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This is the text of my comments at the May 1st Symposium HISTORIES & HUMANITIES AT HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES Embracing the Legacy of John Hope Franklin.
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"'Black Schools Kill Smart Niggers?':
Reconciling the Romance for Black Institutions in the Post-Soul Era"
by Mark Anthony Neal
When I accepted my first tenure track position at Xavier University of Louisiana in the summer of 1996, I was filled with the romance that only nine-years of undergraduate and graduate training at largely white public institutions in Western New York State could produce. Yes, I was happy to leave behind the regional phenomenon known as “lake effect” snow for the warmth and hotness of the “Big Easy,” but more to the point, as the only historically Black and Catholic university in the nation, Xavier offered me my first engagement with an Historically Black College and University (HBCU). As an African-American male from the South Bronx, my first years 12 years of schooling were spent at an all-black Seventh Day Adventist school and a large specialized high school in Brooklyn, NY that defined the concept of urban cosmopolitanism. Yet my experiences in higher education were quite different, spending nearly a decade in classrooms in which I functioned, to borrow a term that Greg Tate once used to describe the career of Jean Michel Basqiuat, as a “flyboy in the buttermilk.” I was devout in my desire not to reproduce that experience, now that I was on the other-side of the desk, so to speak. Armed with a dissertation with enough post-modern jargon to choke the ghost of Baudrillard and still filled with the swagger of the late 1980s renaissance of black cultural nationalism, I “turned south” in hopes of finding my professional purpose. Having never experienced the presence of a black man as a teacher, on any level of formal schooling, I was also endowed with the idea that I needed to be at an HBCU to be on the front lines of saving the next generation of black “boys to men.” It was a heady romance indeed, but also a short lived one.
I was only at Xavier for six weeks when a lunchtime encounter with a very prominent black public intellectual led to the conversation that provides the title for my essay. “Black schools kill smart niggers” was the warning—still remembering the sense of clarity that I sought at the moment I heard the warning—and even before I could utter a word about my commitment to black students, said black public intellectual remarked, “there are black students everywhere that you can teach.” The conversation stayed in the back of my head until months later when my identity politics, in the form of my scholarly interests in black gender and sexual politics, my support of a black woman colleague who was being professionally hazed by the head of my department and as well as my distinct commitment to use “black vernacular” in the classroom made me a target of both my immediate supervisor and the Dean of Faculty. I can remember thinking to myself, as I left Xavier’s campus for the last time after only a year, accepting a position back in New York State, that for the first time in my life I had a firm grasp on the functions of a plantation. To be sure, I’ve experienced plantation life on many a university campus since that initial tenure track position, though places like Duke University, for example, are quite skilled in obscuring that reality. Nevertheless my experience at Xavier raised critical questions for me about the value of historically black colleges and universities, if not historically black institutions in general, particularly in the so-called “Post-Soul” era in which the totems of blackness flow so efficiently through mainstream culture, often to the effect of obliterating their distinctly black sources.
I came of age in the academy at a time, the early 1990s, that was in part defined by the emergence of a contemporary cadre of so-called Black Public Intellectuals; scholars in the humanities and social sciences, many of whom shared an interests in British Cultural Studies and the work of Stuart Hall in particular. To be sure they were not the first black public intellectuals, and more than a few detractors are quick to argue that they are not the most significant, but given the unprecedented access that these scholars had to mainstream media, this was a generation of scholars, arguably, more visible than any previous generation of black academics. For black graduate students, working on contemporary race themes, these figures were simply rock stars—and it was not lost on any of us that they were all affiliated, with rare exception, with well financed elite private institutions. Yet just a generation earlier, many of the scholars who helped establish the first meaningful presence of black intellectuals at predominately White institutions, had significant ties to HBCUs. The presence of prominent black academics and scholars at largely historically white institutions simply confirmed the general “brain drain” that black communities had witnessed since the early 1970s. Whereas a generation earlier the best and the brightest in Black America were exemplars of the rich traditions found at HBCUs, this was not always the case as the 20th century came to a close.
In fact, since the apex of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the early 1970s, there has been little in mainstream culture that affirmed the value of HBCUs—the Tom Joyner Morning Show and Spike Lee notwithstanding; More to the point HBCUs have been under siege. By the early 1990s, HBCUs were clearly devalued in the minds of some as were the careers of those who toiled on their campuses. The sexy view that the television series A Different World held of HBCUs was out-of-sync with institutions who literally had to defend their presence and purpose in the so-called post-Civil Rights era; A Different World spoke more to an historic investment that many African-Americans held out for black institutions. But this devaluation of HBCUs was not simply the product of integration-era politics, post-race fantasies or the rupture of historical memory—some of this devaluation had everything to do with on-the-ground practices that occur in the context of diminishing resources, unaccountable leadership and the egregious exploitation of teaching faculty. For example, when the aforementioned Tom Joyner Morning Show waged a public campaign in support of then Harvard Professor Cornel West, whose scholarly credentials were being questioned by then Harvard President and current Obama economic advisor Lawrence Summer, their bully pulpit might have been better utilized shedding light on the conditions of a good many faculty at HBCUs. At many of these institutions faculty teach 8-10 classes a year, on one-year renewable contracts, for discount salaries, with little time for research all in the name of “service” to the race. I still live with the guilt that my Xavier Dean placed on my head when I announced that I was leaving for a “white” public research institution—a guilt that suggested that I was letting down the race and that somehow I was less of a scholar because I was unwilling to accept the kinds of conditions that generations of black scholars at HBCUs not only survived, but thrived in.
