“This day I shall desert my anxieties.  I shall forsake them – cut them off from the food supply of my spirit.  Confident am I that if I do not feed them they cannot long survive.  I shall seek to limit my primary exposure to those who exploit my anxieties by their tendency to exaggeration and alarm.  I shall seek to broaden my exposure to those whose lives give forth confidence and calmness.” – Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart (p. 124)

I read this passage last night and it  deeply resonated with the way I’ve been feeling lately about life in the Internet Age.  These machines are designed to agitate us and keep us clicking and clicking and clicking some more.  This is why I’m as lackluster a blogger as I am.  I do recognize the power of this medium of communication, and I know that it can be a force for good. But I just don’t want to be hooked into the network all day and feeling constantly manipulated by “crisis” after “crisis” in the news, on blogs and on social networking sites.  Some of this news is genuinely important. There’s a lot of major changes going down in the world right now.   But there’s just so much petty drama to wade through.  This even goes for my social networking friends, many of whom I know in person, and I know that they are good conscientious people.  But some of them can also be consumed by the exaggerations of media and spread that agitation all around.

Good things do come out of social networking, like seeing this article about FoxNews and its fearmongering tactics, and feeling that it synced up nicely with what I read from Howard Thurman.  FoxNews is undeniably the worst offender when it comes to their copious use of fear and ignorance.  I refuse to subscribe to the false equivalence that “the liberal media” does it too in equal measure.   But I will say that many of the tactics that this article describes are pervasive throughout the entire infotainment  industry, regardless of whatever political “brand” they attach to themselves.

I’m just young enough to feel at ease in the world of TV and computers and smartphones, but I’m also just old enough to be suspicious about the intrusion of media into every aspect of my life.  Feeling that I’ve somehow slipped the bonds of The Network, even for short amounts of time, is probably just a delusion at this point, but it is a delusion that I am happy to entertain whenever I can, and for as long as we are still able to do so.

(Published in the GC Advocate, September 2011 issue)

Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense

Professor X.  In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic.  Viking Press, 2011.

Alex Kudera.  Fight for Your Long Day.  Atticus Books, 2010.

1. So it seems we are finally getting around to a real conversation about higher education.   Several noteworthy books on higher education have been published over the last couple of years, including books by scholars such as Lewis Menand, Martha Nussbaum, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus.  Last year PBS released the documentary College, Inc., which raised the profile of the for-profit college industry and seems to have encouraged more public scrutiny of the dubious financial practices at for-profit colleges.  Most of these critiques of higher education seem to revolve around three core issues:  1) The decline of tenure and the rise of adjunct labor as the industry standard, 2) the escalating costs of enrollment and the increasing amounts of loan debt students take on to cover the costs, and 3) the overall corporatization of the university, which is the driving force behind the other two issues.  We can debate about whether profit driven education is good or bad, but we can’t dispute the fact that institutions of higher education are increasingly run like corporations, and that students are now as much “customers” as they are learners.  And there’s a lot of chatter out there now about how students are being sold a sham product.   One Silicon Valley entrepreneur is offering talented young people money not to go to college and to develop startup projects instead.  He insists they will learn more from their real world experiences than from writing papers on Beowulf.

2. One piece that broke through the clutter of commentary on higher education was “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” an article published in The Atlantic and written by a pseudonymous author, Professor X.  The article touched a nerve and went viral in the academic world largely because of the author’s contention that higher education may not be right for everyone, and that here in the U.S. we may be leading people to financial ruin by insisting that higher education be accessible for all who want to attend, even if they are not prepared for college level work.  In the book version of In the Basement of the Ivory Tower Professor X has expanded on the article and absorbed some of the livid critical responses that flooded the message boards and listservs. The resulting book is an elegant and forceful volume that uses the college writing course as a microcosm for higher education.  The hidden identity of Professor X presents a bit of problem when it comes to accepting the veracity of what is written.  We do know he is a middle-aged heterosexual married white male who has an M.F.A., if the autobiographical information included in the book is accurate.  Having worked as an English professor myself I can say I experienced the shock of recognition at several points throughout the book as he describes what it is like teaching freshman composition.

3. Some of the critiques of In the Basement of the Ivory Tower are mistaken.  I didn’t get the impression that Professor X is some kind of neo-conservative with Bell Curve-inspired ideas about the limitations of the intellect among certain groups of people.   What the book does depict is the incredible stress that the new corporate paradigm of higher education is placing on students and teachers.   Students are taking out more loans than ever to cover the cost of school.  Many of them are being coerced to enroll in higher education even though they are unprepared for it, and may not get much out of it.   Teachers are expected to do more teaching with less job security, and to teach more students with less resources. The resulting situation is one where real learning gets sacrificed for economic efficiency, and both students and professors are feeling exploited and cheated by the sitution.

4.  Cyrus Duffleman (aka Duffy or The Duff) is the protagonist of Alex Kudera’s academic novel Fight For Your Long Day.  Like Professor X he also has an MFA and is also an adjunct professor.  I’ve written about academic fiction for this paper before.  These are novels, films, stories or plays that are set in universities and deal with the lives of professors and students.   I am interested in the fictional sto­ries we tell about aca­d­e­mic life and how those stories shape and influ­ence the way that we think about higher education.    Canonical works of academic fiction such as Jim Dixon’s 1954 novel Lucky Jim are known for satirizing university life.  There have been recent entries into the genre such as J. Courtney Sullivan’s Commencement (2010) set at prestigious Smith College.  There’s also the hit film The Social Network (and we all know what that’s about).  But I have found few novels that deal with life at the state colleges, community colleges and for-profit colleges that make up the fastest growing segment of higher education today.  In Fight For Your Long Day Cyrus Duffleman is an adjunct instructor of English in Philadelphia who shuttles between classes at multiple campuses and works a graveyard shift as a security guard.   Alex Kudera’s book is precisely the sort of academic novel I was hoping to see – one that obliterates the old images of genteel pastoral college life and shows what higher education actually looks like today in these times of corporate education, economic anxiety, digital distraction and political paranoia.

5. One thing that Professor X does well with In the Basement of the Ivory Tower is to show how this new form of higher education compromises the grading process. Again, students see themselves as consumers, and therefore a college education becomes something that they purchase rather than something they earn through their work and diligence.  The more cynical students realize this and leverage it to their advantage.  “We’re paying your salary” they say, explicitly or implicitly, “so I am entitled to my A.”  And what can the professors do about it, when all the professors are adjuncts and their own position in the university is tenuous?  This significantly diminishes their authority in the classroom, even if they actually have time to give students a good teaching experience, which too many of them do not have.  Professor X seems to have tried valiantly to maintain some evaluation standards despite this situation.  I can’t say I did the same in my own teaching experience.  (I have taught at two CUNY colleges, but I am not currently teaching.)  I didn’t give out all A’s but I did find it difficult to penalize students by being a stickler when I barely had time to keep up with the assignments myself.

6.  The difficulties in higher education are also exacerbated by the new digital reality we all live in.  It is impossible to ban electronic devices from classrooms entirely.   Some students take notes on laptops, and you know they are on Facebook or Twitter or off searching the web while you are lecturing.  And they are all texting on the phones under their desks.  Furthermore the scattered impulsive way that they absorb information has made them bad writers and impatient readers.  Professor X stresses the point that writing is difficult and that it takes a level of time and effort that seems hard for students to justify in their get-money-fast worldview.  It is hard to convince someone that careful, elegant writing matters in world where Snooki can get a seven figure advance for “writing” a book, and when more people read Chad Ochocinco’s Twitter feed last Sunday than will ever read both of these books combined.

7. College writing instructors often use autobiographically themed prompts to get students to write in freshman composition.  I wonder what will happen when Facebook’s new Timeline format turns out to be as transformative as people are saying it will be.  We won’t even have memoir as a reliable subject to prime the writing process.  People will get used to narrating their lives through digital interfaces.  Writing about yourself in full sentences and paragraphs will seem boring and pointless.

8. In Fight For Your Long Day one of the schools that Cyrus Duffleman teaches for is Liberty Tech, a for-profit school designed to prepare students for work in homeland security.  The school has invested in digitalization, and the CEO of the school says that “the age of the printed word is over.  Online research and education is the future.”

“In this thinking,” Kudera writes, “the CEO recognizes the adjunct instructor of freshman writing as just another middle man who could be eliminated.  Like the book itself, a relic of the past, his quarterly ‘nonbinding noncontract’ is just another waste of paper.”   Later in the book he imagines a scenario that I have often thought about myself:  Classrooms full of U.S. college students taught through satellite hookups to professors in other parts of the globe. “The fifteen grand a year they were paying the graduate student has become fifteen hundred for a hungrier South Asian.  And they’re whip smart. A friend of mine sat in on a Shakespeare seminar and said it was excellent.  Fharard knew the Bard, better than most Aussies and many Brits.  That’s globalization and progress.”

