Literacy, Liberation and Historically Black Colleges and Universities

The third week of September, 2013 was proclaimed “National Historically Black Colleges and Universities Week” by President Barack Obama. In a proclamation, he observed that HBCUs met and meet the need of higher education “focused on meeting the intellectual curiosity and spurring the academic growth of African American Students.”  We will shortly move into the second month of the year, a sweet spot in the academic calendar for deep study free from the anxiety of mid-terms and buoyed by the eminent return of Spring and, for some, the finish line of graduation.  It is a perfect time to revisit the linkages between Black learning institutions and the mission of so-called "Black History Month," a time that Carter Godwin Woodson said should be set aside for inventorying what we have done the rest of the year to advance the study of African people.

How best to accomplish the goal of linking literacy, memory and liberation through Black learning institutions has never been a settled proposition for Africans seeking to produce Black professional thinking classes working for group liberation.  As we are reminded in tome after tome, the concept of the university conceals a Western intellectual genealogy and structure, one that hides its normative assumptions beneath a modern demographic subterfuge by counter-posing the foundations of “predominantly” White institutions against those of “historically” Black ones.  This was a subterfuge that W.E.B. DuBois debunked nearly a century ago and that academic communities such as Howard attempted to take major strides towards dismantling with initiatives such as the 2010 Presidential Commission on Academic Renewal (PCAR). Sadly, we continue to stand at a crossroads, tentative and unsure if we will complete the work of deep reflection and reconnection to clear purpose in the face of intrusive, noisy distractions that whisper “you must first seek permission” into our collective ears.

Grounded in the idea that learning and literacy are Western propositions with, at best, some non-essential, non-Western accessorizing, historically Black educational institutions continue to use externally-derived intellectual and institutional markers to feed the intellectual curiosity of students and faculty they attract, ostensibly for the purpose of group growth and achievement.  The cruel irony in this behavior is that group progress in nurturing the linchpin activities of Black intellectual life— developing deep critical literacy and content mastery to serve group progress—is promoted by celebrating individuals whose achievements are frequently lauded for being indistinguishable from the objectives and values of a society that has maintained a deep hostility to the group progress of Black people.

How best, then, to promote the deep critical literacy and content mastery necessary to meet intellectual curiosity, spur academic growth and blend the aspiration of individuals with the needs of groups of oppressed people?  Here, memory must meet vision, in service of a perpetually unsatisfied desire to know and to act to transform one’s self and the world.  HBCUs produce steady streams of students and scholars who do this work.  The time is long overdue to recognize and to leverage these critical masses, without apology or defense. We will be better for it. The world will be better for it. The alternative is to subsist, perhaps, but not to grow, under the indifferent gaze of imaginary masters as others prepare for the new world a’coming.

In September 2013, shortly after the issuance of President Obama's proclamation, the internationally-reknowned Howard University Film Professor and filmmaker Haile Gerima related a conversation he had with a fellow Black director to over 1,000 members of the College of Arts and Sciences Class of 2017. He was asked how he produced his internationally-acclaimed 1993 film “Sankofa,”  a film with no contrived “point of entry” (industry-speak for a “sympathetic white character” that would make an otherwise unappealing Black narrative attractive to White audiences). The director told Gerima, “they would never let me make something like that.  Gerima replied, “to say ‘they would never let me’ is to have masters.  I have no masters.  I let myself.”

This is a statement of character.  It is a statement born of critical literacy and content mastery.  It is a statement of a free human being, unwilling to hide questions on the complexity of life behind the expectations of others. Successful intellectual work is not measured by its indistinguishable or accessorizing characteristics.  It is measured by its capacity to communicate, improvise and leverage the collective experiences and imaginations of people as a tool for enhancing each participant and the groups whose lives they hope to improve.  Deep literacy requires long, sustained practice.  A search for illuminating frameworks and devices (the search for theory). Debate, discussion and defense of ideas. 

Over the next few weeks, as part of an attempt to engage and renew my personal commitment to advance the work and vision of Carter Woodson for how we use the month of February, I hope to consider literacy in the context of specific intellectual practice, drawing from exemplary, Black institutional learning situations to illustrate specific techniques for pursuing work. 

Amiri Baraka (1934-2014): Mean to Be Free

The life of Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) embodies the refusal to let others shape the memories, desires and destinies of African people, or to decide for us how to narrate or utilize our experiences in the long struggle for liberation and a fuller humanity beyond. In his physical absence, we are left to consider the creeping disappearance of first-rate Pan-African internationalist artists/organizers/thinkers as representative figures in Black (and non-Black) public spheres.  Baraka did not let oppression—including racial oppression—hide behind niceties and subterfuges, realizing that such cowardice allows it to harden into ideologies of power and cultural identity. Oppression has to be confronted, directly. This earned him the enmity of those who fear such exposure and the timid proximate solidarity of those who can tepidly acknowledge him now that he is safely dead.

