Rosa Clark: The Unsung Legacy

by Patricia J. Williams

(A shorter version of this essay is published in the June 4, 2012 issue of The Nation Magazine, entitled “Anti-Intellectualism from Arizona to Michigan.”)

Recently, I found out that my work is mentioned in a book that has been banned from the schools in Tucson, Arizona. The anti–ethnic studies law recently passed by the state (Arizona Revised Statutes Section 15-112) prohibits teachings that “promote the overthrow of the United States government,” “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” and/or “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” I invite you to read the book in question, titled Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanic, so that you can decide for yourselves whether it qualifies.

In fact, I invite you to take on as your summer reading the astonishingly lengthy list of books that have been removed from the Tucson public school system as part of this wholesale elimination of the Mexican-American studies curriculum. The list may be found at http://azethnicstudies.com/banned-books.  The authors and editors include Isabel Allende, Junot Díaz, Jonathan Kozol, Rudolfo Anaya, bell hooks, Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin, Howard Zinn, Rodolfo Acuña, Ronald Takaki, Jerome Skolnick and Gloria Anzaldúa. Even Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and Shakespeare’s The Tempest received the hatchet, deemed works that are “biased, political, and emotionally charged,” or where “race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes….”

Trying to explain what was offensive enough to warrant killing the entire curriculum and firing its director, Tucson School Board member Michael Hicks stated rather proudly that he was not actually familiar with the curriculum. “I chose not to go to any of their classes,” he told Al Madrigal on The Daily Show. “Why even bother?….I base my thoughts on hearsay from others.” Contrasting his sense of the relative dangers posed by Mexican-American studies as opposed to a curriculum that teaches the history of slavery, Mr. Hicks opined that ““Rosa Clark [meaning Rosa Parks] did not take out a gun and go onto a bus and hold up everybody…”

The situation in Arizona is not an isolated phenomenon. There has been an unfortunate uptick in academic book bannings and firings, made worse by a nationwide disparagement of teachers, teachers’ unions and scholarship itself. Brooke Harris, a teacher at Michigan’s Pontiac Academy for Excellence, was summarily fired after asking—merely asking–permission to let her students conduct a fundraiser for Trayvon Martin’s family. Working at a charter school, Harris was an at-will employee, and so the superintendent needed little justification for terminating her. According to Harris, “I was told…that I’m being paid to teach, not to be an activist.” (It is perhaps not accidental that Harris worked in the schools of Pontiac, a city in which nearly every public institution has been taken over by cost-cutting executives working under “emergency manager” contracts. There the value of education is measured in purely econometric terms, reduced to a “product,” calculated in “opportunity costs.”)  To read more about this case and to join the more than 200,000 others who have signed a petition asking for her reinstatement, you can go to: http://www.change.org/petitions/fired-for-teaching-about-trayvon-re-hire-brooke-harris-at-pontiac-academy-for-excellence

The law has taken some startling turns as well. In 2010 the Sixth Circuit upheld the firing of high school teacher Shelley Evans-Marshall when parents complained about an assignment in which she had asked her students in an upper-level language arts class to look at the American Library Association’s list of “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books” and write an essay about censorship. The complaint against her centered on three specific texts: Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. (She was also alleged, years earlier, to have shown students a PG-13 version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.) The court found that the content of Evans-Marshall’s teachings concerned matters “of political, social or other concern to the community” and that her interest in free expression outweighed certain other interests belonging to the school “as an employer.” But, fatally, the court concluded that “government employees…are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes.” While the Sixth Circuit allowed that Evans-Marshall may have been treated “shabbily,” it still maintained that, “When a teacher teaches, ‘the school system does not “regulate” [that] speech as much as it hires that speech. Expression is a teacher’s stock in trade, the commodity she sells to her employer in exchange for a salary.’” Thus, the court concluded, it is the “educational institution that has a right to academic freedom, not the individual teacher.”

There are a number of factors at play in the current rash of controversies. One is a rather stunning sense of privilege, the confident sense of superiority that allows someone to pass sweeping judgment on a body of work without having done any study at all. After the Chronicle of Higher Education published an item highlighting the dissertations of five young PhD candidates in African-American studies at Northwestern University, Chronicle blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote that the mere titles of the dissertations were sufficient cause to eliminate all black-studies classes. Riley hadn’t read the dissertations; they’re not even published yet. When questioned about this, she argued that, as “a journalist…it is not my job to read entire dissertations before I write a 500-word piece about them,” adding: “[T]here are not enough hours in the day or money in the world to get me to read a dissertation on historical black midwifery.” Riley tried to justify her view with a clichéd, culture-wars-style plaint about the humanities and higher education: “Such is the state of academic research these days.… The publication topics become more and more irrelevant and partisan. No one reads them.” This is not mere arrogance; it is the same cocooned, “white-ghetto” narrow-mindedness that allows Michael Hicks to be in charge of a major American school system yet not know “Rosa Clark’s” real name.