9. Professor X writes about the problem of rampant plagiarism in one of his chapters.  Students now aren’t even clever enough to be good plagiarizers.  As he says, “They don’t copy from academic journals.  They just take the first thing that Google belches up.”

10. I haven’t included a lot of plot synopsis for each of these books here. Even if I did want to include more summary of the books I would have just lifted some text from some of the other reviews online, and rewritten the sentences so that it sounds like I am paraphrasing in my own voice.   I would take care to make sure I didn’t cite all of the same passages that other reviewers have cited, and I would add some quotes I didn’t see in other reviews to make mine look more original.

Chances are, whatever rote information I was going to share about these books has already been written up anyway, so why waste time trying to come up with original sentences that will end up sounding like everything else that is already out there?    I have often used this sort of cut and paste technique as a way to prime other pieces of writing as well.  I don’t keep the same text completely but I use the words of others to get me started, and eventually what I end up with looks like “original” writing.  Is that plagiarism?

11. To write a truly good review would have required me to read and absorb both of these books at a level of intensity that I am not willing to commit to right now.  I have other things to do including another job that requires heavy memorization, two big presentations coming up, and finally finishing that blasted dissertation.  Normally I like to read a book at least twice before reviewing it.  The best way to write about a book is when you already have some of the details committed to memory and the writing flows easily.  I read through both of these books one time each and skimmed back through them after that.  My plan is to turn in this review to the editor, then promptly toss both of these books aside so I can move on to doing the next thing.

12.  Yes, I have jacked the enumerated style of this essay from recent popular books such as David Shields’s Reality Hunger, and Wayne Koestenbaum’s Humiliation.  Get used it.  More and more people will be writing essays in this form.

13. The truth is, I don’t know how I would handle being an undergrad in this digital environment with the ubiquity of high-speed connections, iPhones, YouTube and Facebook. It is a marvel that any undergraduates ever finish writing a non-plagiarized paper given the assault on the senses that they experience every hour of their waking lives.   I have enough of a background in reading physical books that I still feel at ease writing longer pieces.  As Professor X pointed out, the biggest problem with teaching writing today is that students do not read, and therefore it is impossible to teach someone what competent writing looks like when they cannot recognize it from their own reading experiences.

14.  Warning to any other reviewers:  One side effect of In the Basement of Ivory Tower is that it makes you extremely self-conscious about grammar.  Professor X has obviously taught plenty of writing courses, and absorbed a wide range of composition teaching advice.  I even admit that this may have contributed to some of the anxiety that made my review even later than it already was.  I began to think that if I’m going to review a book complaining about the decline of student writing, I better make sure my own language is in top shape.  That led to procrastination, which led to delays in getting this done when other tasks started to intrude.  I have found more than a few awful sentences and paragraphs in the pieces that I have published in this paper before.  I’m sure I will find some in this one too.

15.  So let’s just be cynical for a minute and accept that students really are consumers now.  That’s the way it is. We live in a capitalist economy, and the invisible hand of the market urges all institutions toward commercial efficiency.  Adapt or die.

Fine.  Then what kind of product are students being sold?  Like the companies that sell diet pills and light beer, the students are being sold a lifestyle.  And like those other products the advertisements for college are just as bogus.  Students are being duped with the age-old practice of the bait and switch.  On the subway in New York you see advertisements for CUNY that show students mugging it up with award winning professors.  CUNY does have a few of those, but most of the students who enroll are unlikely to be chilling with Nobel Prize winning profs.  No they will be taught in courses where enrollments have been expanded to laughable proportions, and they will be taught by adjuncts.  Some of their professors might be graduate students themselves, some of their professors will be career adjuncts with little prospect of becoming full professors.   Just this week a discussion broke out on our English department listserv over an ad someone posted seeking a grader to help grade papers for a jumbo course at one of the CUNY colleges.  This course has an enrollment of over 100 students, and jumbo courses like this are becoming the norm.  (These are NOT the lecture courses you find at some big state schools where students are broken up into sections and taught by teaching assistants in a more intimate setting.  These are full courses…taught by one professor…with no TA’s.)

16.  Professor X mentions one of the ugliest realities of the new adjunct paradigm.  The more one teaches as an adjunct the less likely one is to be hired as a full time professor.  Colleges want to hire full professors with hot shot credentials who just graduated from brand name schools and may eventually publish books that will gain some notice.  At most schools there is no way to work your way up to tenure by being a dutiful adjunct professor.  The harder you work at being a good teacher the more you get tainted with the stain of “career adjunct.” You can piece together a meager salary from teaching four or five courses at $3,000 a pop, but you will not move up the ladder by being a good team player.  You may in fact be dooming yourself to adjunct purgatory by being devoted to educating your students.

17.  One thing I liked about Fight For Your Long Day is that it feels very much like a 21^st century novel.  Kudera depicts a world of higher education where the aspirations of learning and self-improvement still exist, but they exist alongside a world full of the crass, crude, and pornographic, a world that militates against contemplation and learning,  a world where everything from violence to paranoia to frivolous pop culture is  filtered through the interactive screens that nearly all of the students carry around with them everywhere they go.  The book is full of allusions to current events, politics and pop culture, and is probably oversaturated with too many references, but even in that sense it feels familiar.

I didn’t like the fact that the book had thinly drawn secondary characters. But then again, thinly drawn characterizations are sometimes all we are able to get from our students when they are being throttled through the higher education assembly line.   I went to a small liberal arts college where I knew my professors and they became mentors.  I went back to attend a retirement celebration for one of them last year.  I haven’t seen any of the students I taught in my courses since the classes ended, and barely saw them outside of class when they were enrolled.

18.
“To the young, schooling seems relentless, but we know it is not.  What is relentless is our education, which, for good or ill, gives us no rest.  That is why poverty is a great educator.  Having no boundaries and refusing to be ignored, it mostly teaches hopelessness.  But not always.  Politics is also a great educator.  Mostly it teaches, I am afraid, cynicism.  But not always.  Television is a great educator as well.  Mostly it teaches consumerism.  But not always.

It is the ‘not always’ that keeps the romantic spirit alive in those who write about schooling.  The faith is that despite some of the more debilitating teachings of culture itself, something can be done in school that will alter the lenses through which one sees the world; which is to say, that non-trivial schooling can provide a point of view from which what is can be seen clearly, what was as a living present, what will be as filled with possibility.

What this means is that at its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living. Such an enterprise is not easy to pursue since our politicians rarely speak of it, our technology is indifferent to it, and our commerce despises it.  Nonetheless, it is the weightiest and most important thing to write about.”    – Neil Postman, The End of Education:  Redefining the Value of School (1995).

This presentation is part of a dissertation project on academic novels and the politics of black intellectuals. Samuel R. Delany’s The Mad Man (1994) is an academic novel set in New York in the 1980s during the HIV/AIDS crisis. The novel is narrated by John Marr, a black gay graduate student in philosophy. Described by Delany as a “pornotopic fantasy” The Mad Man combines the world of academic philosophy with scatological fantasies of public sex on the streets of New York. In The Mad Man Delany stresses the centrality of the body (and all of its messy functions) to the production of philosophical ideas. In particular I would like to put Delany’s novel in conversation with the work of Norman O. Brown. In books such as Life Against Death (1959) and Love’s Body (1966), Brown examined the relationship between psychoanalysis, spirituality and commerce. I am reading The Mad Man as an academic novel and I am interested in how Delany uses this genre to explore complex ideas about race, sexuality, education, and money.

Africana Studies Dissertations Discussions at IRADAC (Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean)

Room 8402,CUNY Graduate Center
October 14, 2011, 12pm-2pm

Some helpful links:
-Steven Shaviro wrote a couple of interesting posts  on his blog about The Mad Man here and here.
-Coincidentally, Shaviro also wrote a great piece about Norman O. Brown as well.
-A good (auto)biography of Samuel R. Delany can be found here (written by his critical alter-ego “K. Leslie Steiner”)
-And to tip my hand a bit, the title I’m using is not from Delany but from Walt Whitman’s notebooks for Leaves of Grass, specifically this page which appears just before the first lines that made it into the poem.  Whitman scholar Ed Folsom mentioned this line in the wonderful PBS documentary on Whitman and I thought it resonated with the ideas in Delany’s novel.

Not only has the summer come and gone, but the fall semester is now in mid-terms. Yikes!  I avoided posting things here over the summer because I wanted to get some reading and writing done with minimal digital distraction. It  seems I may finally finish this dissertation that I keep yammering on about.