The founding of Historically Black Colleges and Universities more than a century ago was predicated on the desire of white power brokers to create a buffer class—a cadre of professional blacks and skilled workers that would serve as gatekeepers for the black masses. It goes without saying that part of that project was to distance those gatekeepers from a shared and productive blackness with the black masses—an articulation of a blackness whose full complexity might prove useful for progressive social movement. Yet, quite the opposite occurred as some HBCUs, became hot beds for political activism and the development of progressive race politics. Yet one never gets past the founding expectations of these institutions, where the expectations were that HBCUs would serve the purpose of regulating, policing or even incarcerating blackness. This is a point that Houston Baker, Jr. makes in his devilishly facetious tome Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T, where he brings into focus, Booker T. Washington’s decision to establish Tuskegee University on a plantation. “Taking into account the abject, brutal, stultifying relationship of black-majority plantation arrangements of southern life,” Baker writes, “it seems a terrible augury against black modernism that Booker T. Washington chose an “abandoned” white plantation landscape as the site for his Tuskegee uplift project. More to the point Baker adds, “And Washington did not simply situate his black educational enterprise physically on a plantation. He also instituted and argued for an essentially black peasant southern plantation economics, manners, handicrafts, and habits of mind for the black majority.” (81) While Washington and Tuskegee are simply one iteration of HBCU politics in the early 20th century, Baker’s comments highlight the kinds of tensions between the maintenance of historically specific performances of blackness and those performances of blackness resist the very kinds of regulation that institutions were encouraged to reproduce.
As we think of HBCUs as sites of regulation, it is not difficult, to also think of them as sites of surveillance—a space to monitor blackness. While HBCUs figure less in the eyes of a so-called white power structure in the 21st century, they are still critical to the reproduction of a “not too blackly public” to appropriate Baker’s phrase—that not only denies the full complexity of lives at HBCUs, but also the complexities of private and public blackness. The censure of Spike Lee during the making of his 1988 film School Daze and of the producers of BET’s college reality show College Hill are but two examples of a regulatory project that occurs in support of a sanitized view of black institutions, be they churches, HBCUs, sororities and fraternities or the sexual politics of Black America. It is in this latter category that I have been able to collaborate with colleagues at HBCUs, notably the Women’s Research and Resource Center at Spelman College, currently under the leadership of Beverly Guy-Sheftall, on issues related to sexual violence, masculinity and black popular culture. Currently, the Women’s Research and Resource Center is the only standing Women’s Studies unit at an HBCU. I was initially drawn to this collaborative work in the aftermath of rap star Nelly’s misogynistic video for the song “Tip Drill” which featured a male rapper swipe a credit card through a black woman’s buttocks. Students in Guy-Sheftall’s feminist theory class helped organize a protest against Nelly, who was scheduled to visit Spelman’s campus. That a significant number of Spelman and Morehouse students participate formally and informally in the “strip club” culture that coalesces in the city of Atlanta, only heightens the roles that HBCUs play in producing new and counter narratives about black bodies and sexuality. Indeed the Spelman/Nelly controversy has ushered in a vigorous discussion about gender and sexuality among the hip-hop generation.
These conversations occur as the Hip-Hop Generation questions the “politics of respectability” that has defined so many black institutions and the conservative gender and sexual politics that are reproduced within the context of that “respectability.” For example three years ago when there were allegations of rape against men at Morehouse College by Spelman students, members of Spelman’s Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance issued a public statement criticizing the sense of “complacency” associated with sexual violence against the women at Spelman and black women in general and later organized a protest on Morehouse’s campus. The protest engendered its own criticism, particularly within Black institutions that still value patriarchy and the "stability" it supposedly produces, thus Black women (and a few men) are often admonished for publicly criticizing and holding Black men accountable for behavior that is clearly detrimental to those very institutions. Members of the Morehouse College student senate, for example, introduced a bill condemning the protest, arguing that said protest "created a hostile environment" and "encouraged bad press and character defamation to Morehouse College and its student body." The senate also castigated the FMLA for apparently not asking their permission for the protest. In the final section of the bill, the Morehouse College student senate requested "a public apology from the Advisor(s) to FMLA and student leadership of FMLA and all other organizers of the demonstration for its unruly nature". In many ways the reaction of some Morehouse men, to the Spelman FMLA protest, has to do with the willingness of those women to challenge the social contract between them.
Again these are the singular politics of two institutions that have a complex and often difficult shared history, but highlight how HBCUs continue to be at the center of public debates about “blackness.” It is also important to realize that this project of policing and regulation is not simply generational in nature as witnessed by the recent commentary from students leaders at HBCU like Winston-Salem State and North Carolina Central about the practice of “sagging” and dressing down among HBCU students. This sensitivity towards sartorial choices, as if there aren’t faculty at historically white institutions who would love to ban the wearing of flip-flops to class, speaks to the extent that the very plantation culture that Baker tethered to Booker T. Washington’s project of uplift, is rife with the belief that what has to be regulated and policed is a deviance thought normative to some black bodies. The sagging concerns among student leaders were later echoed by Morehouse College President Robert Franklin, Jr., who recently challenged the practice “cross-dressing” among a few Morehouse students. As many question the relevancy of black institutions like HBCUs in the in the so-called “post-race” era, black institutions might contribute to their own irrelevancy, if they continue to march out-of-step with the broad-based progressive politics that so many Hip-Hop generation Americans are desiring to achieve.
***
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African-American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of several books including the recent New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity and is currently completing Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities for New York University Press.