Happily, there is some pushback occurring against such anti-intellectualism. One of the most vibrant examples is a protest group called Librotraficante, or Book Trafficker. Organized by Tony Diaz, a Houston Community College professor, the group has been caravanning throughout the Southwest holding readings, setting up book clubs, establishing “underground libraries,” and dispensing donated copies of the books that have been removed from Arizona’s public school curriculum. You can donate by visiting http://librotraficante.com.

New York Times Room for Debate: The Supreme Court’s Decision to Hear Fisher v. Texas

We Still Have Far to Go

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/02/22/beyond-race-in-affirmative-action/we-still-have-far-to-go-in-the-quest-for-diversity-on-campus

FEBRUARY 22, 2012

Does anyone really believe that we have “moved past race” considering that American schools are more segregated along the black-white divide than when Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954? Yes, there are new categories of the historically disenfranchised, like Hispanics and Native Americans — who ought to be more visibly integrated in the quest for “diversity.” But the recognition that we need to expand the number of groups who ought to be on the playing field — or ought to have been included long ago — does not mean that underlying impediments to full citizenship have been resolved.

Fisher v. Texas is the latest in the long series of cases in which underrepresented minorities seek quality education as key to the achievement of the American dream. Consider the demographics of Texas: its population is 45 percent white, and about 40 percent black or Hispanic. Yet the University of Texas has a combined black and Hispanic population well below that of its population. While there need be no firm correlation between race and representation in institutions of higher learning, it’s also true that this de facto disparity is rooted in the long history of segregation, limited opportunity and resultant poverty. (It was only in 2010, for example, that U.T.’s Simkin dormitory, named for a Klansman, was finally rechristened.)

There is no question that the Top Ten Percent Plan has increased the numbers of black and Hispanic students, and that this has been unequivocally positive for U.T. Graduation rates have never been higher, admissions and graduation scores have never been better, and the 80 percent of students admitted under the program are, by all measures, the strongest the university has ever had.

So why should race still be something to watch and be concerned about in the admissions process? First, despite the gains, the underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics at U.T. has led to deep concern about leadership opportunities for these communities in the future.

Secondly, we need to acknowledge the race-conscious biases and anxieties lying in plain sight: the Top Ten Percent plan, while supposedly a “race blind” metric, is nevertheless being interrogated for its having worked “too well.” Larry Faulkner, former president of U.T., repeatedly expressed a desire to cap the plan at 50 percent of any incoming class, seemingly agreeing with some critics who have said the plan has delivered “enough” or even “too many” members of certain races to campus. Indeed, the supposed race-neutrality of the plan has been repeatedly evaluated for its success or failure precisely by counting the number of brown noses.

Finally, from its inception, the plan was opposed by some parents’ groups who feel that their school’s top ten percent is better than the top ten percent of students at poorer (i.e., mostly black and Hispanic) schools. Rather than that being framed as an incentive to equalize funding for all public schools, the concern has resulted in a counterproductive backlash that echoes the plaints of “reverse racism.”

In our society, class and race are interwoven so that class in this circumstance as in so many, is a fairly reliable cipher for race. For all the disingenuous hoopla, in other words, the “raceless” metrics of the Top Ten Percent Plan have never been assessed by anything less than race- as well as class-based filters.

Race matters in this culture: if we don’t learn to take it into account in sensible and fair ways, it will continue to operate insidiously within a veil of denial — whether we are dealing with a “colorblind” system like the Top Ten Plan or a more general admissions process. It permeates our lives in statistically documented ways whether we “speak it” or not. To argue that race doesn’t matter or shouldn’t be considered at all in admissions processes that are taking place in an echo-chambered world blaring with explicitly racialized competition is not merely hypocritical but foolish.

Raising Hell…

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

 

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The Tiger Mama Syndrome

Patricia J. Williams | February 3, 2011

Amy Chua does not hold the patent on prejudice. There are lots of ways to spin a stereotype, and that she calls herself a “Chinese” mother in her hotly debated book on parenting, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, plays well against cultural anxieties about American economic status. But for heaven’s sake—the woman was born in Illinois!