A few things I have coming up:

-Another book review for the GC Advocate is done.  I’ll post that in a few days.

-I’m giving a talk on Samuel Delany’s The Mad Man on October 14 in the IRADAC program at the Graduate Center. (Details in another post)

-I’ll be presenting again on Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring, this time at the University of Pennsylvania’s conference on Asian-American and African-American studies in November.

-More to come soon…

Pym: A Novel by Mat Johnson. Spiegel & Grau (2011).

When the first reviews of Mat Johnson’s Pym began circulating online, a couple of friends emailed me links about the book. They knew that I am working on a dissertation about academic novels, and they figured (correctly) that this novel would be right up my alley. The narrator of Pym is a self-described “blackademic” named Christopher Jaynes, the only black professor in the English department at a Northeastern liberal arts college.  Mat Johnson is a professor of creative writing at The University of Houston, and the author of four other novels, including the historical fiction work The Great Negro Plot about the 1741 slave revolt conspiracy in New York City.

My own research is on academic novels written by black writers and/or featuring black characters.  Some other examples in this genre include Percival Everett’s Erasure, Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring, and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. Writers of black academic novels have used the device of fiction to comment on the state of higher education and also to address political questions about the role of the black intellectual.  At some point in all of these novels, there is some discussion as to whether the black intellectual does or does not have a specific obligation to apply their knowledge and talents to the social and political problems facing the African-American community.  The characters are also forced to confront, in one way or another, the idea that black intellectuals do or do not act as representatives of the entire race.  Then of course there is the very idea of “race” itself which complicates matters even further with the contested boundaries of identity, skin color, and ancestry.  In Pym Mat Johnson uses an inventive blend of satire, literary criticism, and even a bit of science fiction, to examine how the idea of race continues to bedevil us in 21^st century America.

The quest for tenure is a staple of the academic novel plot.  True to form Pym begins with Christopher Jaynes being denied tenure, in part because of his refusal to sit on the “Diversity Committee.” His argument is that “The Diversity Committee has one primary purpose: so that the school can say it has a diversity committee…People find that very relaxing.  It’s sort of like, if you had a fire, and instead of putting it out, you formed a fire committee.” Another reason why Jaynes is rejected for tenure is because his colleagues don’t think his research interests are quite black enough.   Though he’s competent in black literature, Jaynes is also interested in the proverbial Dead White Men, and the one that fascinates him most is Edgar Allen Poe.  He is particularly obsessed with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), the only novel Poe ever published, and by all accounts a highly idiosyncratic mess of a work.  We can assume that at some point, probably in a graduate school seminar, our man Jaynes got his hands on a copy of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. (Morrison’s book is never mentioned outright in Pym but it looms large in the background.)  In that influential work of literary criticism Morrison argued that there has always been an “Africanist” presence in American literature, even when the authors may not have consciously written about black subjects.  For Jaynes this theory helps to explain some of Poe’s wacky racial characterizations.

In Poe’s novel, Arthur Gordon Pym is a sailor who, in a series of wild events, ends up on a ship in the South Seas. Eventually the ship nears Antarctica where the crew comes upon a strange tropical island called Tsalal populated by a group of dark-skinned natives.  Among the crew of Pym’s ship is a man named Dirk Peters.  He is identified by Poe as a “half-breed Indian,” but Jaynes thinks that Poe’s description of him sounds awfully Negroid, especially compared to the way Poe had described black characters in his other stories.  Jaynes’s big intellectual breakthrough comes when he stumbles on to the holiest of holy grails for an American literary scholar – an unpublished pre-Civil War manuscript, and finds out that it was written by an African-American man named Dirk Peters who, it turns out, was a real person and not just a fictional character in Poe’s novel.  He tracks down a descendant of Peters in Gary, Indiana named Mahalia Mathis who is none too happy about her ancestor being called an African-American.  She professes to be a proud “Native American,” and she drags Jaynes to a meeting for an organization that turns out to be full of other delusional black folks claiming to be way more Indian than they obviously look. Jaynes’s investigations eventually lead him on his own wild expedition to Antarctica. The trip is arranged by a cousin named Booker Jaynes, described as “the world’s only civil rights activist turned deep sea-diver.”  Chris is joined by his childhood friend Garth Frierson, a tubby black bus-driver from Detroit with a weakness for Little Debbie snack cakes (a habit that ends up coming in handy on their trip in the most improbable way).  Of course there’s a romantic storyline involved, and in this case the romantic interest is Chris Jaynes’s ex-girlfriend Angela Latham, a businesswoman who has just remarried, and whose new husband unexpectedly joins them on the trip.  I won’t ruin too much about their trip to Antarctica, but the excursion turns into a mad cap adventure that involves: a group of weird humanoid snow creatures; the secret Biosphere-style compound of a neo-conservative American painter; “Arthur Gordon Pym” himself; and maybe even the end of the world.

The closest literary cousin to Pym is Percival Everett’s 1999 academic novel Erasure which deals with the discourse of racial authenticity in American cultural and literary history.  In Pym Chris Jaynes feels that he has been rejected by his academic colleagues because he was working on a project that was not “black” in the most immediately legible way.  It is no mistake that he ends up being replaced on the faculty by a self-anointed “Hip-Hop Theorist” named Mosaic Johnson.  Jaynes insists that he wasn’t being evasive by studying white writers.  In fact he was staring deep into the heart of whiteness itself to try to understand the race question.  As he says, “It wasn’t that I was an apolitical coward, running away from the battle.  I was running so hard toward it, I was around the world and coming back in the other direction.”  By the end of the novel Jaynes has done just that – and in a much more literal way than he ever imagined when he started out.

Through some clever bits of literary criticism inserted in the novel, Jaynes discusses the importance of the slave narrative to all forms of black literature that have come after it.  But he also admits to some feelings of exhaustion about the subject.  “I am bored with the topic of Atlantic slavery.  I have come to be bored because so many boring people have talked about it.  So many artists and writers and thinkers, mediocre and genius, have used it because it’s a big, easy target.”  However, he goes on to acknowledge that the topic is simply unavoidable in American history.  “It is the great story, the big one, the connector that gives the reason for our nation’s prosperity and for our very existence within it.”  The history of slavery and the racial codes that evolved out of it have thoroughly infiltrated the American psyche, and race continues to permeate American politics.  We’re all getting the ultimate object lesson in this right now with the ongoing saga of our first black president and the controversies over his racial identity, religious beliefs and place of birth.  Mat Johnson’s Pym is one of many examples of how black artists have tried to use humor and satire to ease the sting of racism, or to undermine the idea of race itself by exposing its absurdities.  There is a long and celebrated history of this kind of irreverence in black stand-up comedy. (Johnson cites the comedian Paul Mooney in one of his footnote digressions.)  But even with the best efforts in humor, or scholarship, or activism, the specter of race will not be so easily exorcised.  And it certainly won’t be removed just by uttering the word “post-racial.” If there is one big, corny, clichéd lesson to take from a novel like Pym, it is that the only way out is through.

(This review will be published in the May 2011 issue of the GC Advocate)

Poet Langston Hughes standing on a street in Harlem

From Nieuw Haarlem to “New” Harlem*

Jonathan Gill. Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America.  New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2011.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts.  Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America.  New York: Little Brown and Company, 2011.

Jeffrey Perry. Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

If you want an interesting glimpse of what Harlem is like in 2011, go there on a Sunday morning.  Tour buses pull up to the sidewalk on 125^th street and dump out scores of tourists near the Apollo Theater.  Take a walk up Seventh Avenue (now Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard).  In Harlem’s heyday, this wide boulevard was the preferred destination for Sunday “strollers,” black residents of Harlem who went to church decked out in their best formal attire and showed off on the promenade afterward.  This fashion phenomenon prompted some people to say Seventh Avenue was “like Easter Sunday 52 Sundays out of the year.”  These days Seventh Avenue on Sunday morning is clogged with “strollers” of a different sort: casually dressed tourists – many of them in blue jeans and T-shirts, which, if you know anything about black churches, is way too casual for the regal ritual of a black church Sunday morning anywhere in America.  The tourists come to Harlem and walk up and down the avenue to stop in one of the neighborhood’s churches hoping to hear some of this rousing, foot-stomping black gospel music they’ve heard so much about.  Most mornings it looks like there are more white people going into the churches than black folks. Outside of one the biggest and most popular churches, Abyssinian Baptist Church on 138^th Street, the line often extends around the corner for the 11am service.  The ushers regularly have to turn dozens of tourists away.

