Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  Classroom illustrations of black feminist pedagogy in practise will be helpful at this point. Students bring certain basic assumptions into the classrooms, and these assumptions reveal the power of ideology—the American-dream ideology. For example, black students will frequently describe experiences of blatant racial discrimination, then in Yuppie tones declare that “every one is equal, racial differences don’t really matter, you can make it if you try hard enough.” Black and white female students will readily relate humiliating examples of sexist treatment, then, contradictory to their assertions, proclaim, “I think that with the proper qualifications women can make it in society today. Things have changed—took at Indira Gandhi, Geraldine Ferraro, and Corazon Aquino.” These students, black and white female and male, desperately want to believe in the American ideology that America is the land of opportunity and you can become anything you want if you try and work hard enough—what Bowles and Gintis refer to as the meritocratic ideology. Introduce to these students the more truthful belief that wealth in America is not the result of hard work, but rather the result of graft, corruption, and protected crime, and the resistance will be overwhelming. Teaching style and radicalized students are of great importance in overcoming such resistance.

  The first classroom illustration occurs in a college course on Third-World women and feminism.10 The topic of women and resistance led to the mentioning of Eleanor Bumpers, the black woman killed by a squad of policemen in SWAT gear. They were evicting her for being behind in her rent by approximately $98.

  After explaining to the class who Eleanor Bumpers was, the statement was made that negligence in paying her rent had very little to do with her death. The students, predominantly white women, initially could not understand what was meant by such a statement. Using the Socratic method, the students soon understood that Eleanor Bumpers’s death was an illustration of the general treatment of blacks and poor people in our society.

  It spoke of police brutality and racism in its worse form, that of seeing an individual as less than human because that person is nonwhite, poor, and elderly. It spoke of putting material wealth and value over human life. Further discussion concerned the inability of white feminists to identify and express national outrage over this incident. The shared historical experience of the black feminist instructor informed her/him that Eleanor Bumpers was fighting the same war of resistance against dehumanization and dominance that our ancestors in slavery fought. Later in the course the question of capital punishment came up....

  The second illustration of the implementation of thinking black in the classroom is in a course on domestic violence. In a small Eastern college the students were asked to compile lists of adjectives that they associated with the black ghetto, suburbia, and Appalachia. The purpose was to compare similarities and differences in perceptions and then discuss the commonality of wife battering. The composition of the class was fifteen white females and three white males, six black and three Puerto Rican females, and one black male. Interestingly enough the white students glibly offered ghetto characteristics. These included: overcrowding, drugs, muggings, slum areas, poverty, and multiplicity of sexual partners. The last characteristic elicited a perceptible gasp of indignation from a black student. As the instructor heard the list grow, automatically she knew that accepting these responses was to accept a conceptual system that was inherently blaming the victim. That is to say that it was buying into an ideology that attributes defects and inadequacy to the malignant nature of poverty, injustice, slum life, and racial difficulties. The stigma that marks the victim and accounts for her/his victimization is an acquired stigma of social origin. But the stigma, though derived in the past from environmental forces is still located in the victim, inside her/his skin. Within this formation, the liberal humanitarian can have it both ways. She/he can concentrate her/his charitable interests on the defects of the victim, condemn the vague social and environmental stresses that produced the defect, and ignore the continuing effect of victimizing social forces. It justifies a perverse form of social action designed to change not society, but rather society’s victim. It is this type of thinking that the Afrocentric conceptual system aims to undermine. Armed with such a scintillating weapon for change, the black feminist teacher artfully and skillfully interprets classroom interaction while never veering from the goals of liberation for humankind through the process of an analysis of oppressions....

  This analysis of oppression stresses racial, sexual, and heterosexual oppression, as well as class. The critical importance of the racial dimension was illustrated in the classroom example being discussed. The black and Puerto Rican students were asked for their lists of characteristics that they associate with the black ghetto. Leading the list was police brutality, followed by exploitation, slum landlords, worst quality of food in the neighborhood stores with the highest prices, corruption, and insensitive city officials. The discussion that followed concerned reality beginning with experience, and how divergent assumptions about the world leads to contrary references on the same event. It is noteworthy that despite the differences in economic backgrounds of the black and Puerto Rican students, and despite the fact that some were gay others not, inevitably their responses to black feminist pedagogy intimated that the black dimension is and has been critically significant in their lives and to their survival in capitalist America.