Baraka’s gifts included the ability to produce a steady stream of texts (poetry, plays, essays, books, paintings, lyrics, et. al.), shaped by his considerable intellect and wedded to the difficult but necessary work of organizing communities.  He could say more in a word or phrase than others can say in volume(s).  He led, wed, divorced, shaped and/or joined a bevy of organizations and social movements, his intellectual DNA flowing through the Black Body Politic for over fifty years. Baraka’s voice anchored us, from the Black Arts Movement’s catalyzing of a “Black Value System” to the post-Gary 1972 acceleration of Black American electoral politics (that made possible, incidentally, the election of Barack Obama), to the revolutionary solidarity and internationalism of third world struggle to the local politics of his beloved New Ark and the current people’s campaign of his son, Ras, for its mayoralty.

Baraka’s passing has all of us revisiting the times we spent with him and his contemporaries. We are obliged to revisit and reflect on these times, share our memories with current and future generations, and use them to shape new vistas of creative purpose in our collective work. I encountered him, listened to him, talked, laughed, plotted with and observed him primarily in meeting places of struggle as much or more as in more select and intimate spaces. I always left him wondering how we could allow him (and those artist/warriors of his generation) to be so undervalued by our communities and the society that continues to hold us hostage to the figures they declare should be our icons. There is no one in a white world to compare him to. To call him a Renaissance Man would be to insult the struggle he waged to define ourselves on our terms, though it would evoke memories of two of his inspirations, Paul Robeson and Malcolm X.

Nearly three thousand people attended Amiri Baraka’s funeral last Saturday at Newark Symphony Hall.  No one there had to be told of his significance, to us and to the world he inhabited for 79 years. Danny Glover and Woodie King, Jr. presided over a flood of tributes from every ideological corner of the African world. A large contingent of Howard faculty, staff, students and alumni were present, bearing an official resolution from the Board of Trustees. This for a man who saw no contradiction in critiquing 1950s Howard as a place where “they teach you how to pretend to be white” as he drank from the genius of its resident Master Teacher in the ways of Black folk, Sterling Allen Brown. In a fitting closure of the Howard loop, one of Baraka’s mentees, the indomitable Tony Medina, opened the program with a magnificently Barakian poetic tribute/charge.

Many—including many in attendance in Newark on Saturday and many more now fitting essays, tributes and commentaries to the contortionists’ task of praise without damning proximity—are temporarily basking in Baraka's glow of radicalism while seeking to avoid any possible punishment from an American society that will never see him for who he was (or us for who we are, for that matter). Funerals are indeed for the living, and people who speak at them consistently reveal more about themselves than they do the departed. Saturday's ritual was no exception: The substratum of struggle was amply and beautifully represented. So too was the repurposing impulse, trending to downright comedy. I only wish that Baraka could have added one more piece to his 2002 collection of eulogies for his friends and comrades:  A loving, acerbic and insightful essay analyzing his own death ritual.

Even former Governor Jim McGreevy—whose 2002 attempt to “fire” Baraka from being New Jersey’s Poet Laureate led to the elimination of the position—was there, quietly in the crowd, a pre-Christie victim of gubernatorial hubris and American hypocrisy, present perhaps for a shot at redemption.  Corey Booker was safely absent, as was CNN, which had live broadcast the funeral of Baraka’s fellow New Jerseyian Whitney Houston two years earlier.  No need to let a speaking subaltern disturb the slumbering façade of the rest of America, after all.

There are those, however, who do speak usefully in the wake of Baraka’s passing. Amid the babbling river of reflections, there are those that merit particular attention, in my estimation. These include one by one of his closest friends and collaborators, our own Eleanor Traylor, and one by one of the most studied and natural extenders of his Afro-bricolage approach to cultural criticism, Howard alum Greg Tate.  I will not close this column by rehearsing the arc of Amiri Baraka’s experiences, education and achievement. That is for this young readership to respect themselves and him enough to do for themselves. Instead, I will close with a memory that contains a charge of its own. 

Shortly after the election of Barack Obama, Amiri and Amina Baraka and many of their contemporaries attended a conference at Temple University on Black Power and the importance of intergenerational linkages. Delivering the conference’s closing keynote address, I talked about the fact that these women and men, now being leveraged as cultural fodder for contorted academic monographs and pop culture posturing, had once been branded enemies of the American social order for their unapologetic, revolutionary efforts. Having survived and paved the way for us, so many of them, now elders, were owed the debt of being engaged, their unfinished work extended, the renewed battles joined. Afterward, Baraka pulled me close and needled me, as always, with what I always took as encouragement and gracious overstatement: The assurance that talk like that is what gets you fired.