I’m not being self-righteous when I talk about seeing white tourists in Harlem. You might even say I’m one of the parties to blame.  Since 2008 I have worked as a New York City walking tour guide.  Leading these tours, often with 25 or so people tagging along behind me, there’s no way to be inconspicuous. Heckling is a regular occurrence.  One time a middle aged black woman came up and started talking to my group. She began quizzing me about what I was telling the group.  You can never tell what’s going to happen when people stop by and cut in on a tour, but I’ve been doing this long enough to know that when New Yorkers on the street want to get chatty it is usually best to just let them speak their piece and move on.  Most of time people turn out to be warm and interesting and informative.  Other times, they might be silly or hostile.  But it’s always interesting, so I just let it ride.  At first this particular woman began frantically pointing out some interesting places, such as a downstairs location that was once a bar where a scene from Superfly was filmed, and a corner where there was once a store owned by Brooklyn Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella.  Then she suddenly flipped on me, “You need to tell them to upgrade your stuff man.  You ain’t even from Harlem!” And then she walked away still muttering “He ain’t even from Harlem” and then kept shouting and pointing at me and my group from across the street.  It was then I noticed the woman wasn’t just being contrary with me, and that maybe she wasn’t all there.  But, crazy or not, she definitely had a point.

No ma’am, I ain’t from Harlem.  I was born and raised in Mississippi.  I’ve been living in New York for nine years.  I’m now a graduate student working on a Ph.D. in English.  The tour company I work for specifically hires graduate students.  Our guides are all serious researchers on New York history, but we may not necessarily be fully authentic native New Yorkers.  I am black, so I knew that I could at least play the black identity card when I started doing tours of Harlem.  I’m a graduate of Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, GA, the same school where Abyssinian Baptist Church pastor the Rev. Calvin O. Butts, III graduated (along with a number of other notable African-American men).  I have a B.A. in history, focusing on African-American history, and the dissertation I am working on deals with black literature and higher education.  But despite all of this, no, I can’t claim to be from Harlem.

I understand this kind of nativism.  That sense of ownership over place is pervasive throughout New York, but is especially prevalent in Harlem, a neighborhood with a proud history and tradition of black independence.  I don’t even need to repeat all the names of Harlem luminaries and all the important organizations that started there.  However, over the past decade gentrifiers have begun to move in.  125^th St. is now filled with snazzy chain stores, (there’s an American Apparel there now for chrissakes, not to mention two Starbucks).  The price of housing has skyrocketed with new glass condos going up on the avenues.  Venerable black owned businesses have closed.  And now legions of curiosity seeking tourists are clogging the sidewalks to listen to people who aren’t even from Harlem talking about the history of the neighborhood.  I can understand why some folks might be a little sour.

But…someone else might say…New York neighborhoods have always evolved.  The Jewish immigrants have all gone from the Lower East Side.   The Italians have all gone from Little Italy.  New York’s ethnic history is one of constant movement and displacement.  This is an argument that our contemporary gentrifiers have noted well and have effectively incorporated into their arsenal.  Nativism just doesn’t work in New York. New York neighborhoods have always been a revolving door if you’re purely talking about racial and ethnic identity.  Adding economics and power to the mix, however, requires looking at things little differently.

These three recent published books all deal with the history of Harlem, this neighborhood that was once known as The Capital of Black America.  Jonathan Gill’s study of Harlem history begins in the early 1600s with the encounters between the Lenape Indians and the first Dutch explorers to set foot on the island.  Within days after the Dutch arrival there were violent clashes between the two groups.  In these first clashes between people who had been inhabiting the island for decades (at least) and these new arrivals from half a world away, Gill sees, “a foretaste of Harlem’s future.”

It is no secret that the clash of cultures has raged on in Harlem, and that tensions remain high there and in other parts of New York City as gentrification shows no sign of stopping.  Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts gives us a more intimate view of Gill’s point about the future.  In Harlem is Nowhere she tells one particularly juicy anecdote about sitting in a Harlem café near two white male yuppies, one a resident, the other a friend who was visiting the neighborhood for the first time.  The visiting friend seemed to be enjoying this trip to this exotic locale and he told the other guy, “This is fabulous…Really, you have to do something to get more people up here!” The quote is purely anecdotal, but anyone who has spent time in contemporary New York has probably overheard some version of this neo-colonial rhetoric tumbling out of the mouth of someone talking about Harlem or Washington Heights or whatever neighborhood in Brooklyn has been declared “rad” and infested by hipsters.  At first there was Nothing…then the hip, wealthy, (mostly) white people showed up….and then there was Something.  But not all of the gentrifiers are white, and that complicates matters a bit.  (At one point in her book Rhodes-Pitts ponders whether she is herself just another gentrifier.)

In his biography of Hubert Harrison, Jeffrey B. Perry explores the complexity of race and class politics in Harlem.   In the book Perry lays down his case that Harrison deserves a bigger place in the pantheon of Harlem’s great intellectual and political leaders.  As Perry describes him, Harrison was  “the most class conscious of the race radicals, and the most race conscious of the class radicals…more race conscious than [A. Philip] Randolph and [Chandler] Owen and more class conscious than [Marcus] Garvey.”  But his biography is much more than just another “Great Man” history.  Perry situates Harrison’s life in the historical and political context around him, and links Harrison’s life to the local, national and global struggle over labor power.  It this kind of understanding of the complex interaction between race and class that is precisely what is necessary to really make sense of Harlem’s past, present and future.

Jonathan Gill’s book Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America is the first comprehensive history of the entire neighborhood of Harlem.  When I was beginning to learn tours, I turned to books such as Gilbert Osofsky’s Harlem the Making of a Ghetto and David Levering Lewis’s When Harlem Was in Vogue to establish a narrative of Harlem’s history from its beginning to the development of Black Harlem.  These and other books gesture toward a history of Harlem before it became black in the early 1900s, but few of them go into extensive detail about that early history. For the most part the non-black history of Harlem was tucked away in ethnic histories of Jewish, German, Irish and Italian immigrants.  For the early history of the island of Manhattan there are books such as the massive Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace.  That book, and others like it, contains some information about the founding of the Dutch village of Nieuw Haarlem in upper Manhattan in the 1650s (named for the city of Haarlem in The Netherlands).  But it appears that Jonathan Gill is the first to have gathered up all of that material, from the pre-history of New York all the way up to the latest information, and synthesized it all into a grand, epic story focused specifically on this distinct New York neighborhood.

Geographically, Harlem starts at the top of Central Park at 110^th Street (Hence the title of the film and song Across 110^th Street).  It stretches up to 155^th Street, the northernmost of the 155 crosstown streets laid out in the original 1811 grid plan of Manhattan.  It stretches across from the Harlem River on the east side, to the Hudson River on the west side.  Within that broad expanse (a four square mile chunk of the thin island of Manhattan) there have been many Harlems over the years.  For New York history buffs Gill’s book is a treasure trove of historical information linking Harlem even more closely to the history and destiny of New York City.  For instance many people have heard of the infamous New York politician William “Boss” Tweed, who grew up on the Lower East Side and became the leader of the powerful political machine Tammany Hall.  The Tweed Courthouse downtown on Chambers St. was used by Tweed to bilk millions of dollars from the city’s coffers, and the building still sits there as one of the nation’s great symbols of political corruption.  However, Tweed’s influence extended uptown as well.  Tammany was involved in the push of speculative building that made Harlem into a residential community in the late 1800s, and they helped to filter some Irish immigrants into the neighborhood.  If you’ve been to Harlem you may have noticed how much wider the boulevards of Seventh and Lenox Avenues are than most streets in the city. From Gill’s book I learned those streets were designed that way as construction projects of the Tweed Ring.  Before he was exposed, Tweed was even planning another city building in Harlem like his downtown courthouse to make some more money disappear. It was the political cartoonist Thomas Nast, whose scandalous drawings eventually helped to publicize Tweed’s corruption.  Nast also lived in Harlem near 125^th Street and 5^th Avenue.

To illustrate the neighborhood’s history, Gill focuses on several other notable New Yorkers who have called Harlem home.  German Jewish entrepreneur Oscar Hammerstein lived in West Harlem.  His son Oscar Hammerstein II eventually teamed up with Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart to change the landscape of American music (drawing inspiration from the jazz music that eventually spilled out of the clubs of black Harlem.) There was also an Italian settlement in East Harlem.  The famous uptown restaurant Rao’s, which is still open on 114^th Street, is one of the last vestiges of Italian East Harlem.  In the late 1920’s the Puerto Rican community of East Harlem began to take form, eventually evolving into the vibrant neighborhood affectionately known as El Barrio.  If I have one minor gripe with Gill’s book it is that his treatment of Puerto Rican Harlem gets lost in the shuffle as he moves on to discuss the ascent of black Harlem in the 1920s. The history of black Harlem itself is well-trod territory, but Gill deftly lays it all out here.  He capably sorts out the complex history of real estate in 1904 to 1907 involving Philip Payton the founder of the Afro-American Realty Company.  Payton was the man credited with placing the first black families on the blocks around 134^th St. that would become the epicenter of black Harlem.

Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America grapples with the cultural, literary, and political legacy of this black neighborhood that formed when black families began to fill up the residential buildings that were thrown up in a fierce fit of speculation, a run which bottomed out with a real estate bust in the 1890s. The book is a creative mix of memoir, literary criticism and journalism woven into a first person narrative about a young black American intellectual as she moves to Harlem.  Rhodes-Pitts creatively captures the persistent attraction of Harlem by writing about some of the great characters in Harlem literature – from Helga Crane in Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand to the nameless narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.  Rhodes-Pitts took the book title from an Ellison essay.  The concept of “Harlem is Nowhere” might seem a little flippant, but she (and Ellison) intended it to be a provocation.  The phrase does capture a certain essential quality about Harlem – that it has existed as much as a dream as a physical reality.  The dreams of Harlem – this mecca of blackness, this refuge from discrimination and indignity – did not take long to fade after the 1920s had passed and when the harsh realities of impoverished urban life began to set in for these agrarian Southerners who had moved there.  As Langston Hughes famously said, “The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any.”

The phantasmic quality of Harlem is surely something to reconsider now that the place has transformed from a shining hope of black self-determination, and then into a drug and crime addled slum in the 1970s, and now into the potential paradise for rich Manhattanites who fall low enough in the ranks of the merely rich that they’ve been priced out of the West Village and Tribeca by the über-rich. Gill’s book ends on a somewhat triumphalist note, lauding the arrival of corporate charter schools and chain stores and Columbia University’s multi-million dollar expansion into West Harlem. However, Sharifa Rhodes- Pitts takes us inside the heated community meetings and listens to the grievances of working class black Harlemites who have organized against the city’s aggressive removal of businesses such as the Mart 125 where vendors operated a market on 125^th Street.  People are still trying to fight the good fight, but a sense of resignation and defeat is starting to set in.  The tide has already turned. Rhodes-Pitts mentions seeing a young Harlemite at one rally wearing a T-Shirt that said, “Harlem isn’t for sale because Harlem has already been sold.”

Since the publication of Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 in the fall of 2009 historian Jeffrey Perry has been working tirelessly to spread the word about the life and work of this grossly undervalued black Caribbean intellectual.  A look at Perry’s website reveals a steady stream of speaking engagements at universities, libraries, community bookstores and labor organizations.  (I saw Perry give a presentation on Harrison here at the CUNY Graduate Center last year.) The book is not just a simple biographical narrative of Hubert Harrison’s life.  Instead, Perry meticulously reconstructs the social and intellectual history surrounding Harrison, and gives a thorough interpretation of Harrison’s political activism and his literary output.  For instance, Perry does not simply write about Harrison’s early life in St. Croix where he was born in 1883.  He also examines the history of the transatlantic slave trade and the impact that the legacy of the slave trade and post-slavery labor structures had on the Caribbean.  Hubert Harrison came to Manhattan in 1900 and settled into the neighborhood known as San Juan Hill in the west 60s, which was then the biggest cluster of black citizens in New York.  When Perry writes about Harrison’s move to New York and Harlem, he puts him in the context of the history of black New Yorkers and the struggle for racial and economic justice in the city.

Harrison was heavily involved in the labor movement, working at various points as a postal worker, then with the Socialist Party USA, and also with the American Federation of Labor. He was also the editor of the Negro World, the newspaper of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and he wrote prodigiously throughout his life.  Harrison was well-known around Harlem as a soapbox orator and an independent lecturer.  He never attended college, but was a fierce autodidact.  Perry describes his voracious reading habits and his diligent commitment to writing and independent education.   In his time Harrison was recognized as a major talent by contemporaries such as A. Philip Randolph who called him “The Father of Harlem Radicalism.”  But for complex reasons – including poverty and politics – he faded from memory.  In particular Perry makes the case that Harrison’s commitment to atheism and freethought put him on the wrong side of the black political structure which has long been rooted in religion, and especially in the protestant Christian black churches. Harrison was a vocal critic of the black churches, which were too often fiefdoms of charismatic individuals.  The emphasis on spiritual escapism pulled people away from the historical materialism that he felt was necessary to understand the position of the black working classes, and the workings of race as mode of social control.

Because of all of this detailed historical analysis, which sometimes strays away from the specific details of Harrison’s life, I have to say the biography is a bit of a dense slog to read through. From hearing Perry’s lectures and from reading other reviews and articles about Harrison, I was familiar enough with the material that I did not get completely lost.  But for a reader who is new to Harrison, perhaps a better place to start would be The Hubert Harrison Reader (Wesleyan, 2001), Perry’s edited anthology of Harrison’s writings.  The introduction to the Reader is a more succinct primer on Harrison’s life, and the essays in the collection provide an opportunity to hear Harrison’s unfiltered voice as a writer.  On its own terms though, the biography is an impressive work of intellectual history that traces the context and circumstances of Harrison’s life, and analyzes the way that his thinking about race and class developed over his lifetime and helped to shape Harlem politics at the dawn of the “Harlem Renaissance.”  And about that so-called “renaissance” Harrison was circumspect.  In an essay on the idea of a “Negro Literary Renaissance” Harrison emphasized that most of the critics who were touting the literary production of 1920s Harlem as a “renaissance” were, in fact, overlooking “the stream of literary and artistic products which had flowed uninterruptedly from Negro writers from 1850 to the present.”  Though he dismissed the talk of renaissance as a white downtown fad, Harrison nevertheless took seriously the actual artistic production of his Harlem contemporaries, and he wrote numerous reviews of poetry, novels and plays.

In one chapter of Harlem is Nowhere, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts dishes out some tough love to Harlem.  Well, she isn’t doing the dishing herself so much as she delves into the critiques from some black leaders that black Harlemites had not done enough to buy up property in Harlem and secure a black future for the neighborhood.  This is a critique that I also heard from several black leaders at an event in Harlem last year.  In her chapter “Land is the Basis of All Independence” she touches on an important idea when she writes about how some people in Harlem falsely subscribe to the idea that blacks have invested a valuable “sweat equity” into the neighborhood that should give them a right to the space, even if they don’t “own” property on paper.  That may be true, but the fact is the wealthy have the state power and the financial power to impose their will whether it’s on the Brooklyn waterfront in Williamsburg or on Lenox Avenue uptown.  It is hard not to make all of this sound like the usual litany of grievances about institutional racism and the historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. But, well, this is about the institutional racism and the historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.  Millions of blacks were brought to the Americas to work on plantations, subjected to a dehumanizing segregation under Jim Crow, essentially re-enslaved again in the post-Reconstruction era in exploitative sharecropping arrangements, and then subjected to a litany of injustices throughout the 20^th century – from lynching to false imprisonment to red-lining and financial discrimination to the assassinations of black political leaders.  And somehow, in the midst of all that, black folks were somehow supposed to find the time and resources to buy up property and secure the neighborhood from gentrification.

Of course now that there is a black guy with the improbable name of Barack Hussein Obama II in the White House, some people are even less willing to hear such grievances. That’s just the rub:  Token diversity is the biggest weapon that the upper class uses against any accusations of inequality or, god forbid, white supremacy (a concept Hubert Harrison explored thoroughly in his political thought).  What is happening in Harlem now is bigger than that neighborhood, bigger than New York, bigger even than the United States.  The biggest lie of the “free-market” cheerleaders is the idea of a free market itself.  There is no accumulation of private wealth without active and aggressive state intervention to tip the scales in favor of the rich.  One way to do that is by making labor organizing illegal, as is happening in Wisconsin right now. All throughout New York the wealthy overclass is gobbling up space to create their own heavily policed and privatized suburban utopia.  But like the city of Fritz Lang’s classic film Metroplis, somebody has to be down below turning the gears in order to make the city work.  In this case, the people below the city are actually outside of it, pushed out to Queens and Brooklyn, New Jersey and Long Island and coming in to Manhattan to serve at the feet of the rich.  This was a city that once took pride in its viable working class. Now the best people hope for is to be buried with one of the Pharaohs.

I still love this city.  For better or worse I have made it my home for almost a decade and I plan to be here even longer.  The going is rough sometimes.  I am no trust-funder and this is not a great time to be looking for an academic career in the humanities. But I have enjoyed my walks through Harlem, even with the heckling.  Learning about New York history has deepened my appreciation for the city in ways I never imagined when I moved here.  I don’t have any positive notes of hope to say that something good will happen to the disenfranchised people of Harlem before they get completely wiped away in favor of their wealthier counterparts.  But these books make me hopeful that someone else out there might be reading, and dreaming, and scheming, and coming up with some kind of plan to help save our souls, and the soul of this city.