No doubt that Chua and her daughters have put in the requisite 10,000 hours it takes to be fluent in any subject, but the Ivy League is chock-full of accomplished people who put in such hours. They come from all over the United States and all over the world. Some growing percentage of them are the products of yuppie, buppie, narcissistic helicopter parents—hockey dads, stage moms, the kind of people who would rather see their child drop dead of heatstroke while running a race than see that child give up. Like Chua, they do so in the name of all sorts of higher values—family honor, Catholic guilt, team spirit, Texan bragging rights, Jamaican superiority, Jewish destiny, women’s equality, Norwegian sang-froid, black pride, Hindu nationalism, immigrant striving, Protestant ethic, true grit. The world is a queasy, uncertain place right now, and what it takes to compete in the rat race exposes our kids to ever-increasing rates of depression, mental illness and substance abuse.

That said, the Ivy League is also home to a much larger group of people who work hard, who love their chosen pursuits, who are happily well-adjusted, yet who did not acquire their highly effective study habits by being turned out into the snow when they were 2 years old—a form of “discipline” Chua brags about. Some of them are even Chinese. Likewise, there are many Ivy Leaguers who do not believe that their accomplishment makes them less “American” or “Western.” They don’t spend time worrying, as Chua does, that if they “feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the US Constitution” they will be “much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice.”

So let’s not spend too much time wondering why Chua assigns her neurosis to her Chinese-ness rather than to her aspirational American upper-middle-class-ness. What I find more intriguing is not so much her obsession with academic success but her pathological yearning for dominance, control, standing and respect. Chua does not just want perfect scores; she is desperately afraid that she and her daughters will be drowned in the chilly goop of what she endlessly refers to as “decline.”

Chua’s fears are not confined by race, ethnicity or personal effort alone. After all, in Greece and France students have been rioting because of the rising costs of a good education and the paucity of jobs. In Akron, Ohio, an African-American tiger mother named Kelley Williams-Bolar was recently prosecuted for lying about where she lived so she could get her children into a decent school district. In California, immigrant kids of Mexican parents are battling for the right to pay in-state tuition at public universities. In Memphis there are fights about whether integrating a poor school district with a wealthier suburban one would constitute a “theft” of education. In London, a woman named Mrinal Patel was accused of fraud for misrepresenting her address so as to qualify her child for a better school. There are few places, in other words, where people are not worried about the quality of life and distribution of resources on a crowded planet.

At the same time, if Singapore, China and Hong Kong are producing a greater number of students with musical proficiency and excellent test scores, it’s because they have made huge public investments in education. They make musical instruments available to students—as the United States once did in the first part of the twentieth century. They have teachers certified in the subjects they teach—as was the case in Russian schools during the Sputnik era. “Westerners” are not nearly as lacking in work ethic as Chua maintains; but you don’t get to Yale if your elementary school has no books. You don’t rank first in the world in science if, as in the United States, 60 percent of your biology teachers are reluctant to teach evolution—and 13 percent teach creationism instead.

It would be so deliciously convenient if calling your kids “garbage”—another parenting trick Chua boasts about—actually turned them into little engines that could. But our larger educational crisis will involve a public investment that simply does not correlate with shooting down the self-esteem of children or disrespecting the “Western-ness” of the parents who struggle to raise them.

Finally, Amy Chua exhibits an excruciating self-consciousness about how she is seen in a racialized public imagination. She is riddled with angst about not betraying her status as a “model minority” who’s “supposed” to be smart in music, math and science. She even “disciplines” one of her daughters by threatening to adopt a “real” Chinese kid. Even as her narrative is swaddled in Dragon Lady analogies, every line is inflected by very American prejudices and divisive ethnic generalizations. Indeed, if you take away the peculiarly manic quality that is Chua’s alone, her anxieties are no different from a lot of “buffer” groups whose inroads on the edges of assimilation mark them, and whose successes are watched reproachfully, jealously by the larger society. The Kennedys walked this walk for the Irish. Fiorello La Guardia complained of it when he was the “breakthrough” Italian. Condoleezza Rice’s and Michelle Obama’s parents toiled and pushed for them in ways typical of a generation of civil rights babies. In other words, this tensely, needily overachieving mentality is hardly unique. It is not necessarily or even probably generated from Chua’s romanticized motherland. Our collective dilemma, and the most poignant challenge presented by her book, is how to survive in a world where the slightest nonconformity risks landing you outside—of a home, of a job, of a life—and left to stand by yourself, alone in the freezing cold.

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Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/158285/tiger-mama-syndrome

 

Notes From The Washington Mall: Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity…

Veritas-iness and the American Way

by Patricia J. Williams

Released: 4 Nov 2010

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Long before I knew the name Descartes, my grandmother rocked me to sleep with one better: “I am, therefore we are.” That would have been my sign for the Stewart-Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity: Sum Ergo Sumus. Would have been, because during my long trip from Boston to Washington, I got tangled in meditations about whether Latin philosophical enfrillments would appear amusing or pretentious, witty or elitist. Would Sum Ergo Sumus be broadcast in Wasilla, where Levi Johnston is apparently running for mayor?

