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"Black Schools Kill
Smart Niggers?”
Reconciling the Romance for Black Institutions in the
Post-Soul Era
By Mark Anthony Neal
When I accepted my
first tenure track position at Xavier
University of Louisiana in the summer of 1996, I was
filled with the romance that only nine-years of
undergraduate and graduate training at largely white
public institutions in Western New York State could
produce. Yes, I was happy to leave behind the regional
phenomenon known as “lake effect” snow for the warmth
and hotness of the “Big Easy,” but more to the point, as
the only historically Black and Catholic university in
the nation, Xavier offered me my first engagement with a
Historically Black College and University (HBCU).
As an
African-American male from the South Bronx, my first
years 12 years of schooling were spent at an all-black
Seventh Day Adventist school and a large specialized
high school in Brooklyn, NY that defined the concept of
urban cosmopolitanism. Yet my experiences in higher
education were quite different, spending nearly a decade
in classrooms in which I functioned, to borrow a term
that Greg Tate once used to describe the career of Jean
Michel Basqiuat, as a “flyboy in the buttermilk.”
I was devout in my
desire not to reproduce that experience, now that I was
on the other-side of the desk, so to speak. Armed with a
dissertation with enough post-modern jargon to choke the
ghost of
Baudrillard and still filled with the swagger of the
late 1980s renaissance of black cultural nationalism, I
“turned south” in hopes of finding my professional
purpose. Having never experienced the presence of a
black man as a teacher, on any level of formal
schooling, I was also endowed with the idea that I
needed to be at an HBCU to be on the front lines of
saving the next generation of black “boys to men.” It
was a heady romance indeed, but also a short lived one.
I was only at Xavier for six weeks when a lunchtime
encounter with a very prominent black public
intellectual led to the conversation that provides the
title for my essay. “Black schools kill smart niggers”
was the warning—still remembering the sense of clarity
that I sought at the moment I heard the warning—and even
before I could utter a word about my commitment to black
students, said black public intellectual remarked,
“there are black students everywhere that you can
teach.”
The conversation
stayed in the back of my head until months later when my
identity politics, in the form of my scholarly interests
in black gender and sexual politics, my support of a
black woman colleague who was being professionally hazed
by the head of my department and as well as my distinct
commitment to use “black vernacular” in the classroom
made me a target of both my immediate supervisor and the
Dean of Faculty.
I can remember
thinking to myself, as I left Xavier’s campus for the
last time after only a year, accepting a position back
in New York State, that for the first time in my life I
had a firm grasp on the functions of a plantation. To be
sure, I’ve experienced plantation life on many a
university campus since that initial tenure track
position, though places like Duke University, for
example, are quite skilled in obscuring that reality.
Nevertheless my experience at Xavier raised critical
questions for me about the value of historically black
colleges and universities, if not historically black
institutions in general, particularly in the so-called
“Post-Soul” era in which the totems of blackness flow so
efficiently through mainstream culture, often to the
effect of obliterating their distinctly black sources.
I came of age in the academy at a time, the early 1990s,
that was in part defined by the emergence of a
contemporary cadre of so-called Black Public
Intellectuals; scholars in the humanities and social
sciences, many of whom shared an interests in British
Cultural Studies and the work of Stuart
Hall in particular. To be sure they were not the
first black public intellectuals, and more than a few
detractors are quick to argue that they are not the most
significant, but given the unprecedented access that
these scholars had to mainstream media, this was a
generation of scholars, arguably, more visible than any
previous generation of black academics.
For black graduate
students, working on contemporary race themes, these
figures were simply rock stars—and it was not lost on
any of us that they were all affiliated, with rare
exception, with well financed elite private
institutions. Yet just a generation earlier, many of the
scholars who helped establish the first meaningful
presence of black intellectuals at predominately White
institutions, had significant ties to
HBCUs. The presence of prominent black academics and
scholars at largely historically white institutions
simply confirmed the general “brain drain” that black
communities had witnessed since the early 1970s. Whereas
a generation earlier the best and the brightest in Black
America were exemplars of the rich traditions found at
HBCUs, this was not always the case as the 20th
century came to a close.