*[This article was first published in the March 2011 issue of the GC Advocate]

Many thanks to Kazembe Balagun, outreach coordinator at The Brecht Forum, for posting a note on Facebook with the actual reading list from “Afro-American Studies 198: The Black Man in the Cosmos” a course taught by Sun Ra in the spring of 1971 at UC-Berkeley (and the inspiration for the title of this blog).

John Szwed’s wonderful biography Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, is an impressive study of Sun Ra’s work (no small feat since Ra could be a difficult character to get a handle on). A good brief introduction to some of Sun Ra’s recording is this short guide written by Szwed in the Village Voice.

In Space is the Place, Szwed listed the works Sun Ra assigned in the Berkeley course and described the course this way:

“Although a respectable number of students signed up, after a couple of classes it was down to a handful…But a large number of local black folks regularly attended, always distinguishable from the students by their party dress.  The classes ran like rehearsals: first came the lecture, followed by a half hour of solo keyboard or Arkestra performance.  But it was a proper course – Sun Ra had after all trained to be a teacher in college – with class handouts, assignments, and a reading list which made even the most au courant sixties professors’ courses pale.”

The Egyptian Book of the Dead

Bill Looney, Radix (a book of astrology)

Alexander Hislop, Two Babylons

The theosophical works of Madame Blavatsky

The Book of Oahspe

Henry Dumas, Ark of Bones and Poetry for My People

Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, edited by Leroi Jones & Larry Neal

David Livingston, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa

Theodore P. Ford, God Wills the Negro

Archibald Rutledge, God’s Children

The spring 1971 issue of Stylus (vol. 13, no. 1), a black literary magazine of Temple University

John S. Wilson, Jazz: Where It Came From, Where It’s At.

Yosef A. A. Ben-Jochannan, Black Man of the Nile and His Family

Count Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires, and the Law of Nature.

The King James Bible (which was listed on the syllabus only as “The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death”)

P.D. Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe.

Frederick Bodmer, The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages.

Blackie’s Etymology

[…and other recommended books on hieroglyphics, color therapy, the Rosicrucians, Afro-American folklore, and ex slaves’ writings.]

(pp.294-295, Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra.  New York: Pantheon Books, 1997)

The collection Sun Ra: The Immeasurable Equation: The Poetry and Prose is an expensive and rare anthology.  I’m saving up my pennies to get a copy at some point, but if you look at the Amazon and Google Books previews you can get a glimpse of what’s in it.  Along with Ra’s prose and poetry there is also a bibliography of his book collection compiled by Arkestra member James Jacson and other scholars after Ra left the planet in 1993.  Szwed’s biography gives a good portrait of Ra’s voracious reading habits and his insatiable thirst for books on music, history, religion, the occult, science, language and just about anything else he could get his hands on.

I’ve been especially thinking about Sun Ra’s music this week what with the uprising going on in Egypt. Of course Egypt was near and dear to his heart and its ancient history was the source of the Arkestra’s mythology.  Here’s a selection from an Arkestra concert in Egypt in 1983 with Salah Ragab and the Cairo Jazz Band.

All Power to the People.

Here’s the abstract I submitted for my talk:

“Black(ness) No More: Academia and the Culture Wars in Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring.”

Ishmael Reed’s satirical novel Japanese by Spring (1993) is a humorous but sharply critical depiction of political debates in academia that took place in the 1980s and 1990s, commonly known as “the culture wars”.  These debates included conflicts over topics such as affirmative action, black studies, multiculturalism and feminism, all of which are depicted in the novel.  The main character of the novel is a black literature professor, Benjamin “Chappie” Putbutt III, a former Black Panther turned neoconservative, who is striving for tenure at the fictional Jack London College in Oakland, CA in the early 1990s.  This presentation is part of a larger project on academic novels and the politics of the black intellectual. I will consider Japanese by Spring as a novel that is simultaneously situated in the traditions of African-American satire (including writers such as George Schuyler, a literary influence on Reed’s work), as well as a work of “academic fiction,” a genre defined by its fictional depictions of professors and university life.

The particular panel I am on will be held on Saturday, January 8th, 10:15-11:45am, at the CUNY Graduate Center, Room C205.

Accepted (2006)

College Inc. (2010)

In one scene from the college comedy film Accepted, the dean of an elite fictional institution, Harmon College, is having a private meeting with one of the school’s fraternity leaders. “Do you know what makes Harmon a great college?” the dean asks the student.  “Rejection.  The exclusivity of any university is judged primarily by how many students it rejects.”  With its crimson colors and prominent “H” in the design Harmon College is clearly meant to invoke Harvard University as a representation of all the prestige and privilege of America’s traditional colleges and universities.  On the flipside is the South Harmon Institute of Technology (yeah, that’s right.  S.H.I.T.) a school started on a lark by young Bartelby Gaines (Justin Long) when he got rejected from all seven schools he applied to, including Harmon.  These ideas of “rejection” and “acceptance” recur throughout the film.  Harmon College is predicated on rejection while South Harmon Institute of Technology is the place of acceptance.  During an impromptu assembly at the new South Harmon, Bartelby Gaines realizes he is in front of an auditorium full of lovable losers like himself, people who didn’t make it into the school they wanted and who just wanted an opportunity to go to college somewhere, anywhere.  He then gives a fiery speech to this audience of rejected students telling them, “We accept you!  We accept your flaws!”

I’m not sure about the background of the screenwriters or the director of this film, but clearly someone involved in this project was familiar with the for-profit college industry.  Accepted was released in theaters in 2006 but didn’t do all that well at the box office.  Perhaps people saw it as just another stupid college movie, and yes, at times it does play out like so many of these silly formulaic college comedies.  But behind the predictable frat jokes and sophomoric toilet humor is a film that comes close to brilliance in the way that it captures the spirit and ideology of for-profit colleges.

The film mostly follows the story of Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long, probably best known as the “Mac” guy) as he graduates from high school.  Bartleby is a lovable slacker.  He’s clearly intelligent and shrewd, but he’s also a lackluster student.  While Bartebly gets rejected by every college that he applies to, his best friend Sherman (Jonah Hill, star of Superbad) gets accepted to his dream school, the prestigious Harmon College.  To avoid disappointing his parents Bartleby hatches a scheme to fabricate an acceptance letter to a fake school.  He enlists the computer whiz Sherman to help him design a realistic-looking website for the institution.  When Bartleby realizes that he will need an actual physical campus to keep the ruse going, he finds an abandoned psychiatric hospital near Harmon College and renovates it to look like a college campus. He then gets his uncle Ben Lewis (the great comedian Lewis Black) and has him pretend to be the Dean of the college. Ben is a washed up alcoholic who dropped out of grad school years ago, and his rants about the lies of higher education (in typical Lewis Black style) are some of the best moments in the film.

At first Bartelby put up the website just to fool his parents.  But he is shocked to realize other people also visited the website, and on the first day of classes hundreds of students pour into the school with $10,000 tuition checks in hand.  That’s when Bartleby figures out maybe this starting up your own college thing isn’t such a bad idea.  Thus the South Harmon Institute of Technology is born, welcoming these self-proclaimed “SHITheads”, these students who also did not get accepted into traditional colleges.  South Harmon Institute of Technology becomes the scrappy underdog we root for, and all those snooty elitists at Harmon College are just trying to block their shine.

The circumstances around the founding of South Harmon are not exactly that of a for-profit school like University of Phoenix.  Real life for-profit colleges are backed by investors and were started from the beginning with the idea of maximizing profits.  However, Accepted does manage to tap into the image that for-profit schools project about themselves, and I think the film inadvertently offers up a cautionary tale to those of us interested in preserving public higher education.

It is important to see that for-profit colleges are not just about finding ways to make colleges profitable, and not just about applying market rationality to higher education by arguing that the bottom line benefits all.  No,  for-profit colleges have been as successful as they have been so far because they have found ways to tap into the hopes and dreams of people struggling to give themselves a better life.  Their spiritual message is one of acceptance.  In their propaganda, all for-profit colleges are plucky startups like South Harmon Institute of Technology and all traditional colleges (private or public) are crusty elitist spoil-sports like Harmon College.  Here in New York City the subway cars are full of for-profit college ads persuading people to get a college degree no matter if they have kids or are already working two jobs.  We will accommodate your needs, they say.   The traditional college is elitist and exclusionary, while the for-profit school is democratic and non-judgmental

This should come as no surprise.  Thomas Frank’s political bestseller What’s The Matter With Kansas explored how the right wing has endeared itself to the very working class that it has spent most of the last three decades disenfranchising and undermining through unregulated casino capitalism and aggressive anti-union tactics.  The for-profit college phenomenon is simply the latest chapter in a long history of Wall Street exploiting and undermining the American working class while selling them a false sense of empowerment.

