|
Can We IT
Users Create Communities
Cooperation & Collaboration in Cyberspace
By
Rudolph Lewis With regard to uses of information
technologies (IT), there is a generational gap as well as a
racial and class gap in America. It may worsen with a
gender/racial gap, black boys are not going in respectable
numbers to the best high schools with the best curriculums and
teachers, and the best technologies. So black masculinity in the
great abstract wilderness of cyberspace will be coming up on the
rough side of the mountain. We are, and gonna be for sometime,
behind the learning curve. Too many have no clue how
disadvantaged we are in dealing with the arduous journey that
lies ahead in cyberspace.
We don’t speak the languages, no
interpreter in tow, especially if middle-aged, and out of school
twenty years or more. We ain’t got the tools and the map
(boring how-to books and tech instructions) to get through the
entangling forests of wires, rapid rivers of jargon, codes,
numbers, protocols, it all pulls you quickly down through a
dizzying stream of who knows where. Even on the flat plains and
arid deserts the spaciousness of computerized pyrotechnics the
vastness of the possible and the potential are stunning, too
much to get your hands or your mind around. Unprepared,
ill-equipped, too optimistic, can we make a successful exodus
into this brave new world, that is cyberspace?
I’m not talking about Third Word nations
(Nigeria or Bangladesh), but right here in Black Baltimore. Are
black boys and men ready to take up the staff of Moses to lead
us into the Canaan of Cyberspace? My digital Moses who has
entered our new world, as I have stated in other places, is
Kalamu ya Salaam. The “tablets” e-drum carved out is
important revolutionary instruction provided by example rather
than manifesto. Here we have no cozying up to this or that
foundation or that corporate concern. Kalamu ya Salaam, a
cyber-pioneer in the best spirit of American self-reliance,
demonstrates daily in public space his core concern the creation
of community with black artists and writers.
I have a faith in pragmatism, in Dewey and Du
Bois. Education should be useful as well as edifying. I speak of
the individual rather than the larger society with its global
interests of security and control, at home and abroad. I speak
of an education for the individual for the black boy who
doesn’t just want to fit in but who can freely set the
parameters of his dream.
For poor black boys here in Baltimore, the public education
system cannot and will not provide that service.
It fails 50 percent of them. The future
projections for black boys the elders of this community -- the
courts the jailers and politicians -- already know that poverty and
crime have been mapped out.
The educational czars and ceos of Baltimore
don’t love black boys. They see them marched chained, gangs of
them to Central Booking, or slaving at some $6 an hour job or
doing piecework, and they are not moved to tears and to
concerted actions. That is my casual conclusion after working as
a librarian in a local black magnate school, with a liberal arts
focus, which has a student population of 70% black females, the
boys in the city’s middle schools do not make the grades to
get in, these street boys of hip hop just ain’t college
material, numbers tell the tale. But the Man, Mr. Charlie, knows
how to deal with them, he has a plan for them. Do we?
So we have a dilemma: we got black boys who
can’t get to where the technology and the instruction in
technology are supposed to be; and we have an older black
generation that does not realize the importance of cyberspace
for our future. Those middle-aged have forgotten there was a
Search for Canaan, they already have their milk and honey and
benefits package. Thus we are crippled in our exodus, lacking
the very raw resources that are needed to populate and create
communities in cyberspace.
Of course, there are those who have set up
black camps in cyberspace; some have even built sturdy long
lasting structures, and some have already sold them to white
corporate concerns. Many had/have get-rich schemes, like the
49ers. We got Billy the Kids and Ma Barkers. Lone Ranger and Tontos. Charlie Chaplin and Charlie Chan. A few range wars
between independents and corporates fencing off territory that
should be free. Cyberspace is a frontier with dangers and
opportunities.
Those of us who know something about
colonization, like we Liberians, we Israelis, and we Americans,
know that one doesn’t want to get caught out there in the
wilderness, in hostile territory, surrounded by one’s
enemies, back to the sea, so one needs to be able to call on the
cavalry. Generous souls from across the water who know what is
at stake give and give big—life and limb. For we know the
Injuns gonna be coming, the natives are restless (those who have
built the massive structures with fears of us camped on the
outskirts in tents and in houses of corrugated roofs). The
martial drums can be heard, the backroom plans for clearing the
ground, is known by those who have ears, for those who are
wired.