Reconciling the Romance for Black Institutions in the Post-Soul Era"
by Mark Anthony Neal
When I accepted my first tenure track position at Xavier University of Louisiana in the summer of 1996, I was filled with the romance that only nine-years of undergraduate and graduate training at largely white public institutions in Western New York State could produce. Yes, I was happy to leave behind the regional phenomenon known as “lake effect” snow for the warmth and hotness of the “Big Easy,” but more to the point, as the only historically Black and Catholic university in the nation, Xavier offered me my first engagement with an Historically Black College and University (HBCU). As an African-American male from the South Bronx, my first years 12 years of schooling were spent at an all-black Seventh Day Adventist school and a large specialized high school in Brooklyn, NY that defined the concept of urban cosmopolitanism. Yet my experiences in higher education were quite different, spending nearly a decade in classrooms in which I functioned, to borrow a term that Greg Tate once used to describe the career of Jean Michel Basqiuat, as a “flyboy in the buttermilk.” I was devout in my desire not to reproduce that experience, now that I was on the other-side of the desk, so to speak. Armed with a dissertation with enough post-modern jargon to choke the ghost of Baudrillard and still filled with the swagger of the late 1980s renaissance of black cultural nationalism, I “turned south” in hopes of finding my professional purpose. Having never experienced the presence of a black man as a teacher, on any level of formal schooling, I was also endowed with the idea that I needed to be at an HBCU to be on the front lines of saving the next generation of black “boys to men.” It was a heady romance indeed, but also a short lived one.
I was only at Xavier for six weeks when a lunchtime encounter with a very prominent black public intellectual led to the conversation that provides the title for my essay. “Black schools kill smart niggers” was the warning—still remembering the sense of clarity that I sought at the moment I heard the warning—and even before I could utter a word about my commitment to black students, said black public intellectual remarked, “there are black students everywhere that you can teach.” The conversation stayed in the back of my head until months later when my identity politics, in the form of my scholarly interests in black gender and sexual politics, my support of a black woman colleague who was being professionally hazed by the head of my department and as well as my distinct commitment to use “black vernacular” in the classroom made me a target of both my immediate supervisor and the Dean of Faculty. I can remember thinking to myself, as I left Xavier’s campus for the last time after only a year, accepting a position back in New York State, that for the first time in my life I had a firm grasp on the functions of a plantation. To be sure, I’ve experienced plantation life on many a university campus since that initial tenure track position, though places like Duke University, for example, are quite skilled in obscuring that reality. Nevertheless my experience at Xavier raised critical questions for me about the value of historically black colleges and universities, if not historically black institutions in general, particularly in the so-called “Post-Soul” era in which the totems of blackness flow so efficiently through mainstream culture, often to the effect of obliterating their distinctly black sources.
I came of age in the academy at a time, the early 1990s, that was in part defined by the emergence of a contemporary cadre of so-called Black Public Intellectuals; scholars in the humanities and social sciences, many of whom shared an interests in British Cultural Studies and the work of Stuart Hall in particular. To be sure they were not the first black public intellectuals, and more than a few detractors are quick to argue that they are not the most significant, but given the unprecedented access that these scholars had to mainstream media, this was a generation of scholars, arguably, more visible than any previous generation of black academics. For black graduate students, working on contemporary race themes, these figures were simply rock stars—and it was not lost on any of us that they were all affiliated, with rare exception, with well financed elite private institutions. Yet just a generation earlier, many of the scholars who helped establish the first meaningful presence of black intellectuals at predominately White institutions, had significant ties to HBCUs. The presence of prominent black academics and scholars at largely historically white institutions simply confirmed the general “brain drain” that black communities had witnessed since the early 1970s. Whereas a generation earlier the best and the brightest in Black America were exemplars of the rich traditions found at HBCUs, this was not always the case as the 20th century came to a close.
In fact, since the apex of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the early 1970s, there has been little in mainstream culture that affirmed the value of HBCUs—the Tom Joyner Morning Show and Spike Lee notwithstanding; More to the point HBCUs have been under siege. By the early 1990s, HBCUs were clearly devalued in the minds of some as were the careers of those who toiled on their campuses. The sexy view that the television series A Different World held of HBCUs was out-of-sync with institutions who literally had to defend their presence and purpose in the so-called post-Civil Rights era; A Different World spoke more to an historic investment that many African-Americans held out for black institutions. But this devaluation of HBCUs was not simply the product of integration-era politics, post-race fantasies or the rupture of historical memory—some of this devaluation had everything to do with on-the-ground practices that occur in the context of diminishing resources, unaccountable leadership and the egregious exploitation of teaching faculty. For example, when the aforementioned Tom Joyner Morning Show waged a public campaign in support of then Harvard Professor Cornel West, whose scholarly credentials were being questioned by then Harvard President and current Obama economic advisor Lawrence Summer, their bully pulpit might have been better utilized shedding light on the conditions of a good many faculty at HBCUs. At many of these institutions faculty teach 8-10 classes a year, on one-year renewable contracts, for discount salaries, with little time for research all in the name of “service” to the race. I still live with the guilt that my Xavier Dean placed on my head when I announced that I was leaving for a “white” public research institution—a guilt that suggested that I was letting down the race and that somehow I was less of a scholar because I was unwilling to accept the kinds of conditions that generations of black scholars at HBCUs not only survived, but thrived in.
