Students in the U.S are wired and hooked up. iPods, Blue Tubes, Blackberries, and lap tops enter the college classroom attached to a student who has left his or her books or flash drive with the paper or homework assignment at home.

To introduce a race, gender, class perspective on literary texts to students, to predominantly white and middle to upper class women at an all women’s private art college, you can start with the representation of the female. Introduce the literary terms: silence, innocence, violence, victim(s), motherhood, speaking and writing. Go slow. Start with short stories: “Diary of a Madman,” “The Lottery,” “The Office,” “Children of the Sea” - but do not introduce race. “We’re from prep schools.” And look at the eyes! “It is just a little diagnostic writing exercise,” I say - with butter on my tongue.

The three Black students among them are just that - among the other students. They live in the dorms with the other students. They are full of the other students. I cannot recognize myself in these Black students and they cannot afford to see themselves in me.

The Scarlet Letter, As I Lay Dying, So Long a Letter - but do not introduce the race business and ignore the critiques of religion.

“I have to work after this class,” one student tells me as she reluctantly moves to situate her desk among a group of four students. And I do not know if I am to call this late evening literature class off.

Affirmative Action, they are thinking. They would have overheard parents and others in their community in reference to Blacks without understanding how and why, as white young women, they have and will continue to benefit from Affirmative Action, whereas I have yet to see the results of those few short years when it did benefit a few Blacks.

“We are not English majors.” A change in tactics displaying the direction of their thinking, and a continued challenge before me. For to read and write well, I gather, is to declare English as your major. This is an art college! What a waste of time is reading. Reading requires silence, and I have gathered, too, as time passed, that they are lost for the hour and twenty minutes the iPods, Blue Tubes, Blackberries, lap tops are silent.

But the students have something to say: “What do you want us to do?” Aside from the individual emails in which I comment on each theme or paper thesis and each paper and hand back that work as well with my comments, I email notes: “This is what we did today in class.” “This is what we will do next class.” Mini commentaries on Hawthorne’s protagonist Hester or the themes of silence or of violence are also presented to the students in email.

Still the question, “What do you want us to do?” persists.

“I never had a teacher who said we had to come up with questions.”

“Maybe not in high school?”

“No, I had English 102 before.” She sat through this course before?.

“Well, we develop inquiries into these literary themes by asking questions. College is about asking questions.”

And she is angry. I see the eyes and the grumbling in her group. I am new to this college and have been teaching for over twenty years but I have also been Black 57 years in the U.S.

The next class day, she, like the student who had to work after this class, withdrew from the class.

And still, there is the question, what do you want us to do? If I tell you, if I tell you what to think, if I write your thesis statement, it will be my idea, my thesis statement reflecting what I see in a text, what I am questioning or examining in a text. If I tell you…

“What is it you see, what is it you are thinking?”

Confusing!

It is a level of uncertainty. You start with a question and think your way to developing a thesis on a theme, say, ‘silence’ as represented by Hawthorne through his protagonist, Hester… It is okay to start in uncertainty. It is okay to question.

Confusing!!

And why did I persist? A $30, 000 price tag for each year and not including the dorm, their food, or books, must count for something more than a job at the end of this endurance test.

Why do I persist?

What else can I do?

“You have high expectations,” they tell me.

I look and see that I am so alone.

I send four unsatisfactory forms to the counselor, dean, and chair on four students in the class, three of which did not turn in papers. A week or so later, I send a long email to the chair: Here is what is happening in my class. Respond: continue. You can’t lead a horse…

As I Lay Dying did not go over well. “Are the people Black?” These are rural people from Mississippi. (It is the language that I say is “poetic” with Darl, Faulkner’s alter-ego. Nonsense, says their eyes). These people have something to say though “uneducated.”

“Everything with you is in quotation marks.” Frustration clashes with frustration - only their frustration is more visible and vocal and mine is eating away at my illusion, I admit, that learning to love learning can ever happen again in a corporate-controlled society.