On the one hand, I was blessed with a feisty, funny, clever grandmother who would have seen humor in my co-optation of her lullaby — she might even have been proud. Back when the United States led the world in academic achievement, I went to a great public school where I was privileged to study Latin for six years, plus another two years in college. I was lucky enough to attend law school. Res ipsa loquitur.

Sadly, American education has suffered a miserable decline since those days. According to the Programme for International Student Assessment, we are fifteenth in reading literacy, twenty-first in science literacy and twenty-fifth in math literacy. This slide was largely accomplished by a calculated disinvestment in public education that began with the anti-tax movement of the late 1970s. California, where that movement began with a series of ballot initiatives, had one of the best school systems in the world. It now ranks almost dead last here, just above Mississippi.

There’s a curious tension in politics between the popular hunger for better schooling and widespread resentment of those who actually find it. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin have built a movement around the felt dispossession of those who don’t read newspapers, whose spelling is nonstandard and who cite Shakespeare to “refudiate” book-learning. Beck, who sniffs that public schools should be abolished altogether, exploits this ambivalence brilliantly by establishing his online Beck University, whose basic courses are Faith 101, 102 and 103; Hope 101, 102 and 103; and Charity 101, 102 and 103. Yet Beck U. also has a coat of arms with a numbingly lofty motto: Tyrannis Seditio, Obsequium Deo.

On the morning of the Rally to Restore Sanity, I ended up grabbing a taxi and told the driver I wanted to go to the Mall, please. He took me to the nearest shopping mall, where I procured a venti mocha latte from the drive-through Starbucks, while gently setting him straight. Oh yes, this was a march for latte-loving yuppie nerds like me. While Stewart and Colbert expressly appealed to “the busy majority” of reasonable, middle-of-the-road, somewhat-stressed-but-not-given-to-hysterics people, the signs among the masses were deeply inflected by class consciousness and the national educational divide. Some were relatively subtle: “Which Way to Whole Foods?” and “Anyone for Scrabble Later?” Others more overtly referenced Beck’s Rally to Restore Honor: “Every Word on This Sign Is Spelled Correctly”; “I (heart) Evidence-Based Policies”; and my favorite: “If You Don’t Believe in Government Perhaps You Shouldn’t Run for It.”

This was a crowd that listens to NPR (“Kiss Me, Nina Totenberg!”). It was racially and ethnically diverse (“Fox Told Me I Am a Terrorist”). Their humor was sophisticated (“I Clutch My Purse When I See Juan Williams Coming”). It was a throng of New York Times readers who eat bagels and peruse the Book Review. They marched with Kindles in hand, and their Patagonia backpacks contained novels by Anna Quindlen and essay collections like David Rakoff’s Don’t Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil and Other First World Problems.

If this sounds like a litany of class markers, we need to remember that class and education are not necessary correlates. This was a population of very diverse Americans who equate political sanity with studiousness and curiosity. It was a gathering of people fluent in subtlety and satire, tolerance and tact; who saw similarity in differences and differences among the similar; who appreciated metaphors, analogical thinking and the discipline of data. This is the opposite of fundamentalism. And it ought to be the very essence of American identity, for we can have no broad civic culture without it. Unfortunately these critical capacities are also the hallmarks of a good liberal arts education, which is increasingly unavailable to any but the very well-off. (The State University of New York, Albany, just announced that it may eliminate its Latin, French, Italian, Russian and theater degree programs.)

Why bother with the nuances of analytical thought? Consider this — recently State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley tweeted:

“Happy birthday President #Ahmadinejad. Celebrate by sending Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer home” and “Your 54th year was full of lost opportunities. Hope in your 55th year you will open #Iran to a different relationship with the world.”

Sarah Palin tweeted back: “Happy B’day Ahmadinejad wish sent by US Govt. Mind boggling foreign policy: kowtow & coddle enemies; snub allies. Obama Doctrine is nonsense.”

This is not merely a lack of irony; it is a form of illiteracy, the kind of flat, childish reading that grasps the basic meaning of each word but not what they mean together.

We of the Kindle-toting tribe must take no solace in snobbery or superiority at moments like that. Rather, we must join in the recognition that this national crisis of flat readership hobbles everyone. To us all — Tea Partyers and Obamanistas alike — I commend the words of Servius Sulpicius, in a letter to Cicero in 45 BC: Denique noli te oblivisci Ciceronem esse et eum qui aliis consueris praecipere et dare consilium, neque imitari malos medicos, qui in alienis morbis profitentur tenere se medicinae scientiam, ipsi se curare non possunt. (Or, “Wise up, buddy, and practice what you preach.”)

Copyright © 2010 The Nation — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 November 2010
Word Count: 960
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