The founding of Historically Black Colleges and Universities more than a century ago was predicated on the desire of white power brokers to create a buffer class—a cadre of professional blacks and skilled workers that would serve as gatekeepers for the black masses. It goes without saying that part of that project was to distance those gatekeepers from a shared and productive blackness with the black masses—an articulation of a blackness whose full complexity might prove useful for progressive social movement. Yet, quite the opposite occurred as some HBCUs, became hot beds for political activism and the development of progressive race politics. Yet one never gets past the founding expectations of these institutions, where the expectations were that HBCUs would serve the purpose of regulating, policing or even incarcerating blackness. This is a point that Houston Baker, Jr. makes in his devilishly facetious tome Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T, where he brings into focus, Booker T. Washington’s decision to establish Tuskegee University on a plantation. “Taking into account the abject, brutal, stultifying relationship of black-majority plantation arrangements of southern life,” Baker writes, “it seems a terrible augury against black modernism that Booker T. Washington chose an “abandoned” white plantation landscape as the site for his Tuskegee uplift project. More to the point Baker adds, “And Washington did not simply situate his black educational enterprise physically on a plantation. He also instituted and argued for an essentially black peasant southern plantation economics, manners, handicrafts, and habits of mind for the black majority.” (81) While Washington and Tuskegee are simply one iteration of HBCU politics in the early 20th century, Baker’s comments highlight the kinds of tensions between the maintenance of historically specific performances of blackness and those performances of blackness resist the very kinds of regulation that institutions were encouraged to reproduce.
As we think of HBCUs as sites of regulation, it is not difficult, to also think of them as sites of surveillance—a space to monitor blackness. While HBCUs figure less in the eyes of a so-called white power structure in the 21st century, they are still critical to the reproduction of a “not too blackly public” to appropriate Baker’s phrase—that not only denies the full complexity of lives at HBCUs, but also the complexities of private and public blackness. The censure of Spike Lee during the making of his 1988 film School Daze and of the producers of BET’s college reality show College Hill are but two examples of a regulatory project that occurs in support of a sanitized view of black institutions, be they churches, HBCUs, sororities and fraternities or the sexual politics of Black America. It is in this latter category that I have been able to collaborate with colleagues at HBCUs, notably the Women’s Research and Resource Center at Spelman College, currently under the leadership of Beverly Guy-Sheftall, on issues related to sexual violence, masculinity and black popular culture. Currently, the Women’s Research and Resource Center is the only standing Women’s Studies unit at an HBCU. I was initially drawn to this collaborative work in the aftermath of rap star Nelly’s misogynistic video for the song “Tip Drill” which featured a male rapper swipe a credit card through a black woman’s buttocks. Students in Guy-Sheftall’s feminist theory class helped organize a protest against Nelly, who was scheduled to visit Spelman’s campus. That a significant number of Spelman and Morehouse students participate formally and informally in the “strip club” culture that coalesces in the city of Atlanta, only heightens the roles that HBCUs play in producing new and counter narratives about black bodies and sexuality. Indeed the Spelman/Nelly controversy has ushered in a vigorous discussion about gender and sexuality among the hip-hop generation.
These conversations occur as the Hip-Hop Generation questions the “politics of respectability” that has defined so many black institutions and the conservative gender and sexual politics that are reproduced within the context of that “respectability.” For example three years ago when there were allegations of rape against men at Morehouse College by Spelman students, members of Spelman’s Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance issued a public statement criticizing the sense of “complacency” associated with sexual violence against the women at Spelman and black women in general and later organized a protest on Morehouse’s campus. The protest engendered its own criticism, particularly within Black institutions that still value patriarchy and the "stability" it supposedly produces, thus Black women (and a few men) are often admonished for publicly criticizing and holding Black men accountable for behavior that is clearly detrimental to those very institutions. Members of the Morehouse College student senate, for example, introduced a bill condemning the protest, arguing that said protest "created a hostile environment" and "encouraged bad press and character defamation to Morehouse College and its student body." The senate also castigated the FMLA for apparently not asking their permission for the protest. In the final section of the bill, the Morehouse College student senate requested "a public apology from the Advisor(s) to FMLA and student leadership of FMLA and all other organizers of the demonstration for its unruly nature". In many ways the reaction of some Morehouse men, to the Spelman FMLA protest, has to do with the willingness of those women to challenge the social contract between them.
Again these are the singular politics of two institutions that have a complex and often difficult shared history, but highlight how HBCUs continue to be at the center of public debates about “blackness.” It is also important to realize that this project of policing and regulation is not simply generational in nature as witnessed by the recent commentary from students leaders at HBCU like Winston-Salem State and North Carolina Central about the practice of “sagging” and dressing down among HBCU students. This sensitivity towards sartorial choices, as if there aren’t faculty at historically white institutions who would love to ban the wearing of flip-flops to class, speaks to the extent that the very plantation culture that Baker tethered to Booker T. Washington’s project of uplift, is rife with the belief that what has to be regulated and policed is a deviance thought normative to some black bodies. The sagging concerns among student leaders were later echoed by Morehouse College President Robert Franklin, Jr., who recently challenged the practice “cross-dressing” among a few Morehouse students. As many question the relevancy of black institutions like HBCUs in the in the so-called “post-race” era, black institutions might contribute to their own irrelevancy, if they continue to march out-of-step with the broad-based progressive politics that so many Hip-Hop generation Americans are desiring to achieve.
***
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African-American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of several books including the recent New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity and is currently completing Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities for New York University Press.
16 comments:
I love this, especially the remark about Baker being devilishly facetious. (I'm reading his Betrayal right now and that's a fitting description for this book as well.) I didn't know you did a year at Xavier. I have been trying to articulate what bothers me so much about the recent attention to dress code on HBCU campuses, but you've stated it so well here. Well done.