“Yes, we”… And I do not feel like there is a “we,” but I say “we,” “we put these words in quotation marks in order to indicate that we are questioning, challenging, maybe, the accept definition of say, ‘freedom,’ ‘silence.’ Didn’t we see that Hester and Darl in their ‘silence’ actually were thinking, observing, philosophizing, challenging their surrounds and accepted but hypocritical norms?”

Silence!

What do you want us to do? We don’t know what you want us to do? I know. I know… I hear the footsteps of the college administration - the watchdogs. But I persist.

I think I can close the discussion on bell hooks’ memoir, Bone Black, by explaining why she says she will not fear the blackness, is comfortable there. She will go there and from within this color that opens up a space for her, she will speak and write. “Remember Hester,” I tell the students. “Remember Darl before his family packs him off to the asylum.” “Hester, too, learned not to fear the darkness.”

But with bell hooks, there is a slight difference. “When we speak of women, we must remember that “women” includes the majority of the world’s women as well. Women of color.”

Their stillness tells me, they fear they will hear what they don’t want to hear. They stare now at the subject at hand.

She, bell hooks, is a Black American and she, and I are of the same generation. As hooks describes, cultural representations of the color black were negative. “Black days.” Black clouds.” Black was ugly.

From where I stand, I do not see any student taking notes. Some are not looking my way. Their backs are turned as they sit in groups. I see some eyes roll to the ceiling and I see the heads of two or three students come together.

I look at my notes and continue. Children did not wear Black. When you did see black worn by an adult, as hooks states, you could safely assume that individual was in mourning. Someone died. Not until the middle 70s are so did the market catch up. Black people said “Black is beautiful” - referring to the race and to the color itself. Then anyone could go in a store and buy all black and wear all black…

“Johnny Cash wore black!”

A dam burst releasing not rushing water but laughter, snickers. ‘Quiet! Students!”

It was over, and I knew it.

“Johnny Cash wore black!” And they had one-upped the teacher, the Black teacher. “Johnny Cash wore black!” And now you, teacher, can shut up!

GOP Rep. Joe Wilson had entered the classroom: “You lie.” Shut up!

“I don’t understand why you refuse to listen.” You don’t listen, and I am afraid your papers will reflect this.”

“I can’t take anymore of this” rang out from the back of the room!

I stopped the lecture. I am silenced!

Johnny Cash wearing all black does not represent the “academic freedom” of the student, as the union representative, tried to insist. She was not the Black woman standing before a predominantly white class trying to explain the referential meaning of “Bone Black” and its relationship to another generation’s challenge to the representation of blackness in the social and cultural milieu. She was not one of the dreaded ones standing before this agitated crowd in the era of post-racial rhetoric.

In this era, in this silence in which the Black America must submit to the capitalist agenda, I must respond to emails, teacher, must tell a student what she missed in class - verbally before I am allowed to start class, must accept the wrong assignments or past assignments, with a smile. In short, I must entertain, sing and dance in a much more acceptable space of blackness.

In an email that night, “teacher, you didn’t respond to my email. You are the teacher and I am the student.”

I am the student and you are the teacher….TEACHER!

Besides, you are an “unknown teacher” with “unknown methods to me.”

A Black young woman…Yes, I suppose, sadly, I am “unknown.” No one has dared to teach her to recognize me as kin.

My response to all of the students that night from home was - I felt less than a human being leaving class tonight. Please, I have done all I could possibly do including individual emails regarding thesis and papers, updates to follow along in class discussions, conferences in class. Yet, the outburst in class was disrespectful and displayed a level of contempt for me. I do have other responsibilities some of which I am barely able to fulfill (and what I didn’t say) because I do spend so much time trying to stay ahead of their only question - “what do you want us to do, Teacher?”

Teacher! (High School). Not professor. (College). Earlier in the term, some emails began with “Hey.”