So what black boys experience now in the
streets of Baltimore and in our public schools is of great
import for IT users and pioneers, especially those independents
in need of skill and long-term commitments and vision, as John
O. Killens used to say, for the long distant run, they who want
to change America structurally and spiritually, we have to send
scouts back where our people are and provide some instruction
how they can get away from the slavers and the slave catchers.
And get to Kansas, You know, we got to saddle up, strap on our
guns, like Buck and the Preacher, to smooth out the route.
The black magnet school I know had neither
the latest computer technology nor a functional library, neither
a technology program nor a library program, to serve either
student or faculty. And there was no plan to develop either, no
one interested and no one capable of doing it. This is what
passes for excellence when we speak of black education, in a
black city in America. And the conservative choir and the
republican black preachers got their fingers in our face saying,
you see, this is why we need Choice. Public education no longer
functions for black and poor families, and certainly not in
terms of preparing them for the job market or for college. And
both conservative and liberal mantra chorus in with money is not
the problem, only a problem of leadership, and morality.
We adults who provide finances, skills, and
support for education, we demand excellence of our children with
thousands of political speeches and testimonies and we create
tests and bench markers for success and responsibility but we do
not demand excellence of ourselves, our policies, and our
commitments. We send our children to schools in which plaster
falls from the ceiling, lights do not work, floors and ceilings
with holes, water damage, and mold. There is no response to
facility needs. But we expect these our hopes and joy to make
our inept decisions and policies concerning them look good. And
when these, our children, expose us, we set up greater barriers.
One principal in
Florida had a female student stripped searched and arrested
because he feared for his life.
There are exceptions. Some parents raised,
took money out of their own pockets for computers and printers
for this black magnate school after a plea from an energetic,
thoughtful, caring young black male tech teacher. He was
serving, gratuitously, also as a computer technician for a
school of 1700 students and a 80-member faculty. When I arrived,
there were no computers in the library until the last four
months of the school term. For his initiative in securing the
computers, he went around the System bureaucrats, and for that
daring the young tech teacher was abused. For the higher ups who
had no plan and no program for technology censored him because
they felt that his vocal efforts showed them up—their
impotence, ignorance, and lack of responsibility.
They squashed him, rather than praise him,
for his sacrifices, his thoughtfulness, and generosity. For
these education autocrats and czars, military discipline is of
more important than civility, cooperation, and collaboration.
They do not consult, they command. In this black magnate school no staff, no
teacher, no administrator dare question or raise an objection.
If you see dirt, you keep it on the down low. The young black
tech forgot his place in the great hierarchy of being.
To Baltimore’s loss, he received a job
offer and accepted it from a Georgia school system, which has
much more money committed to quality education and quality
facilities. Down South, it seems, they are more committed, than
we Up-South, to sufficient up-to-date digital hardware and
software, its widespread instruction, learning IT’s practical,
and creative uses in the larger world.
Black Baltimore languishes beside the Bay. It
gets poorer and poorer, and black boys more criminalized,
because they have little interest in working for slave wages.
Our leaders (principals and school administrators) are excellent
with cell phones, uniforms, the manipulation of numbers and
scores to meet republican guidelines for black education. But we
ain’t with the Net, or email. We fear our youth—what they
might say, how they might represent us in public space.
The Baltimore System is a fortress. It uses
e-mail like a fax machine or a fact machine; extraordinary
filters screen out educational websites, that is, foreign
language websites, film institutes, no rhyme nor reason has been
ever provided for this mindless censorship, exclusivity. And no
workable way has been established to correct it.
When the black magnate school got computers
and hooked into the System network, administrators did not have
sufficient knowledge, experience, power, not even the chair of the
technology department, to begin a rudimentary technology program
for teachers, staff, and students. The entire school needs
rewiring, more flexible responses to tech problems, and
administrators critically aware of the crisis in black male
access to the latest technology and uses of IT and those who are
willing to make personal sacrifices.
The System and its administrators want rather
to conceal faults and shortcomings because it makes them look
bad. And as one principal reminded me, Don’t let’em see you
sweat. So much looks good on the surface but beneath the veneer
there’re rotten planks. This very attractive woman, this
selfsame principal, who’s husband is a noted preacher and she
one of his evangelists, didn’t sweat it, though she drove the
Negro female custodians (in their sixties) like they were
modern-day slaves. The dear principal got her promotion, and a
big raise.