In fact, since the apex of the Civil Rights and Black
Power movements in the early 1970s, there has been
little in mainstream culture that affirmed the value of
HBCUs—the Tom Joyner Morning Show and Spike Lee
notwithstanding; More to the point HBCUs have been under
siege. By the early 1990s, HBCUs were clearly devalued
in the minds of some as were the careers of those who
toiled on their campuses. The sexy view that the
television series A
Different World held of
HBCUs was out-of-sync with institutions who
literally had to defend their presence and purpose in
the so-called post-Civil Rights era; A
Different World spoke more to an historic
investment that many African-Americans held out for
black institutions.
But this
devaluation of
HBCUs was not simply the product of integration-era
politics, post-race fantasies or the rupture of
historical memory—some of this devaluation had
everything to do with on-the-ground practices that occur
in the context of diminishing resources, unaccountable
leadership and the egregious exploitation of teaching
faculty. For example, when the aforementioned Tom Joyner
Morning Show waged a public campaign in support of then
Harvard Professor Cornel West,
whose scholarly credentials were being questioned by
then Harvard President and current Obama economic
advisor
Lawrence Summer, their bully pulpit might have been
better utilized shedding light on the conditions of a
good many faculty at
HBCUs.
At many of these
institutions faculty teach 8-10 classes a year, on
one-year renewable contracts, for discount salaries,
with little time for research all in the name of
“service” to the race. I still live with the guilt that
my Xavier Dean placed on my head when I announced that I
was leaving for a “white” public research institution—a
guilt that suggested that I was letting down the race
and that somehow I was less of a scholar because I was
unwilling to accept the kinds of conditions that
generations of black scholars at
HBCUs not only survived, but thrived in.
The founding of Historically Black Colleges and
Universities more than a century ago was predicated on
the desire of white power brokers to create a buffer
class—a cadre of professional blacks and skilled workers
that would serve as gatekeepers for the black masses. It
goes without saying that part of that project was to
distance those gatekeepers from a shared and productive
blackness with the black masses—an articulation of a
blackness whose full complexity might prove useful for
progressive social movement.
Yet, quite the
opposite occurred as some
HBCUs became hot beds for political activism and the
development of progressive race politics. Yet one never
gets past the founding expectations of these
institutions, where the expectations were that
HBCUs would serve the purpose of regulating,
policing or even incarcerating blackness. This is a
point that Houston Baker, Jr. makes in his devilishly
facetious tome Turning
South Again: Re-thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T,
where he brings into focus, Booker T. Washington’s
decision to establish Tuskegee University on a
plantation.
“Taking into
account the abject, brutal, stultifying relationship of
black-majority plantation arrangements of southern
life,” Baker writes, “it seems a terrible augury against
black modernism that
Booker T. Washington chose an
“abandoned” white plantation landscape as the site for
his Tuskegee uplift project. More to the point Baker
adds, “And Washington did not simply situate his black
educational enterprise physically on a plantation. He
also instituted and argued for an essentially black
peasant southern plantation economics, manners,
handicrafts, and habits of mind for the black majority.”
(81)
While Washington
and Tuskegee are simply one iteration of HBCU politics
in the early 20th century, Baker’s comments highlight
the kinds of tensions between the maintenance of
historically specific performances of blackness and
those performances of blackness resist the very kinds of
regulation that institutions were encouraged to
reproduce.
As we think of
HBCUs as sites of regulation, it is not difficult,
to also think of them as sites of surveillance—a space
to monitor blackness. While
HBCUs figure less in the eyes of a so-called white
power structure in the 21st century, they are still
critical to the reproduction of a “not too blackly
public” to appropriate Baker’s phrase—that not only
denies the full complexity of lives at
HBCUs, but also the complexities of private and
public blackness. The censure of Spike Lee during the
making of his 1988 film
School Daze and of the producers of BET’s
college reality show
College Hill are but two examples of a
regulatory project that occurs in support of a sanitized
view of black institutions, be they churches, HBCUs,
sororities and fraternities or the sexual politics of
Black America.