I did not say that the salary is a disgrace, for anyone teaching, let alone anyone teaching with a doctorate degree, or that I have been feeling my way in the dark at a new campus with a night class where I see only one other teacher and or that the chair who hired left the campus before I ever met him, or that I have meet in nearly 10 weeks only one other Black faculty at a gathering for new faculty.

I did not say that I am automatically a target since I am not Oprah. I am not Obama. I am not the Black academic who has learned to get along to serve his or her own, that is, ultimately corporate interests. I do not say that for weeks, I see another Black only when I see the cooks and the security guards.

My response to the students, however, is problematic, the administration claims. My response is personal, they say. My response is unprofessional!

Out of line? They are the clients, the buyers of degrees. Out of line, dreaded one!

Disrespectful students become concerned students with academic freedom. Remember, the price tag and the advertisement students would have received: The gateway to a high-paying job in ____ starts here! Hands on skills! A degree in the pocket in no time!

College is as easy as collecting “As” under No Child Left Behind. Pass one test and then another. Memorize and we will prepare multiple choice tests on The Scarlet Letter or As I Lay Dying. Write an essay that at least has the gist of what you feel.

Go easy, professor - or your job is at stake! Hand out the “As” and your evaluations with sparkle with student acolytes about your humor and easy-going attitude.

Here in the U.S., the students are wired and hooked up to symbols of capital while they take their seats, eager to become commodities in the marketplace. Others? Workers? American college students are not in college to work with or on behalf of Others or Workers - and protest is something “old school” folks did “back in the days.” They expect to be the next Bill Gates or better - the next young Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook.

What is the content of their art work? Have you ever stopped to see what constitute art today? And I looked at this former teacher. They express the Self - but who and what constitutes this Self? It is about circles, lines, and squares, daps of paint here and there. I was reminded that I recently viewed the work of promising young filmmakers, Sundance icons on the front and back of DVD covers only to be disappointed with virtually no plot but a series of images after images in imitation of Bergman, Fellini, or Goddard.

What is the content of art today? We know what it is not. Sterility is in fashion. Connect with nothing but a Self adorned by corporate wear and gadgets, embodied in corporate think.

Where is Black literature today in the hands of young Black writers? With the exception of Haitian writer and thinker, Edwidge Daniticat, we are treated to soft porn, romance, or “moma-was-a drug-addict-and-daddy-was-a-prison-inmate - but I made it big! Successful!

Increasingly, college and university administrator’s first task is to bring home the bacon. Attract corporate funding and underwriting for various programs. Students are paying clients, paying for a degree - job is another matter. Teachers talking nonsense, teaching old school history about race, gender, and class issues is an obstruction for us and for you!

Go easy, go easy, or we, liberals, will crush you!

Who but the liberal put in the mouths of the young the question: “What do you want us to do?” Who but the liberal elites encourage the young to understand by posing that question that the uncooperative teacher is to think about ways in which the students avoid thinking?

What is thinking anyway, teacher? - as students stand flanked by liberal college and university administrators. How far has it gotten you?

The times are a’changing alright.

If we are producing anything aside from war and fighters of these wars, prisons and inmates, we are producing a whole generation of wired students who will soon discover they have been sold a narrative of milk and honey if enough of them are not able to slot themselves as cogs as some manger of underpaid Indians or Bangladeshis.

The disempowerment of resistance begins with the liberal elite.

In Chris Hedges’ article “A Recipe for Fascism,” he writes that the liberal class, along with other factions of the “political equation” – are “lackeys for Wall Street.” While the Palins and Becks pander to hatred, “mobilizing passion to get the masses, fearful and angry,” the liberal class has responded by “placating corporate power.” The liberal class, he continues, understands the “systems of corporate power,” and opts to work “within them” to accomplish the “same results” desired by the wealthy elite. Hedges writes:

…[t]he entire spectrum of the political landscape collaborates in the strangulation of our disenfranchised working class, the eroding of state power, the criminal activity of the financial class and the paralysis of our political process. (November 8, 2010, Truthdig)

“Commerce cannot be the sole guide of human behavior,” he writes, but as those of us who teach college students know, it does. “All social and cultural values are now sacrificed before the altar of the marketplace.” And that is just fine with liberal educators as it is with so-called “right-wing” educators.