Around 1970 I constructed an outline for an essay to be entitled "The Northern Nigger Syndrome", that was meant to be an analysis and critique of northern brothers who came South (especially to HBCU)seeking to affirm their Blackness while still viewing the world through their white supremacist lens. I had in mind brothers who wrote confused narratives such as this one by Mark Anthony Neal.
Mr. Jones,
sounds like a provocative essay; please forward when you're done so that I can post on the blog.
"The Northern Nigger Syndrome", Mr. Jones? And yet the paper was to discusses "northern brothers"? As if the problematic term Nigger has not be grafted to the black female body, as if we should just ignore black females in general? And 1970? Seems to me that, sir, you participate in the very discourse which Mr. Neal has outlined.
I've never commented on your blog for the years that I scoured it for connection. Nothing really appealed to me because I saw just another very talented and more erudite man than myself show-off his schooling to not ever touch upon the heart of matters that were immediate to me. Since 2003 I have been tolling with queries of regret haunted by the issue that not one so-called modern Black educator would approach what you approached here. And since the past few years I have tried to bait several, they refuse to touch this issue still--until now with you.
I have been told that the only way to approach this conundrum would be to join the academy and I thought it was a reproductive waste considering I knew I was a practitioner of research and experimentation that did more than most in the academy had or could conspire.
Everything you assume here is what I wanted my Gen X Black academic peers to approach. None would. Even when I introduced myself to them on their college campuses, they treated me like a trouble-making enemy for the most part because I did not behave appropriately in the manner that they were socialized to as instructors reproducing to teach their students how to haze anyone of our line "with the program" with the same instructions. I met your peers that you tout to only have them scare me up and down without having them really take time to discover how it could benefit them and their supposed declared missions of wanting to teach and lead. I realized part of the reality of those missions were the self-possessed idea to want to lead alone, or by their coterie ONLY, or their way. I watched them write books to not come up with an idea. I knew I was a living idea generator and that was my strength. Not having family support or systematic support was my weakness. I could not impress them with the traditional seductive ploys without the bona fide they had in being through the academia and abiding with the program.
I was not like them who were still trying to work from within. It was cognitive that I was from the outside, was using the system of the historical meaning of Uppity Negro to teach how to build a new system for reconstruction, yet they saw that I needed to learn my place. I don't see that Black educators are that guiltless and victims of their plantation mentalities they choose time and time again and boldly used to stratify me from connecting meaningfully of possibilities.
I remember ironically it was at Morehouse that students in the History department warned me to not get banned from Morehouse forever because they sensed what I was doing was inventive and paradigm-shifting but it was tricky. Those students knew they were not supposed to dedicate allegiance to me or time to try to understand and defend or lobby my hypothesis that they admitted made sense and was showing results. I was not with the program of academia. No one Black was supposed to really infuse practical models that integrated disciplines and test out new economy models of social innovation and social enterprise with their students on their campuses--and especially not from an outsider not vetted before or "trained" to stay in line.
I met several of your colleagues that you have vouched for for years as the next great whatevers and I know from experience how they stratified themselves and their students to stay away from me. I saw the jealousy and felt it when students were told to not wear their shirts to class or on campus and that parents stole their students shirts to have students tell me and buy another one. I witnessed students not understand why some students hated me and why faculty did not support me when I came to their campuses. I had to tow the line in even NEVER telling those same students from my mouth the truths that the program of those who were supposd to be innovative educators they TRUSTED were following out directives of controlling them and me and silencing to cultivate and train them and me how to not be inventive and industrious which would only but open space and language to question them, their missions, and their tactics status quo.
I witnessed the elitist of coterie of so-called Black Academics that trivialized and ridiculed what I was doing to only but find out laters after I quit in the past two years, there is mounds of defense I found in theories of practice created and heralded as enterprising research that was exactly what I created. I used tools that I had no idea was substantiated by White elitist practitioners who probably did not create their theories to vindicate me. I found this information by mostly reading Time magazine or Newsweek to continue to find that Black Academics probably knew at the time that I was relative but it did not fit "with the program" in real-time.
Last fall I confronted the dept. chair of economics at Howard at a reception at a DC think tank one evening. I challenged him of why I never heard from him when I visited his campus. I piled on additional assertions that I assumed I would have met him or some other colleague from the Economics dept. since the Abram Harris Economic Society was the first and only student group to identify that I was using tools of behavioral economics as part of the equation of my model of Uppity Negro. One student lobbied that she could see that I recreated a former system under a the guise of social entreprenuership to fund active research and development in real-time and it was. It was not until after I quit in 2007 that I found out that I was using Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation and the style of results-orientation planning theorized by other Harvard (white male) colleagues. I had no idea that what I was doing was breakthrough theory also know as breakthrough innovation until I experienced what you have written about here today. I created thinking HBCUs would have embraced my ingenuity and contributions but instead I learned quickly that no one wanted any new ideas of Blackness reappropriated in any variation challenging thier program. I even found that Black educators at non-HBCUs were no better. I saw how fraternity was: vile and vicious.
That dept.chair told me at that reception that his school had not reached that level of scholarship yet that I was approaching. That was his excuse and I punched him back for trying to placate me with a weak excuse to try to seem like the victim. I told him that I had found out subsequently in years that I was applying models theorized and practiced by esteemed superior elites whose researched were for the most part tested and produced under the Harvard brand. He could not say anything else.