  Comments from white students after exposure to black feminist pedagogy were uniform: the majority showed visible signs of being uncomfortable, but remained silent in their discontent and amazement. Slowly but surely, after mustering up much courage, they stated that they felt taken aback, silenced, afraid that they would be challenged with questions they were unable to answer because they had never “thought that way” before (that way being Afrocentric thought or “thinking black”). In response to their comments, the domestic Third World students countered, with assurance and conviction in their voices, expressions such as, “This is the first time in my school career that I feel comfortable, really comfortable, in a class, because I feel like the teacher understands where I’m coming from”; “I feel good about the class because all sides of a question are discussed. For once the white way is not the only way or the right way.” Eventually the vast majority of students realize and appreciate the value of being exposed to the consistency of a perspective that gives credence and respect to all peoples of different cultures....

  Black feminist pedagogy has its roots in Africa, the mother of civilization. The philosophy and practice is applicable and beneficial to people throughout the world. That it holds specific relevancy for racism worldwide is extremely appropriate at this time in the 1980s. Racist mobs of young whites hurling insults and assaulting blacks, and white police regularly beating and brutalizing blacks with near impunity, are endemic to male violence and racist mentalities that distinguish the American landscape. White racist violence is flourishing under the Reagan administration, which has gutted civil rights enforcement and slashed social service spending while pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into militarization and his pestiferous pet—nuclear star wars....

  Schooling in white capitalist America nourishes a system that helps to train/teach young white children to carry out their racist violence. It instills its white students with a cultural imperialism and intellectual ethnocentricism, which fuels them with a white superiority that implicitly and explicitly encourages racism, sexism, and heterosexism. This same educational system fails to educate nonwhites, who attend classes with regularity or irregularity.

  Black feminist pedagogy has as an end result the development of generations of black, white, Puerto Rican, Chicano, Asian American, and Native American people prepared to radically change capitalist white America. It is fitting to have black feminist pedagogy as the theoretical construct for educational change. Black women historically have been central to educational change as teachers, survival technicians, administrators, and revolutionary thinkers. It is politically sound to listen to the reaso
n and intellect of our ancestral educational role models. A social movement led by black women—the vanguard—is in order. If and when persons with vision in America have sufficient power to radically change the social relations, black feminist pedagogy should be the prime blueprint for the task.

  ENDNOTES

  1 S. Bowles and H. Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), 265.

  2 A famous quote by Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, which appears in his Souls of Black Folks. The quote also appears on posters and postcards and has become a popular adage.

  3 Unpublished essay by Dr. Robert Moore from a speech delivered in Toronto, Canada, in 1985 at an education conference.

  4 C. T. Mohanty, The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought; An Essay in the Sociology of Knowledge (paper), 5.

  5 Ibid, 14.

  6 Ibid, 15.

  7 For a full discussion of this literature, see L. Myers, Contributions in Black Studies, How to Think Black: Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, 6, 1983—84, 39—44.

  8 Unpublished essay by R. Moore, Panel on Education—Third National Convention of Women for Racial and Economic Equality, May 1984, 6.

  9 R. Dunayevskaya, from the essay, “Women as Thinkers and Revolutionaries,” Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution, 80.

  10 The classroom illustrations are based on actual experiences of the author.

  Elizabeth Higginbotham

  Elizabeth Higginbotham is associate professor of sociology and associate director of the Center for Research on Women at Memphis State University. Her current research is the upward mobility of women of color, and she is currently completing a book on educated black women. She has published widely on race, class, and gender in the lives of women, and is highly sought after in colleges and universities throughout the country because of her work at Memphis State, designing faculty development workshops on incorporating women of color into the college curriculum. Her essay “Designing an Inclusive Curriculum: Bringing All Women into the Core” (1990) grows out of this important work.

  DESIGNING AN INCLUSIVE CURRICULUM: BRINGING ALL WOMEN INTO THE CORE

  To be successful, transforming the curriculum involves three interrelated tasks. The first is to gain information about the diversity of the female experience. The second task is to decide how to teach this new material, a process that typically involves reconceptualizing one’s discipline in light of a race, class, and gender-based analysis. Often this means learning to move typically marginal groups into the core of the curriculum. Furthermore, efforts can be made to present issues on people of color in their complexity, rather than in stereotypic ways. The third task is to structure classroom dynamics that ensure a safe atmosphere to support learning for all the students. This paper will discuss each of these tasks. It begins with a critique of the traditional curriculum in light of its treatment of people of color.

  MARGINAL IN THE TRADITIONAL CURRICULUM

  When I consistently see many bright and respected scholars failing to take steps to bring women of color into their teaching and research, I look for social, structural explanations. A sociological perspective can help us to understand the roots of racist thinking and the many forms it takes in traditional disciplines and women’s studies. This approach is more productive than blaming these scholars—or simply attacking them as racists. The search for the social, structural roots of the marginalization of people of color in scholarship and education takes me back to my early schooling.