“Human suffering is dismissed as the price to be paid for the coming paradise.” They employ globalization-speak and resist thinking out-the-box. They are the box’s “systems managers,” writes Hedges.

As “systems managers,” he explains, liberals are a far cry from the “old left” - the Wobblies, Socialists and Communists parties, the Congress of Industrial Workers, or the independent press. The movements of the Left were “carefully orchestrated,” Hedges writes. “Their disappearance means we lack the vocabulary of class warfare and militant organizations, including an independent press, with which to fight back.”

Fellow editorial board member and columnists at the Black Commentator, Professor Horace Campbell, speaking on Hugh Hamilton’s Talk Back, WBAI, November 8, 2010, argues that instead of working to form a sustainable movement of the people, liberals are still waiting for Barack Obama to deliver them from association with the people, the working class, unemployed, and poor. At every opportunity, there is a noted liberal chanting that if only we, liberals, push Obama and then he will…

But, “Barack Obama,” said Campbell, “bailed out the banks. Barack Obama supported the oil companies. Barack Obama continued the war in Afghanistan. So, Barack Obama believes in the cultural values of capitalism.”

What part of this budding fascist state do not the liberal elite understand?

As I see it, Barack Obama is the leader of the liberal cabal, the one selected to deliver the liberals to their function in a fascist state while collectively Obama and the liberals decimate the working class - and most importantly - any form of resistance from the Left - because there is a Left that is not this liberal elite - because this liberal elite is terrified of the Left - and the liberals keep their feet firmly planted on the neck of the Left.

That is why the Left in this country cannot rise to full visibility. The Left is not the liberal politicians, academics, or press, but the liberals, still clinging to the Dream, are good at spreading the word that the Left is dead.

Did we hear from the liberals last week? Do we hear from the liberal press or academics with Black Americans confront the brunt of Empire’s injustices? The Left is present. It is the organizations fighting on behalf of Oscar Grant, killed by BART police Johannes Meserle, sentenced to just 2 years in prison. It is the organizations fighting to save Mumia Abu Jamal, sitting for the last 29 years on Death Row. It is the effort of a few and Nancy Lockhart fighting for the release of two innocent Black women in a Mississippi prison. It is a Michelle Alexander and her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. It is a Horace Campbell and a Chris Hedges rather than the usual cabal of white liberal commentators claiming the Left. It is anyone whatever the color or class status who refuse to sleep and allow the folks controlling the pods to send them to cloneland. It is the people I know who volunteer their time to fight on behalf of faculty of color and who educate others about the sellout of labor organizations. It is those who speak, write, and teach to their detriment for justice.

The Left is what the liberal elites live to crush!

We are told that the liberals will fall. The liberals are helping to hollow out the state, Hedges writes, “to sustain a casino capitalism that is doomed to fail.”

“The failure to question the utopian assumptions of globalization has left us in an intellectual vacuum.” Thank the liberal elite in control of the alternative liberal press and academic institutions. Thank the capitalist politicians they support and elect.

And the liberal elite remain on message as they groom a succeeding generation.

If we do not look out at these college classrooms and see these students and recognize how the liberal elites are co-opting the young for the armies of a fascist state, we will wake up to a horrible sight:

Before the young people we stand, trying to make them understanding. See. When we hear from among them a most hideous sound, and we see they are pointing at us with contempt, and our reaction of fear shuts down our windpipes before we even feel the rough hands grabbing our arms. And because too many of us have rejected the space in which our heritage of Blackness would have empowered us, we will meet “in a place where there is no darkness,” (George Orwell, 1984), and we will encounter the new generation of O’Briens, sitting us before Big Brother.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.