How do you make an excuse that the reason you did not support me was because you had not reached that level of scholarship yet to teach your disenfranchised students how to be "ten times better than the White Man" when you are teaching your faculty and students to not try new things from new people who are not with the program? How do you justify to someone who has proven to create an effective model of intergrated disciplines as new knowledge ecomony on your campus and you haze her? And then when she confronts you, you play the victim that you and your department (and peers of Black eoconomists) somehow did not know that the research was out that that substantiated what I created and what and why I did that was not even created by Black Theorists but Harvard elites who too did not produce their findings to support me either--but consequentially did. What were Black economists working on? How was it that the Abram Harris Economic Society the only body to cognitively dissect that I was relevant and ironically treated like their namesake, Abram Harris, who too once their peer, ostracized and punished for being too innovative for that same department at Howard. He replicated history to lead miserably not only his department at Howard to not realize the irony of their culmination in hazing me but as well he did not realize the gravity of his power in not leading his department to not be that vulnerable in not knowing the research that was valid that I was applying that Ivies had proven emerging trends.
And I came to your blog for years waiting for you to stop writing about art to write about the academies. I have a degree in art and my passion is in Black women's empowerment but you did not know that the very department at Spelman is not as innovative as you commend. They too are stifling eventhough they are the most open and fertile body on Spelman's campus or any campus I visited out of all HBCUs and non-HBCUs.
Dr. Sheftall was receptive of me but even she did not understand nor her staff. They were linear and I had no time to deal with them looking at me as if I was a cute marketer. I just appreciated that they supported in getting shirts but I was heartbroken that they were like others in not being intellectually inquistitive to sense there was more than just what they saw in what they saw as what I was doing was just business using the free marketing values to promote a single theme. They could not even see there was multiple themes that even integrated their discipline with the model. It was econ, business, r&d, history, anthropology, social science, political science, art in multiple sub-disciplines, and technology. It was so much more in so many areas of business and integrated social sciences--not social work-- with making disciplines tangible in a free market ecomony of knowledge management and innovation modules.
I am relieved to now read this that I needed campaigned wider then in 2003 when I started to find out that I was going to spend years trying to tweak campuses and navigate landmines to be able to try to find someone that saw what you have just written and want to take on the real-time R & D in what I as doing in showing a model that was forcing to fight this paradigm. I did not create Uppity Negro to take on this social conundrum. I actually had no idea of it's extremeties in 2003 when I started. I told people that if I knew I would have faced what I experienced I would not have done it because I never planned to ruin my credit, take risks on my safety, and risked ruining my reputation on all that was that big that I could not fight alone as I was doing. I would hae tried to find...you...before stepping out there alone to them be out there and not be able to find anyone willing to tell these truths you have written here.
And to know now that you have always known this about the state of HBCUs and Black Academia, I would have reached out and had been responding years ago. I just had no interest in defending Black Art (in which I am a part of and covet) because I knew this issue was the most important issue determining the health of what is considered Black as an identity.
Educators at non-HBCUs were just socially nicer in not hazing me. They too were just as archaic to be so young to want to replicate something that made no sense to me in maintaining some ideal.
Overall, Boomers hated me and so did the parents who never intended for their children to want to love being Black in the manner I was posing in a reconstituted model of (say) the dead heroes' type of sensibilities and ethics of Blackness and living.
It was a formula and it proved too much that people did not want to be found out. Even students who were loyal to their parent's program which was bullying schools to not innovate ideas of Blackness knew that I as onto exposing them by mathematic equation of their inability to find evidential just cause in denouncing the hyothesis of the project. It was too Black and too surprising for at the time in 2003, people just wanted to remain stuck at talking about ideals (not ideas) of Black improvement (not Blackness improvement). No one was really wanting to really try anything that was a risk and could shift their lives out of the 40-year inertia of thinking significance in redemption they were seeking would happen magically and be gifted without reciprocated hard work, risk, exploration, discovery, and testing of themselves and the unknown in themselves and others.
There was an article in the NYTimes recently by Mark C. Taylor also hitting on fraternal issue I have with academics overall. I don't want to sound like a professor or be a professor. I didn't care to write to campaign to be touted. I created and that should have been enough. I created a model never created before me of an old system and applied modern applications that would have and did produce derivatives that the Black Community had not seen before in benchmarking program development and using the free market to make all disciplines integrated to fertilize time-limits and time-limited results-orientated initiatives. Who in the Black Community was doing that in 2003? Who is doing it now?
I know I was supposed to be silenced and Black educators let me know. I came to them so innocently wanting the connection and to create partnerships but I could never get there because I did not speak the language they needed to campaign in pageantry of academic elitism and worth and since no one did what I did before and proved to be "accepted" by the gatekeepers, I could not possibly know what I was talking about or trying to do. I was waiting for your testament as well as Mark C. Taylor's.
The entire experience has resulted in me feeling like having to attend an Ivy academy to get the "respectability" to only but then have the bona fide to prove what I already hypothesized in 2003 before their was an explosion of mainstream blogging, Facebook, or YouTube even the integrated they have come up with and how to use it was part of my initiative. I have the proof.
I have the proof that I created Uppity Negro to serve as a model like Edun and The Red Campaign and I told Bono at a reception at my job to have him gasp and try to reconfigure his train of thought when I told him I hate proof that my idea which was identical to him in process development was created first. A Black woman was not supposed to be that innovative and conceptualize what he and other bright eggs produced even before he did. He was/is the noted genius. (People were trying to change the subject by pulling him away to focus in on continuing to sign autographs when I could see he was thinking hard. Who was I and why was I not relevant eventhough I was confounding him? "Black women are not known to be that innovative" is probably what he was sensing because I sensed it as I learned over the years in meeting my own that they weren't. They followed formulas to follow formulas to want to be significant. I didn't.)