It is in this
latter category that I have been able to collaborate
with colleagues at
HBCUs, notably the Women’s
Research and Resource Center at Spelman College,
currently under the leadership of Beverly
Guy-Sheftall, on issues related to sexual violence,
masculinity, and black popular culture. Currently, the
Women’s Research and Resource Center is the only
standing Women’s Studies unit at an HBCU. I was
initially drawn to this collaborative work in the
aftermath of rap star Nelly’s misogynistic video for the
song “Tip Drill” which featured a male rapper swipe a
credit card through a black woman’s buttocks. Students
in Guy-Sheftall’s feminist theory class helped organize
a protest against Nelly, who was scheduled to visit
Spelman’s campus.
That a significant
number of
Spelman and
Morehouse students participate formally and
informally in the “strip club” culture that coalesces in
the city of Atlanta, only heightens the roles that
HBCUs play in producing new and counter narratives
about black bodies and sexuality. Indeed the
Spelman/Nelly controversy has ushered in a vigorous
discussion about gender and sexuality among the hip-hop
generation.
These conversations occur as the Hip-Hop Generation
questions the “politics of respectability” that has
defined so many black institutions and the conservative
gender and sexual politics that are reproduced within
the context of that “respectability.” For example three
years ago when there were allegations of rape against
men at Morehouse College by Spelman students, members of
Spelman’s Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance issued a
public statement criticizing the sense of “complacency”
associated with sexual violence against the women at
Spelman and black women in general and later organized a
protest on Morehouse’s campus. The protest engendered
its own criticism, particularly within Black
institutions that still value patriarchy and the
"stability" it supposedly produces, thus Black women
(and a few men) are often admonished for publicly
criticizing and holding Black men accountable for
behavior that is clearly detrimental to those very
institutions.
Members of the
Morehouse College student senate, for example,
introduced a bill condemning the protest, arguing that
said protest "created a hostile environment" and
"encouraged bad press and character defamation to
Morehouse College and its student body." The senate also
castigated the FMLA for apparently not asking their
permission for the protest. In the final section of the
bill, the Morehouse College student senate requested "a
public apology from the Advisor(s) to FMLA and student
leadership of FMLA and all other organizers of the
demonstration for its unruly nature." In many ways the
reaction of some Morehouse men, to the Spelman FMLA
protest, has to do with the willingness of those women
to challenge the social contract between them.
Again these are the singular politics of two
institutions that have a complex and often difficult
shared history, but highlight how
HBCUs continue to be at the center of public debates
about “blackness.” It is also important to realize that
this project of policing and regulation is not simply
generational in nature as witnessed by the recent
commentary from student leaders at
HBCU like
Winston-Salem State and
North Carolina Central
about the practice of “sagging” and dressing down among
HBCU students. This sensitivity towards sartorial
choices, as if there aren’t faculty at historically
white institutions who would love to ban the wearing of
flip-flops to class, speaks to the extent that the very
plantation culture that Baker tethered to Booker T.
Washington’s project of uplift, is rife with the belief
that what has to be regulated and policed is a deviance
thought normative to some black bodies.
The sagging
concerns among student leaders were later echoed by
Morehouse College President Robert Franklin, Jr.,
who recently challenged the practice “cross-dressing”
among a few Morehouse students. As many question the
relevancy of black institutions like HBCUs in the in the
so-called “post-race” era, black institutions might
contribute to their own irrelevancy, if they continue to
march out-of-step with the broad-based progressive
politics that so many Hip-Hop generation Americans are
desiring to achieve.
Source:
NewBlackManl
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of
Black Popular Culture in the Department of African &
African-American Studies at Duke University. He is the
author of several books including the recent New Black
Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity and is currently
completing Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black
Masculinities for New York University Press.
* * *
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Responses
Doc,
Let me first say that I have met Mark Anthony Neal a
couple of times and always found him a likable and
deeply intellectual man. I have read most of his books,
and I often suggest them as must reading to my
students. While I agree that teachers at HBCUs carry a
larger teaching load that does affect our research
productivity, (and I will admit that my next statement
will show me as one who has never really enjoyed much of
hip hop culture being more moved by a blues and funk
aesthetic), when has hip hop culture produced
“progressive politics” that could lead to the gaining of
first-class citizenship in any way? I’ve never seen the
need to march “in-step” with hip hop culture because
much of it is “much to do about nothing.”
