Black Face in the Halls of Higher Education – Represent Our Resistance

Black literature courses, in particular, became sites of fierce counter resistance on the part of white students, many of whom demanded to be allowed to disassociate the oppression (or that ugly feeling they felt within before they turned away from the texts or the Black teacher reading passages) and focus, instead, on a temporary and painless as possible voyage to the Black world. In a sociology department, for example, students and faculty might discuss statistics: the number of Blacks incarcerated or the number of Black enslave persons, even, on a given plantation — back in the day. In Music, students and faculty might stand around, if they so desired, and sing the lyrics to “Sweet Chariot, Swing Low,” but in English classes that focused on Black literature, students had to see and feel — and to do that, they had to become intimate with the written word on the page before them. It is much harder for white students to read and contemplate the image Sethe, Morrison’s character in Beloved, presents when she tells Paul D that in the barn that day, Schoolteacher and his nephews sold her milk! It is much harder for students to accept Lucy’s sassiness toward her benevolent employer, Mariah. Lucy, a “foreigner,” an African Caribbean with no money, no anything, is hired by “kind” Mariah and her husband Lewis. My students talked of Lucy’s insolence and “mistreatment” of Mariah who was “trying to be nice to her” — her — rhyming with ugh and sounding like dirt! It is harder for these students to believe Assata Shakur was “innocent” and wasn’t involved in the murder of that policeman. Last year, at yet another University of Wisconsin campus, a white male student laughed out loud in the large lecture hall when I read a passage from Assata’s autobiography in which she states that she was innocent. Black women and Black little girls are not generally associated with “innocence.” No one of the “militant” type could possibly be innocent.

The transgressive industrial complex, as I call it, not only benefits the U.S. economy but also contributes to the acceptance of counter resistance, that is, suppression of consciously Black (authentic as opposed to commodified, fake blackness) at institutions of higher education. “When young black males,” bell hooks has noted, “labor in the plantations of misogyny and sexism to produce gangsta rap, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy approves of the violence and materially rewards them.” I have had faculty follow behind me down hallways insisting that these rappers spoke for me and people like me who come from the “ghetto” — as we all come from the ghetto. Never mind the misogyny and sexism. Get with it!