I tried to tell Black educators my vision in 2003 and hence to still have them trying to validate the old academy and old Black models of maintaining the status quo in not trying anything new and especially if it is from an altruistic outsider. And still there is no place for me anywhere.
Two points:
Your frame of reference for what goes on at an HBCU is very limited. You wrote this long piece and you spent one year at an HBCU.
2) It is odd that you lump all HBCU together in the same vein. There a vast differences between each university. Is Duke just like UNC?
Rodney,
thanks for the comments.
Yes, spent one year teaching at a HBC, but that doesn't mean that haven't had relationships and dealing with them during the course of the last 13 years, be it via interactions with HBCU faculty and academic activities on the campuses.
Also some would argue that the piece was not long enough--all about perspective.
The length issue is tit for tat.
I still have a problem with lumping all HBCU together. White institutions aren't lumped together in the same manner at all.
Why do you feel comfortable doing that with HBCUs?
Rodney,
from the text:
"While Washington and Tuskegee are simply one iteration of HBCU politics in the early 20th century, Baker’s comments highlight the kinds of tensions between the maintenance of historically specific performances of blackness and those performances of blackness resist the very kinds of regulation that institutions were encouraged to reproduce."
or
"Again these are the singular politics of two institutions that have a complex and often difficult shared history, but highlight how HBCUs continue to be at the center of public debates about “blackness.”
I didn't lump all HBCUs together.
The black school/white school comparison is an apples and oranges comparison, as there are thousands of PWIs that were not founded from a common mission. There are little more than 100 HBCUs and the reason why we continue to value them is because we deem there was a common mission in their founding.
MAN
I finally got an opportunity to evaluate "'Black Schools Kill Smart Niggers?' by Mark Anthony Neal. The article is a complex read. If it is intend for HBCUs, my only question is: Who is it intended for?
Dr. Neal’s fascination with the “regulatory” nature of HBCU’s regarding gender and sexuality conformity lends most of his concerns with the culture of HBCUs. I doubt that his concerns with culture will be enough to change the attitudes, values, and behavior of faculty, staff and administrators at HBCUs for the next thirty (30) years. Also, Dr. Neal’s fascination with calling HBCUs a “plantation” is indeed striking. Dr. Neal appear to arrive at this by drawing attention to the regulatory and the policing of “blackness” at HBCUs, I always thought of the Southern plantation as a forum (this is a nice way to say this) of the brutal economic exploits of Southern States and Europe. Do I assume this meant “blackness”?
I do agree that HBCUs are difficult places to establish a career, but I do not see them any different than any other place to establish one. HBCUs do not regulate “blackness”. Their existence defines it. HBCUs understand the alienation and marginalization of “blackness” in America. HBCUs are wise to understand this and begin to engage all its constituents in instructional and institutional strategies to cope with this historical phenomenon of being “kicked to the curb”.
The complexities of the issues raised by Dr. Neal, perhaps in the minds of many, are good ideas, but do not rest at the bottom line for most HBCUs. HBCUs relevancy appears in understanding their complexities and choose what’s relevant to the bottom line. HBCUs make a conscious effort not to make issues salient that draws attention from the bottom line. If issues become salient, like the protest of Spelman College students on Morehouse campus, Morehouse or any other institutions are wise to address the action of these organizers given the complexities of the issues and given the complexities of what it means to provide quality education at an HBCU during a school year.
Institutional and instructional quality at an HBCUs, especially with limited resources (e.g. faculty, staff and administrators), requires “all hands on deck” and do not allow to slow down “to discuss” or “acknowledge” campus concerns for the action of a few senseless African American men within the context of Morehouse or any other institution. Critical thinking requires us to minimize social distractions and “get on with the program of educating black students”. Entities or agents in the institution should understand and not complicate the process.
It is very unfortunate for Dr. Neal to enter an HBCUs without understanding the culture of an HBCU. HBCUs do not kill “Smart Niggers”, “transsexuals”, “rappers placing credit cards through a women buttock”, “gays” or the like. HBCUs simply understand the complexities of the issues and decide “there are bigger fishes to fry”.
While continuing to follow this thread and mulling over Neal's inference that HBCUs are plantations where smart niggers go to die, a complementary question kept bobbing up in my consciousness and I thought I would share it with others who are part of this conversation.
This is the question: If HBCUs are plantations where smart niggers go to die, are African American studies programs at Traditionally White Institutions (TWI) intellectual Bantustans where the not-so-smart-ones go to become self-proclaimed authorities on all things Black?
Mr. Jones,
if there is anything to be inferred by my piece, it is my belief (rather explicit I believe) that if we are truly committed to working with and for black institutions, we need to get beyond our romantic notions of how they function.