The System’s IT staff is small and response
time is two to three weeks or longer. They themselves the IT
department have no plans for technology development and
instruction for teachers and students, and if so, it is a club
conversation. They are also short-staffed. All comes from down
on high. There’s no democracy in public education when it
comes to black education. When Board members and administrators
think in terms of “black” they do are not think in terms of
“black liberation” but rather in terms of “black
opportunism” and “black enhancement” (in a me-first kind
of way). The spirit is all wrong; everybody feels squeezed, and
put upon.
The worst problem is that the black magnate
school does not know how to use computer technology, even if had
it, it does not know its possibilities, its potentialities for
the education of our people, for our liberation, and our exodus
into cyberspace. The present IT use now is the writing and the
printing of papers, web-research is also at a rudimentary stage.
A simple matter like e-mail use is a major mountain to climb, a
mighty river to ford. Our evangelist principal wanted teachers
to receive pronouncements from North Avenue Central, where the
present ceo resides, commanded it be done, and four months later
at the end of the year all the teachers found the System’s
email, rather useless. Some went through the motions for
appearance sake. For no teacher or staff member wants to be on
the principal’s troublemaker list. She has an insidious sick
way of getting back at those who doing want to go along to get
along.
The System did not have web-mail—penny
pinchers control, direct black education. We get by, always
behind the curve, with hand-me downs from the well-off. Here was
the problem. If the computer did not have the right “image”
one could not access the System’s e-mail and one’s account.
There was at one point only ten (new) computers with the
System’s “image,” and only two available for teacher
e-mail use for the entire school of 80 teachers, except for the
principal who had a different system altogether, one of the
comforts of privilege. The use of the System’s e-mail system
at it’s best is cumbersome, awkward, and passive, and
unproductive educationally.
There’s no dynamic full use here by either
students or teachers of the technology of liberation. But there are yet other mindless
wanderings that occur in the swamps and peripheries of our brave
new world. The school had/has a website. Instead of it
operated as a teacher/student project, like the student
newspaper, the principal farms that job out to commercial
concerns. As suggested above, there is a generational agony,
which doesn’t trust our young people to be responsible, as we
would have them, especially when they wearing white tee shorts
down to their knees. Their caps on backward, covered in Iverson
plaits and tattoos. Bill Cosby says our black boys are their own
worst enemy. Is
that true, too, of Baltimore’s black public schools?
The overall problem is attitude. People who
teach black boys and black men (and that includes black teachers
as well as white) they don’t have much respect for black males
and black male needs, like liberation, and the skills and
attitudes needed for liberation. Those who are not oppressed or
who don’t feel the oppression (as much) with their
hundred-thousand-a-year incomes, I can understand why they feel
no urgency in these matters and that they find it easier to
blame the victims—black parents, black mothers, black homes,
black history, and black morality.
These principals in Baltimore, I understand,
have extraordinary powers, and that power is at the very top of
their agendas, personal power, and how they can extend that
personal power and sway. One ran for mayor recently, and,
fortunately, for us respectable church going black folk, he lost
to a more experienced white politician. All in the papers, we
know these principals are experts at manipulating numbers and
test scores and meeting the quotas set for them by the white
legislators in Annapolis. And, it seems, from what I have
observed the male principals of the black persuasion are among
the worst; female teachers hold themselves when they hear the
announcements of their appointment.
With a great need for black male principals
in the System, these represent, many think, the brutal, cruder
manifestations of black manhood and black male excellence. One
such doctorate endowed principal thought that computers were
secondary to excellence in education in the 21st century. He
believed that having a basketball team and a traditional rivalry
with another magnate school was more important than a librarian
or having a computerized library catalog, or a technology
program. The ceo finally transferred him to the Jail School;
expectations are lower there.
We are being bled, my brothers and sisters;
we are being misled. Everybody knows that for black education in
Baltimore the problem for black boys resides massively in the
shortcomings of middle-school education. No teacher wants to
teach there, these black boys with their baggy jeans below their
underwear, with white tee shorts down to their knees and girls
with their tight fitting jeans, and their foul mouths,
seemingly, are just too much, too savage to educate. Black male
puberty conflicts and horrors are just beyond the System’s
power and resources.
The money paid teachers just ain’t worth
the hassles and there ain’t no program money dedicated
especially for this arduous educational transformation.
Presently, the ceo told the teachers union the System is
$25 million in the red, so raises were off the table.
And so when teachers get their certification they run for
the hills, for the surrounding county schools systems.