The PBS Frontline documentary College, Inc. pointed to some of the numbers that have raised concerns about what is happening in the for-profit college industry.  20 billion dollars of federal loans and grants have been used by students to attend for-profit colleges. (i.e. these profitable companies have been built through those dastardly “government handouts”)  Today for-profits account for 10% of the nation’s college students, but consume 25% of the federal aid.  Defenders of the for-profit colleges rightly point out that student loans have been soaring out of control at the traditional colleges, so it’s hardly fair that for-profits should take all the blame for this financial problem.  They are right.  Student loan debt overall is a $750 billion dollars, roughly equal to the entire amount of credit card debt in the U.S.  However the problem is that for-profit colleges account for 10% of the nation’s students, but account for 44% of the loan defaults.  These are the makings of another destructive financial bubble, maybe one just as ruinous as the housing market crash.

And I’ll concede the for-profits another point: If anything they have only accentuated the extortionist practices already present in the traditional colleges.  For instance, traditional colleges have cut deals with textbook companies that force students to pay for books at exorbitant costs.  In my own field of English, students are forced to pay $60 a pop for crappy composition readers they’ll probably never read again, mainly because they are full of worthless insipid articles from Newsweek passed off as models of good writing.  Tuition and fees are going through the roof year after year.  This is all done knowing that most students will just accept these burdensome costs as the necessary evil of higher education.  The students increasingly rely on loans and credit cards to cover the costs and keep compounding their debt in order to stay enrolled from year to year.

One of the key moments for me in College, Inc. comes near the end in an interview with Mark DeFusco, a former administrator at the University of Phoenix.  When asked if education should be a business, DeFusco paused for a beat or two, then said: “I’m happy that there are places in the world where people can sit down and think.  We need that.  But that’s very expensive.  And not everybody can do that.  So for the vast majority of folks who don’t get that privilege, then I think it’s a business.”

I know documentary editing can be misleading, and any stray quote can be pulled out as a “gotcha” moment.  But I do think DeFusco articulated something that is particularly disgusting about the for-profit schools: This thinly veiled contempt and condescension towards the very students who come to their schools.  The idea that the humanities are all fine and good for well-off students, but a waste of time for poor students is one of the principle ways that the for-profit schools can and will end up reproducing the very inequality that they claim to be eradicating.  The lofty world of ideas is fine for students from wealthy backgrounds, but the poor need “practical” skills.  It’s fine for all those rich kids to develop the ability to think creatively, to question age-old assumptions, to develop the kind of historical sensibilities and knowledge necessary for participation in a democracy – but we need to put you poor people to work, not fill your head with all these high-falutin’ ideas.

In fact what they are saying is that working class students are not even worthy of the vaunted Western tradition of Great Ideas that conservatives in the 1980s were trying so hard to defend from all those “intellectually bankrupt” and “therapeutic” multiculturalists.  Again, we have one of those shrewd reversals: it is now the Right and the for-profit colleges who claim to be the champions of multiculturalism.  If you let them tell it, Wall Street is the only entity in America really standing up for the rights of minorities to receive an education.   And now, they argue, it is at the traditional college where the administrators stand in the doorway of the school, like George Wallace in Tuscaloosa, refusing to allow hardworking black and brown students access to higher education.

This is where I think Accepted unintentionally hit the nail on the head.  The administrators and defenders of actual for-profit colleges know that many Americans see traditional colleges as elitist and exclusionary (even when at public schools like CUNY, people have been fighting for years to have wider, affordable access to higher education). If we are not careful we will hand the for-profits exactly this type of pseudo-populist energy that Bartleby wins among the students at South Harmon.  And I think it is especially important that in our critiques of for-profit education that we do not demonize the students who have chosen to pursue their education at these schools.  Defenders of for-profit education love to use their students as human shields to deflect criticism, as if anyone who has a problem with for-profit education really has a problem with these hard-working students who just want to go to college.

In recent months there have been numerous rallies to defend public education. Over the last few weeks Europe has exploded with student protests against budget cuts. Here in the U.S.  the documentary Waiting for Superman, about charter schools at the elementary and secondary level, has upped the ante and forced people to take sides in the debates about education profiteering at all levels.   However I think the movement for public education suffers from the same malaise affecting the American left as whole:  We are too comfortable playing defense.  Even after the American people elected a Democratic administration into the White House, the left was still preoccupied with the latest stupid statements from Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, allowing them to set the terms of debate.  The result has been a weak health care reform bill with no public option, and now Obama signing a bill to give more tax cuts to the rich.  (Not to say he didn’t want to do that anyway, but that’s beside the point.  He should have been pushed in a different direction.)  In order to really make a difference for working people we can’t continue to keep relying on defensive measures.  I realize that defending education budgets as they are now is absolutely necessary.  And I respect the effort that organizers have already put in to this movement.  I just hope that while we “defend” and “protect” our public schools from further commercialization of education, that we also find a way to start talking about the expansion of public education.  We need more compelling stories about how public education has been essential to the project of democracy.  And we must push for real, affordable opportunities for students to gain access to college without a lifetime of debt.

The Cross of Redemption : Uncollected Writings.  Random House, 2010.

Nearly every review I’ve seen of the Cross of Redemption so far has picked up on one particular quote from this new collection of James Baldwin’s writing.   It is the first paragraph of a piece titled “from Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States: One Minute to Twelve – A Forum,” which is a transcript of a 1961 speech the 36 year old Baldwin gave in New York for the Liberation Committee for Africa:

Bobby Kennedy recently made me the soul-stirring promise that one day – thirty years, if I’m lucky – I can be President too.  It never entered this boy’s mind, I suppose – it has not entered the country’s mind yet – that perhaps I wouldn’t want to be.  And in any case, what really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro “first” will become the first Negro President.  What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.

The quote is shockingly appropriate, not only for his comments about the potential of a black president, but also that it was given at an event on the liberation of Africa.  Barack Obama’s ties to the African continent through his father are now well known. (And will undoubtedly play a significant role again in the 2012 campaign since the “birther” conspiracies still persist.) Early in Obama’s political career, and early in his presidential campaign, he was wise enough to address his connection to Africa head-on.  It bespoke Obama’s intelligent grasp on the history of black political discourse in America. Black artists in the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by the international politics of anti-colonialism in that time, and inspired by the anthropological study of African survivals, began to re-connect with and embrace the continent and its culture.  They turned the “curse” of Ham and African lineage into a positive affirmation of global liberation.  By the next decade the black intelligentsia would be awash in kente clothe, and the term “African-American” would begin to seep into the American lexicon.  That quote also encapsulates Baldwin’s always razor-sharp analysis of race in America.  Baldwin understood that the symbolic progress of a few, especially the prospects of a black man in the White House, could very easily be used to discredit the persisting inequality among the many.

James Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924. He was the oldest of nine children, and grew up in poverty.  His father was a strict, religious man (and actually his step-father) who was a minister of a storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin would depict this early life in the church and this troubled relationship with his father in his first novel Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953).   At the age of fifteen Baldwin accepted his own call to preach and did so for three years before leaving the church, and home, and moving downtown to Greenwich Village.  Eventually he made his way to Paris among the American expatriate community there.  He met a friend and lover Lucien Happersberger, a Swiss artist, who invited him to stay in his village in Switzerland where Baldwin completed writing Go Tell it on the Mountain.  Later, at the behest of a Turkish actor friend, he would also spend several years living off and on in Istanbul, Turkey where he completed his bestselling novel Another Country.  Baldwin was involved in the civil rights movement through marching and speaking, but became exhausted by the string of assassinations in the 1960s (“they’re killing my friends” he said in an interview once) and he spent more time in France in the 1970s.  He eventually died of cancer at his home in the South of France on November 30, 1987.

The writings featured in this collection are not entirely new.  Some of these were collected in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction a volume which is now out-of-print. The Cross of Redemption was compiled by Randall Keenan, a fine creative writer in his own right (author of the novel A Visitation of Spirits) and a professor of English at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.  It is meant to be a companion piece to the Library of America’s collection of Baldwin’s non-fiction essays by compiling other essays and interviews published in magazines over the years from 1947 to 1987.  The book reviews from the 1940s are especially interesting as they provide a look into Baldwin’s early years as a developing writer.

In his introduction Randall Keenan points out how easy it is to “pigeonhole” Baldwin as a writer who was limited to writing about race and blackness.  These were certainly subjects that Baldwin knew well, but he always wrote about them in the service of much bigger ideals.  As Keenan puts it, “…though it is too broad – if not useless – to say his true topic is humanity, it is useful to see how, no matter his topic, how often his writing finds some ur-morality upon which to rest, how he always sees matters through a lens of decency, how he writes with his heart as well as with his head.”