Part I KD
As a product of HBCU's (both undergraduate and graduate) and as a professor committed to the survival and development of these institutions I can assure you Mr. Neal, that the notion of a romantic HBCU experience is the furthest thing from our consciousness. We do however, love these institutions because we love African people. What does that assume? It assumes that we are not committed to dogmatic notions of blackness or abstractions about its regulation whether they are ultra conservative or post modern. It simply says that we are committed to Black people and the institutions that “we control" with all their complexities and contradictions. It assumes that nothing is perfect and without its challenges. It assumes in a general sense that these institutions do more good then they do harm. It assumes that HBCU’s continue to produce and graduate the vast majority of black professionals, organic intellectuals and skilled workers within the African-American community. It also says, without being apologetic, that Black intellectuals have a social, spiritual and moral obligation to teach other Black people. Like all serious relationships we have moved beyond romantic notions of love and have committed ourselves to the philosophy of "love in struggle". I am sure you understand this as a husband and a so called proponent of Malcolm X's identity as a father. Concomitantly love in struggle also requires us to commit beyond the material. This is something I think PWI loyal brothers and sisters like you seem to always somehow omit. Choosing to teach at PWI’s is as much a class question as it is a question of intellectual freedom and creativity. You see brother Neal, “I know that you know” that HBCU”s, like most teaching colleges and universities in the US, are under funded. I am willing to bet that most professors at teaching colleges complain about class size, weak academic support and school infrastructure, the social conflict that permeates spaces with limited resources in a capitalist culture, the inability to publish, etc. It has been my experience that only colleagues at predominantly white, wealthy institutions find these conditions unbearable. As a social scientist who claims to be progressive I am sure that you are familiar with the linkages that exist between race and class. You see many of us at HBCU’s have gone beyond the romantic notion of being radical, public intellectuals and embraced being radical, organic intellectuals by committing class suicide. This is clearly not a new proposal. We simply follow in the traditions of our ancestors who came before us i.e. we choose community over affluence and we are committed to plugging up the brain drain. That is all. It’s a simple proposition. Granted some of your criticism is valid, but I question your intentions. Your experience with HBCU’s seems more like a one night stand as opposed to a long-term commitment. Again, “I know that you know” as a husband, that real understanding between partners can only come from a substantive commitment to space and time. After all this is what brother Malcolm taught us. In his honor I will try to “make it plain”.
Part 2 KD
Because I have a strange feeling that your infamous encounter with a “prominent black public intellectual” was a discussion you might have had with Michael Eric Dyson, I have a simple challenge for you. Instead of exclusively interrogating HBCU”s as an outsider, reflect on your personal experiences at PWI’s. Spend some time interrogating linkages between class and race at Duke. Better yet, confront your administration about its class consciousness and the unequal distribution of wealth that exist within the university itself and its relationship to the larger NC higher education community. I am willing to bet that once you truly make a commitment to Duke and you engage it critically, as you do HBCU”s, you might find that “PWI”s kill more smart niggers and faster than HBCU’s”. In the mean time I am going to keep my ass at home, in the black vernacular sense. For multiple reasons I like saying “We” in the classroom”. I like confronting my Black male students about finding a more developed way to express their radicalness then through sagging pants and commercialized hip hop. I love the country and urban Black tones that shape the voices of students, professors, administration and staff, without seeming pretentious. I don’t feel the need to prove to white folks that we are important. I just love our folk. In the final analysis, the “best of who we are” says that our culture and institutions are “valuable beyond price” even if that price is associated with higher salaries, smaller class loads and large research budgets. You should try it one day. It might expand your understanding of what it truly means to be a “public intellectual” in the tradition of brother Malcolm.
KD said...said,
I appreciate both the tone and depth of your response; additionally, in that my critique was largely made from the vantage of the "working conditions" at HBCUs (as opposed to the student experience), I can appreciate your response as someone surviving those conditions. Your comments are not unlike those made in private to me by your HBCU colleague and my friend and comrade William Jelani Cobb.
A few words about context. This a piece that I wrote for an HBCU symposium at Duke--in support of Duke own initiative with HBCUs. In that much of the conference was celebratory of HBCUs(and deservedly so), I choose to offer a more provocative critique. That was my only motivation, as there were more than enough presentations at the symposium to counter my own, including a quite brilliant lecture by Howard's Greg Carr. As reflected in the piece itself, I'm of firm belief that we are oftentimes hesitant to offer critiques of our institutions in public forums and those who do often risk being labeled as "outside" of or in opposition too black communities (as reflected in some of the comments in this thread).
The very critiques I've made here about HBCUs, I've made in other context about my experiences at PWIs (see http://seeingblack.com/2003/x091203/thugnig.shtml & http://www.popmatters.com/columns/criticalnoire/020301.shtml) and in light of the "privilege" associated with being at some PWIs. Indeed all of my training occurred at a State College/University and until my appointment at Duke 5 years ago I taught at public institutions, so I have no illusions about teaching loads, salaries, large classes etc.
And of course I'm not oblivious to the functions of race/class/gender/sexuality as it exist at Duke. As the archives of this blog will show, my involvement as one of the so "Duke 88" was born out of the desire to hold PWI's accountable. Yes, PWIs "kill smart niggers," (particularly black women)and we have been more than willing to hold PWIs publicly accountable (the case of Boyce Watkins or most famously Cornel West being example). My point was that were are reticent to make those same public critiques of black institutions. Additionally we have no historic commitment to PWIs that would warrant the kind of critique that I make of black institutions who we are historically committed to.
The reality is that I teach just as many black students at Duke (and when I was as SUNY Albany for six years) than I did at Xavier. We need a presence at all of these institutions, so I refuse to defend or justify where I am now.
I don't have to imagine being a public intellectual functioning under duress at an HBCU, because I've already done that at public institutions. What I'd like to think we can agree on is that there are many ways to function as a public intellectual--this blog being such a forum--or the fact that I have offered my public non-academic writings to black magazines and website for almost a decade without charge (in the spirit of Manning Marable's "Beyond the Color Line") as do many black academics and independent scholars.
If there was any underlying motivation here it was to create a forum to have this conversation and your response shows that you are e just as committed to public discourse as I am. Ultimately such serious exchange of ideas will create the conditions for better black institutions, be it HBCUs, the black church, black radio, etc.
MAN
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