  As a black person in a society dominated by whites, I was always an outsider—a status—that Patricia Hill Collins argues has advantages and costs.1 I was cognizant even as a young child that the experiences of black people were missing in what I was taught in elementary school. This pattern was later replicated in junior high and high school, then in college, and later in graduate school. But while I had been critical all along, not until I entered graduate school could I debate with others about the content of courses.

  Throughout my whole educational career, agents of the dominant group attempted to teach me the “place” of black people in the world. What was actively communicated to me was that black people and other people of color are on the periphery of society. They are marginal. I learned that what happens to people of color has little relevance for members of the dominant group and for mainstream thinking.

  Early in school, when we were studying the original thirteen North American colonies, I was exposed to the myths about who we were and are as a nation. One of the first lessons was that America is a land that people entered in search of freedom—religious freedom, the freedom to work as independent farmers, freedom from the privileged nobility and the hierarchical stratification of Europe, and freedom from the rapid industrialization of Europe. Colonists, and later white immigrants, wanted change in their lives, and they took the risk to begin life anew in this budding but already glorious nation. The fact that they were seeking their “freedom” while enslaving others (principally Native Americans and Africans) was not viewed as a contradictory activity, but just “one of those things” the United States had to do to build a great and prosperous nation.

  New York, where I grew up and received much of my education, prided itself on being a progressive state, and required schools to devote time to the Negro experience (as it was called). We discussed slavery in the South, and during Negro History Week we learned about Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and George Washington Carver. We were explicitly taught that black people did not share the same history as whites. African people had been forced to come to North America against their will, and instead of finding freedom, they had had to work as slaves.

  The experiences of Afro-Americans never informed the standard characterizations of the society: even the slave experience of Africans and Afro-Americans did not alter the image that America was a land in which people found freedom. As a student, I had to master the myths and accept them as part of my socialization into the political system. I also learned that the information I accumulated about black people—and later other people of color—was nice to know for “cultural enrichment.” Exposure to the experiences of Afro-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and others was useful to develop tolerance for difference and make us better citizens, but this information was never meant to identify concepts, to develop perspectives, or to generate images or theories about the society as a whole.

  I was in school to learn the experiences of the dominant group which was also very male, as well as white and affluent—and that would be the basis for an understanding of the system. If I learned that, I could go to college and perhaps do more interesting work than my parents did.

  In spite of the intended message, it was hard for me to understand why the experiences of black people were not incorporated into our images of who we are as a nation. At the time there was no mention of Asian Americans, Chicanos, or Native Americans. But I came to understand the practice. Whatever happened to black people was an exception to the rule —we were a deviant case—just like using “i” before “e” except after “c.” Since the experiences of black people did not have to be included in our search for the truth, they were not the material from which theories and frameworks were derived.

  As I reflect on my early educational experiences, I see that the messages I received as a child, an adolescent, and an adult blamed the victim. For example, we were taught that the African people who “came” to America were not civilized; therefore, they could not pursue the American dream as initial settlers and white immigrants had been able to do. The lack of black participation in mainstream American society was attributed to lesser abilities, defective cultures, lack of motivation, and so forth. To make a “victim-blaming” attribution, teachers did not actually have to say that black Americans were lazy, ignorant, or savage—although that would surely do the trick. Instead, victim-blaming was subtly encouraged in classes where images of America as the land of freedom and opportunity were juxtaposed with the b
lack experience, without any reconciling of the contradictions through a structural explanation. Students then relied on prevailing myths and stereotypes to explain the black “anomaly.”

  As a young black girl, I found these messages problematic, and throughout my life I have sought answers to questions about the experiences of black people at different historic moments. As a scholar, I still struggle with how best to use the knowledge I have gained. Thus, I approach the issue of curriculum integration with a fundamental critique of the traditional curriculum. I did not begin by discovering that women were missing from the curriculum—instead I have always perceived schools as foreign institutions. The information taught in schools was alien to me, to my family, to my neighborhood, and in a certain respect to the city, New York, in which I lived. Yet, in order to move to the next educational level and succeed in society, I had to master this information and pass tests. In my view, you were smart if you could pass the tests, but you had to look elsewhere for information to help you survive in the real world.

  Today’s wave of curriculum reforms presents an opportunity to restructure education, to alter the environment that was alien to me and many others. Such a remedy would include in the curriculum all the people in the classroom and the nation. Instead of focusing solely on the experiences of dominant group members, faculty members would teach students to use and value many different experiences in order to develop conceptions of life in this country and around the world.