I would also add that in addition to head and heart, Baldwin knew the importance of the body as the site and source of human liberation.  This is the Baldwin who published Giovanni’s Room in 1954, an explicitly gay novel, now considered a classic, but which at the time was a massive risk, not only because he was a young writer, but also because this was a time when people were literally arrested for being in possession of such “obscene” material.  Baldwin understood that sex and the body were at the core of understanding American racial and political attitudes.  Reading through these essays one is never more than a sentence or paragraph away from the body, whether he is writing about the physical work of labor, the perplexities of love and sexuality, or the reality of death.   In this way Baldwin belongs in conversation with another of New York’s great writers, Walt Whitman.  Like Whitman, Baldwin knew New York City, and the nation it belongs to, backwards and forwards, from top to bottom.  Because of the circumstances of their birth – Baldwin born poor into a storefront church family in Harlem, Whitman born poor into a Long Island family full of alcoholism and disability – both writers learned what it means to be on familiar terms with a human desperation that most Americans spend their whole lives trying not to see.  Baldwin saw it all, the depths poverty in Harlem, the bright lights and glamour of the Broadway stage, the suffocating racial customs of the South, the staggering stupidity of Hollywood.  He also witnessed the perceptions of Americans abroad, in Europe (especially Paris) and in the Muslim world (particularly in Turkey where he lived off and on over a decade).

The essays in The Cross of Redemption are surprisingly fresh.  It is a credit to Baldwin’s genius as a writer that his work remains vibrant and timeless even thought he was writing about political figures and controversies that have since faded into the past.  I’ve been reading Baldwin for years, but I admit I came to this collection with the (arrogant) perception that I would somehow have to update his commentary to write about him.  I had the idea that Baldwin was a writer who, despite his split from the church, remained mired in Christian theology and yoked to a problematic notion of Christian victimhood.  I thought I would have to revise his work to account for all the political changes since his death in 1987.  I also thought I’d need to account for the growth of things like the Internet and new media, and its string of ridiculous spectacles passed off as “news.”

Nope.  Jimmy was way ahead of the game.

For instance, in “Mass Culture and the Creative Artist” Baldwin writes “The people who run mass media and those consume it are really in the same boat.  They must continue to produce things they do not really admire, still less love, in order to continue buying things they do not really want, still less need.  If we were dealing only with fintails, two-tone cars, or programs like Gunsmoke, the situation would not be so grave.  The trouble is the serious things are handled (and received) with the same essential lack of seriousness.”  Take out the references to cars and Gunsmoke, and essentially the commentary applies to today’s ridiculous new media spectacles.  In another example, “An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Y. Davis” and “A Letter to Prisoners,” Baldwin speaks to the conditions of our ever expanding prison industrial complex, as the profits of incarceration continue to be fueled by the bodies of the poor, most of them are young black and Latino males.

There are several pieces in the collection that I could spend this entire review quoting and parsing over.  But the one that stirred me the most was “The Uses of the Blues.”  Here Baldwin weaves together the genius of black music and ties it to the history and politics of the United States.  Certainly when he quotes Bessie Smith “Then it thundered and lightnin’d and the wind began to blow/ There’s thousands of people ain’t got no place to go” Hurricane Katrina comes to mind.  From “Brownie you’re doing a heckuva job” to a spaced out Barbara Bush saying that sleeping on the floor in a gym in Texas was “working out well” for the evacuees since they were dead broke anyway, the disaster impressed on a whole new generation of young people that the American government still possesses a shameful lack of regard for the poor, and in particular, poor people of color. (“George Bush does not care about black people”)  And yet, while Barack Obama certainly rode a wave of indignation about Hurricane Katrina, about Wall Street’s excesses, and about the economic inequalities throughout the nation, and harnessed them into his impressive run to the White House, that indignation and that guarded sense of suspicion the people have for this country still exists in spite of his historic win. Baldwin puts it this way:

“I want to make it clear that when I talk about Negroes…I am not talking about race; I don’t know what race means.  I am talking about a social fact.  When I say “Negro” it is a digression;  it is important to remember that I am not talking about a people, but a person…I’m talking about what happens to you if, having barely escaped suicide, or death, or madness, or yourself, you watch your children growing up and no matter what you do, no matter what you do, you are powerless, you are really powerless, against the force of the world that is out to tell your child that he has no right to be alive.  And no amount of liberal jargon, and no amount of talk about how well and how far we have progressed does anything to soften or to point out any solution to this dilemma.  In every generation, ever since Negroes have been here, every Negro mother and father has had to face that child and try to create in that child some way of surviving this particular world, some way to make the child who will be despised not despise myself.”

The danger in the Age of Obama is to think that November 4, 2008 somehow marked the end of the dilemma that Baldwin describes here.  The danger is in thinking that because the President shares the same skin color and texture of hair as your child that your child will now automatically get a fair shake in education, employment or the criminal justice system.  James Baldwin, tapping into that prophetic tradition, and seeing what had happened over the course of his own life, knew that a little progress can be a dangerous thing.  Having a black president in office didn’t help the 14 year old boy I saw in Brooklyn on Fulton and Tompkins the other day, surrounded by three NYPD officers, looking disgusted and helpless while sitting on his bike getting written up for the grave offense of riding his bike on the sidewalk.  People in the ‘hood see this, and know that they are caught in the quota game, and sooner or later, this kid gets cycled through the criminal justice system, and sooner or later the optimism of 2008 will fade if there is no substance behind it when it comes to the day to day conditions for the working poor.

As Baldwin continues in the same essay, “it is not a question of accusing the White American of crimes against the Negro…What I’m much more concerned about is what White Americans have done to themselves.”  Those white Americans, particularly the ones clinging to the Republican Party, may not feel the police breathing down their neck daily like the young man on Fulton, but economically they are not faring much better.  It is their faithful allegiance to corporate power that will eventually choke the life out of them.  These same corporations, Wal-Mart the most iconic among them, shamelessly tout patriotism while exporting jobs overseas, busting unions at home, and profiting from the influx of illegal immigrant labor domestically. The middle class, (black, white and otherwise) is decimated.  But we still clamor for that good life, and are now getting enslaved to consumer debt and homes we can’t afford, because buying and owning stuff is conflated with patriotic duty.  Yet, even amidst the financial crisis there is a very real prosperity that America has experienced over the years and can’t be easily dismissed.  Immigrants still risk life and limb for the possibilities of living here.  The dream still shines. As Baldwin says, “We really did conquer a continent; we have made a lot of money; we’re better off materially than anybody else in the world.” But, he cautions, “How easy it is as person or as a nation to suppose that one’s well-being is proof of one’s virtue.”

It is precisely this conflation of wealth and righteousness which has always been at the root of American capitalism and has grown even more intense since 1989 and “the end of communism,” just two years after Baldwin died.   And that brings us to “The Tea Party” a revival movement rooted as much in commerce as it is in spirituality or theology.  Defenders of the movement claim it is really about economic policy and not about race, and I don’t think we should be quick to dismiss that claim outright. Again from “Uses of the Blues,” Baldwin writes.  “To talk about these things in this country today is extremely difficult.  Even the words mean nothing anymore. I think, for example, what we call ‘the religious revival’ in America means that more and more people periodically get more and more frightened and go to church in order to make sure they don’t lose their investments.” Yes, the sacred economy has fallen, and in order to set it right a blood sacrifice must be made to the gods in order to restore order.  That’s what they really mean by “watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants.”  Whiteness, capitalism and faith are all intertwined in this right-wing worldview.  In another essay “We Can Change the Country,” Baldwin writes. “One must face the fact that this Christian nation may never have read any of the Gospels, but they do understand money.” And that’s an apt description of this movement, equal parts anti-intellectualism, “free-market” ideology, and apocalyptic Christianity

There is much more here in The Cross of Redemption than I cover in these few paragraphs.  I think it is true that Baldwin did get “bitter” later in his career, as people claimed, and rightfully so.  Again, the assassinations wore him down.  Nixon and Vietnam wore him down.  And his artistic success allowed him the opportunity to get some reprieve by spending time in other parts of the world where he did not have to confront this trouble on a daily basis.   Though he felt some despair, he did not lose all hope.  In the documentary James Baldwin: Price of the Ticket (California Newsreel, 1990), Baldwin spoke in a clip about his guarded optimism for the future:  “I really do believe in the New Jerusalem.  I really do believe that we can all become better than we are.  I know we can.  But the price is enormous and people are not yet willing to pay it.”