It seems that much
of Neal’s issue with HBCUs is more about the inability
of popular culture scholars, i.e., hip hop scholars, to
gain respectful places and payment at HBCUs, which leads
to his proclaiming HBCUs as plantations. However, what
Neal fails to address is the reason that popular studies
as well as other very critical areas of thought and
research are not supported at HBCUs is because HBCUs
barely have enough funds to offer basic core classes for
graduation.
Furthermore, Neal
fails to discuss the number of highly qualified teachers
who are finding creative ways to implement or integrate
their areas of specialization into the core curriculum
classes. We may not have a woman’s studies component at
Jackson State University, but most of the English, art,
history, political science, and social work professors
make sure that their majors are introduced to the
traditional and most recent research where woman’s
studies intersects with their particular major.
I don’t disagree that most of the decisions made at
HBCUs by African American leadership is often a direct
result of the need to gain funding from a white and
racist college board or board of regents. Also, the
alumni at HBCUs must do a better job of funding their
own institutions, yet we must also accept that African
people with the same degree and experience still earn
twenty five to fifty cents less on the dollar than their
white counterparts so with less pay HBCU graduates have
less to contribute to their alma maters.
However, it seems
that Neal is glossing over or over simplifying the
complex “thing,” which is the HBCU. Neal connects the
legacy of HBCUs to the founding of most HBCUs on
plantations, using the overly worn and overly flattened
straw man figure of Booker T. Washington to
sensationalize his point. To give Neal credit, it is a
tired but effective analogy because most African
Americans perceive Washington as a “Tom,” “sell-out,” or
“gate-keeper,” thus Neal is able to link his readers’
negative feelings of Washington to HBCUs.
(However, if
Washington were here today, he could ask the same
question that he asked a century ago: You Negroes can
vote, pontificate, and speak French, but what do you
own? Even though I am a creative writer with a liberal
arts degree, I know that people who can make or fix
something have a better chance feeding their family,
especially if they own the company that does the makin’
and the fixin’.)
What Neal’s
discourse lacks is the fact that during the late 1800s
very few black people had any land to donate for the
establishing of a school of any level. Accordingly,
with the change in labor moving from agricultural to
industrial, there were empty plantations (plots of land)
that could now be used for something else. Let’s be
real. Most people don’t donate their new clothes; they
donate their used clothes. Plantations were the used
clothes that were being passed to the former slaves.
I wonder if Neal
has ever refused to purchase a home because it was once
owned by a white racist. Like most of us, he was
probably just happy to get the “used” home at a discount
rate. I don’t mind objective discourse and critique,
but Neal has created a straw man opponent rather than
addressing in an intricate manner the real struggle of
HBCUs to survive in the face poor funding and constant
attacks and justifications for closure from racist
whites and from African Americans who, themselves, do
not respect African American institutions or who have
taken one bad experience and have made the one
experience the metaphor for the HBCU.
Even the first
black President has just cut funding to HBCUs. Of
course he probably doesn’t know anything about HBCUs so
why would he be any more connected to them than white
liberals? The point that I am making is that for Neal
to rightfully condemn or discuss HBCUs in a meaningful
or helpful manner, he must be willing to do the work of
addressing all of the special issues. If he wants to
quote Houston Baker, he should remember what Baker said
in Critical Memory but mostly what he said in The
Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism about
black America being a tree growing from the roots of
chaos, a very complicated and interwoven chaos.
To understand HBCUs
in the same way that one desires to understand black
culture, one must be willing “to unravel a culture’s
‘multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of
them superimposed upon or knotted into one another,
which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit.’”
To understand a culture you must understand its
conceptual units, which grow from its unique
existence. The same is true for the HBCU. As a popular
studies scholar, Neal is, essentially, a type of
cultural anthropologist. Yet, in his critique of the
HBCU he is failing to meet his full responsibility of
showing both the unique and universal aspects of a
culture’s concept units. He is providing the what but
not the why or cause, leading his readers to conclude
that HBCUs are innately inferior because their scholars
are innately inferior.
