[As another
semester winds to a close, a week’s series on some of the moments that have
stood out to me and what conclusions I’d take away from them. Leading up to a
weekend post on some of my summer and fall plans. Share your spring follow ups
or summer/fall plans in comments, please!]
On perhaps my
most radical moment as a teacher—and why it wasn’t.
As part of my
semester preview series back in January (has it been four months already?!), I highlighted
my plans to address the social media, public scholarly concept of the
#FergusonSyllabus: the collective goal of providing students with texts,
authors, frames, and contexts that can help us talk about and understand the
histories unfolding all around us. As the recent events in Baltimore (among so
many other places) have made all too clear, that goal remains as vital and
meaningful as ever. And as I wrote in this Talking Points Memo
piece on the Ferguson riots, one ironically but appropriately reprinted
verbatim during the Baltimore ones, I don’t know that there’s any American
history more important for us to remember in that context than “race riots”
like that in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898—nor, thus, any American
literary work more worth our collective reading and engagement than Charles
Chesnutt’s historical novel of that event, The
Marrow of Tradition (1901).
So as I wrote in
that January post, I put Marrow back
on my American Literature II syllabus for this semester. I’m glad I did,
although we still struggled with the same issue I mentioned there (the
inability of many of my students to get all the way through that admittedly
challenging novel and to its particularly significant and powerful conclusion).
But as it turns out, it was another novel in a different class—Richard
Wright’s Native Son (1940), which
has been on the syllabus for my Major American Authors of the 20th
Century course every time I’ve taught it—that provided me with the occasion for
a far more overt #FergusonSyllabus moment. As we concluded our four days of
conversations about Wright’s novel, I took a step back from the students’
strong points about Wright’s style, his creation of his protagonist Bigger
Thomas, his depiction of his Chicago setting, and so on. I provided a number of
statistics about racial inequities in the justice system in 21st
century America, about the disturbing trends on the ground in communities like
Ferguson, about death row and sentencing and the war on drugs and many other
related issues. And then I removed my sweater, revealing the
t-shirt underneath: stark black, with “I Can’t Breathe” in striking white
letters.
For someone who
prides himself on not bringing my personal politics into the classroom—I know
my choices of authors and texts, among many other pedagogical details, are
certainly political ones in their own right, but I still find those different
from overt statements of my contemporary political affiliations or
attitudes—this felt like one of my most radical classroom moments by far. (After
10 years in the classroom, I don’t get nervous too often any more, but I was
shaking like a leaf at that moment.) I can only imagine what fodder it would
provide for critics of higher ed, those who like to rant about the “liberal
indoctrination” we seek to carry out on our students. Yet the more I
thought and have continued to think about the moment, the more I would argue it
represents far more of a continuity with than a contrast to my other
pedagogical choices. After all, I know of few texts, in any genre and from any
period, that force us to confront difficult, unsettling, controversial, vital
American truths—present and ongoing as well as past and originating—more than Native Son. Asking students to read and
talk about that book is thus a deeply radical move—not in the narrow sense of
partisan politics, but in the broader and much more important sense of
impacting and affecting perspectives and conversations. Which is to say,
whether I break out any more t-shirts or not, I’ll undoubtedly continue to wear
my AmericanStudier heart on my sleeve.
Next conclusion
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this semester conclusion? Ones of yours you’d share?
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