Baba Amiri, as you well knew (and know as an Ancestor) and showed us every day, talk like that—and the actions that accompany it—is what gets you free.

Thinking Work and Group Progress: An HBCU Imperative

As of midnight last night, the United States federal government is temporarily closed.  The U.S. Congress has capitulated to the afore-stated agenda of the gerrymandered zealots of the Republican Party.  This knot of non-politicians have a simple agenda:  rescue their idea of what "America" is from the rising tide of color portended by the country's demographic shift and retreat behind the comforting ramparts of state and local entities.  Robert Reich, hardly alone in his assessment, captured the general arc of this strategy in a March 2013 column for Salon.com.

The creeping balkanization of the American state, fed by recent decisions at the hand of the Federalist Society-stocked Supreme Court of the United States, has the potential to unleash another round of intellectual warfare over the basic truths and notions of the American project.  This has the potential to ultimately be a good thing.  If Nick Bromell's new book, The Time is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of American Democracy , is to be believed, African perspectives on the nature and experience of American democracy have always fed our perspectives.  What Bromell has not made clear is how Black sites of professional intellectual work have helped generations of African people develop and sustain these ideas and the movements they have birthed. To be fair, as Martin Kilson and others have observed, contemporary ignorance of the relationship between Historically Black Colleges and Universities and the production of Black Radical Thought is fairly commonplace.  The time, however, has come for HBCU-sited thinkers to take up the work of previous generations and set it once again at the center of the project of group progress in America.

Can Howard and her sister HBCUs become more consistent sites for nurturing deep intellectual work that transforms learners and scholars, fosters collaborative critical content mastery, and feeds deep-seated social change? Rhetorical pronouncements notwithstanding, this is by no means a settled question in a time of for-profit vocational education, with its inability—and lack of desire—to challenge or displace the long-standing American social and economic order. 

The first month of school saw Howard's students, staff and faculty observe signal moments in the memory of Africans in the United States. We marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington.  We hosted an intense and provocative consideration of the purpose, direction and future of Historically Black Colleges and Universities during Howard-Morehouse-Spelman week.  We paused to contemplate the martyrdom of Black children in liberation struggles, symbolized by the “Four Little Girls” of Birmingham. 

The heartfelt pledges to convert the sacrifices of the past to work dedicated to improving individual lives and reshaping social, economic and political institutions made at these rituals of recommitment often obscure a lingering question. Have we lost our sense of collective purpose, sacrificed in part on an altar of material comfort and an easy aspiration to individual achievement as progress?

There is no more poignant moment to consider the tension between the pursuit of group objectives and individual ones than the civic nationalism of Constitution Day. At Howard, we observed Constitution Day with a debate on Stop and Frisk laws between a students from Howard’s undergraduate Martin Luther King, Jr. Debate Team and a debate team from the School of Law. Observing this exercise made me once again pause to consider the nature and relationship of America’s African citizens to the American national project and social structure. The question of African citizenship in America remains unsettled, our group status too often conflated with the fortunes of select individuals. In disconcerting ways, our thinking classes are less equipped to engage in the work of group social change than at any time since the end of enslavement.

A central challenge facing students in general and African students in particular is the challenge of literacy. The substitution of technological literacy for mastery of deeply-developed reading, thinking and research skills and techniques has obscured a crisis-level gap between the type of content mastery necessary for optimal participation in emerging national and international networks and our developed capacities at present. Simply put:  We all need more words and the will and skill to use them to influence people, institutions and politics.

College students are well enough along in the school year to have enthusiastically imbibed and repeated the official and organic sense of collective mission represented in their home institution's mission statements. We have certainly dutifully done this at Howard. Now, having sworn our fealties, we have settled into the rhythms and business of daily academic life.  The business of completing tasks, assignments, meetings and activities almost always displaces any sense of excellent learning and collaboration. Our learning objectives are filtered through a lens of vocational practicality that leaves little room for sustained, slow contemplation.  Everything at the university feels as if it issues forth at warp speed. Speed and efficiency at task completion is, sadly, too often a proxy for competence, for mastery, for knowing.  In fact, as Richard Arum and Josipa Roska write in their book Academically Adrift , acquisition of social networking skills, glossed with the approximation of content familiarity and critical thinking is what Mark Edmundson refers to as “knowingness” in his new book Why Teach: In Defense of a Real Education.

Over the arc of the next few blog posts, I hope to consider the topic of thinking work at Howard, considering small moments that might translate into larger conversations about purpose, literacy, commitment and critical intelligence.  In the words of Fred Moten and Stefario Harney, perhaps we can lay bare the energy and sentiments of an “academic undercommons,” or the lives of thinking, living and committed people engaged in the hard work of translating thinking into doing, not as a grand theoretical project but as a subversive, joyous and life-giving act of self-liberation.  And perhaps, just perhaps, we can reach out, one to the other, and do more together.