When I was a MA English student at
JSU, I wanted to
write a thesis that was an analysis of the lyrics of
Prince. My committee rejected my topic, with one
professor saying to me, “There is no way that we are
going to submit that topic to the Mississippi College
Board.” Thus, I was forced to write my thesis on James
Baldwin, which was not a big deal since I have always
loved Baldwin’s work. However, once I earned my degree,
I self-published my work on Prince in 1996, and since
then I have sold at least three copies a week over the
past thirteen years, selling seven copies last week.
While I disagreed with my academic mentors as to what
topic I should engage as an English scholar, it was the
education that I received at JSU along with seeking
other scholars and writers outside the campus that
allowed me to publish a work that has been sold on four
different continents. Like I said, I don’t mind an
objective critique of HBCUs—as long as it is objective
and balanced.
C. Liegh
McInnis
www.psychedelicliterature.com
proud graduate of
Jackson State University
and man-chile of Clarksdale, Mississippi, home of the
Blues
“If you ain’t never picked cotton, you can’t tell me sh**...”
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Brief Response to Mark Anthony Neal
It is a fact that such historically white institutions
as Duke University and such historically black
institutions as Tougaloo College, which occupies a
portion of the old Boddie plantation, are part of the
racialized social contract that warrants the democratic
experiment in the post-colonial United States of
America. In the reification of black/white binaries, it
is convenient to forget that historically Mormon,
Catholic, Jewish, and Native American institutions of
education are paragraphs in the contractual text. All
of them, including
the College of William and Mary, Virginia, Harvard,
and Princeton, belong to the American tradition of the
plantation. They are sites of regulation and
surveillance where downpressing and uplifting occur
simultaneously. All of them “enslave” students,
faculty, and staff to something. One expects post-soul
individuals who volunteer to be gatekeepers to know
that.
Reification and convenience are not necessarily grave
offenses against humanity, but using them to murder the
metaphor of romance for black institutions has affinity
with what Roman Catholics account as venial sins: they
allow charity to subsist, even though they offend and
wound it.
In his May 1, 2009 speech “Black Schools Kill Smart
Nigger?”: Reconciling the Romance for Black Institutions
in the Post-Soul Era, Professor Mark Anthony Neal
effectively registers his personal anxieties about
Xavier
University of Louisiana in particular and black
institutions in general. Some of his astute and serious
criticisms of contemporary HBCUs must be respected. And
measures should be taken to minimize the need for such
criticisms. Nevertheless, he fails to recall that some
HBCUs were founded by African American freedpeople not
by white power brokers and missionaries. He seems not to
remember that during the Age of Segregation and beyond
HBCUs performed obligations that most HWCUs did not
assume belonged to their missions. His failure of memory
or dis(re)membering puts the relevant achievements of
HBCUs in abeyance. His post-race generalizations are,
to say the least, disappointing.
As an alumnus of and former faculty member at Tougaloo College and
a current faculty member at Dillard University, I know a
little about change and the irrelevant. I am aware that
we will have wakes and funerals for many American
institutions as the new world order declares them
irrelevant for this planet. What I dislike about
Professor Neal’s speech is his not listening to good
advice from Booker T. Washington. He did not first cast
down his bucket where he is employed. That might have
been a better way of embracing the legacy and audacious
wisdom of
John
Hope Franklin.—Jerry W. Ward,
Jr.
* *
* * *
 |
Malcolm X
A Life of Reinvention
By
Manning Marable
Years
in the making-the definitive biography of
the legendary black activist.
Of the great figure in twentieth-century
American history perhaps none is more
complex and controversial than Malcolm X.
Constantly rewriting his own story, he
became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and
an icon, all before being felled by
assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
Through his tireless work and countless
speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands
of black Americans to create better lives
and stronger communities while establishing
the template for the self-actualized,
independent African American man. In death
he became a broad symbol of both resistance
and reconciliation for millions around the
world. |
Manning Marable's
new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement.
Filled with new information and shocking revelations
that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a
sweeping story of race and class in America, from the
rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the
struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties
and sixties.
Reaching into
Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his
parents' activism through his own engagement with the
Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the
world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the
never-before-told true story of his assassination.
Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of
the most singular forces for social change, capturing
with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in
the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
*
* * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 30 May 2009 |