My brothers and sisters, we fear our children, who know
so much more about what is happening from ground up than both
teachers and administrators. We fear they will expose us, we
fear ourselves These middle schools are not so far from being
prisons and the students prison mates who are every second,
minute in rebellion against the rigidity and stinginess of and
lack of respect of their adult masters.
In some of our communities, the one I live in
for instance, only a quarter has a high school diploma or a GED
diploma. The Man and the System have failed these. What kind of
attitude does one expect these parents and their children to
possess? Should they be thankful for their poverty, for the type
of Indian schools they and their children are forced to attend,
to endure? No, the primary interest of our leaders and school
administrators are power and sway (their salaries, their tenure,
their status), over teachers, over parents, and over students.
They want to reduce all to piecework, and a mindless
“yessuh boss.”
These educational czars are elitists, of the
worst type, with their comic book degrees, like Bill Cosby. They
think that they can improve the education of black boys by
making them like white boys, real preppy: these black boys, they
demand, must give up hip hop, pull up their pants, tuck their
shirts in their pants, wear a tie and jacket, and say No to
drugs and sex, and, if you please, salute the flag.
Yes, indeed, my good friends, our generation
of experts wants to impose the backward black puritanism on our
children that we rebelled against in our youth, in the 50s and
the 60s, keeping us down on the farm, pregnant and ignorant.
Setting up barriers and road blacks, militarizing our existence
with recruitment of more and more cops and GIs. They only want
black boys to know what they want them to know, and speak only
how they want them to speak, and do only what they want them to
do. They don’t want them to be free, to think about,
contemplate their liberation, and that of their people.
What these doctors of education prescribe is
a whitewash. You can succeed, you can have comfort if you only
be like your masters, that is true freedom: Be acceptable like
Colin, be respectable like Condi. Our boys can’t just be. In
such an environment of repression provided at birth, taught
daily to stay within restricted lines, such demands of
conformity are not made on any other people. Because of these
institutional failures, we IT users who are cultural workers and
educators must find ways to supplement technology education for
both black adults and black boys.
Maybe a black tech listserv is needed to deal
with some of these issues. We got to get the computers and
software in black boys hands. We have to show them how it is
being used and how it might be used. Numerous roles need filling
in black cyberspace for black liberation. These celebrated black
principals need instruction. Let’s recruit and serve.
So I have lodged a severe complaint against
what happened within a year at a black magnate school. So what,
is that news? No, probably not. But there was another possible
outcome. This black magnate school has wonderful programs and
competent teachers—a drama department, media classes, music
department. Some students there will become actors, playwrights,
filmmakers, computer experts. The opportunity to put forth in
cyberspace their talents and skills was lost. There they could
have had a school website which could have posted in text
numerous student essays, poems, plays, sound clips, and their
photos, hopes and dreams; video clips of music programs, plays,
and other special events during the year. This kind of
coordinated educational activity did not occur at this black
magnate school. And there aint’ no good excuse why it didn’t
happen.
My good friends, Cyberspace is the Place, the
space black boys need to be free, it ain’t cramped, they can
stretch out there. They can unprogram the programming that
ain’t for liberation and program the programming needed for
liberation. For this ultimately is the struggle to be, of
Identity. And space is the place to solve these dilemmas, to get
away from the industrial/slave mentality of 19th
century America.
Space is the Place. Black boys need to be
black boys, and dress like black boys, and walk sideways with a
skip like black boys. And be black men, their girlfriends and
wives can’t define that, schools can’t proscribe it. The
state owes a debt to their parents for IT hardware and
instruction. Then get out of the way and let black boys work.
Our successful colonization of cyberspace
depends very much on the work and creativity of black boys, and
black boys from the streets. Let us recruit and serve. There are
new ground to be plowed in cyberspace, trees to fell, bridges to
build, shops and stores, schools
to establish, theaters and music halls to found, and little
towns to architect. We need the troops, the exodusters, the
builders & technicians; those who know books, theater,
music, and video, promoters, technicians & scientists.
Ordinary folk.
My view is not without hope, idealism cannot
be sustained without realism, and, at times, not even without
cynicism. My point is that we have before us the opportunity to
build a new kind of black world in cyberspace, while it is still
90 % virginal. And that public education has become a stumbling
block. Black cyberspace colonists need to know the odds that
they face and do whatever to counter the regression in black
technical education. . . . Recruit and serve. * * *
* *
posted 27 June 2008 |
