Think about a course that you are currently most excited about teaching. Why is this an important course? How does it deepen’s one understanding of the world?
My courses centered on the black freedom struggle excite me most. For one, they are in my wheelhouse; more important, they are typically the most transformative for students in how they theorize about the politics of history; how they conceptualize race as a social construct and a construct of power and racism, particularly structural racism; and how they conceive of themselves as social change agents. I teach a lecture course titled “The Civil Rights Movement Reconsidered” and an upper-level seminar titled “The Politics of Narrating the Black Freedom Struggle.” These two courses overlap, with the seminar expanding on the theoretical, historical, and historiographical questions that typically emerge during the lecture course.
The stated function of the lecture course is to complicate the popular civil rights narrative (the saintly, accidental activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat which prompted the modern civil rights movement in which the preordained Martin Luther King Jr. led the black masses in their triumph over bad white people in the racist South). The actual function of the class has been “blowing students’ minds,” regardless of their race, about the history they have been given regarding African Americans’ freedom struggle – or, more accurately, the history they have not been given. Rather than deal in stories of saints and martyrs, we learn to explore how marginalized groups with little resources shifted their social position through activities that were often mundane, arduous, and largely invisible. In the process, we consider how and why popular renditions of history become popular and what effect they have on subsequent activism.
Relatedly, we consider how certain tactics affect popular understanding of particular histories. For instance, much of civil rights activism was invisible by design, particularly that of Black women: as a result, only recently has Black women’s centrality to the civil rights movement become evident. This course requires frank discussions about race and racism and we spend much time defining both concepts, doing so makes the necessary discussions about racism and white supremacy less taboo, though no less loaded. Additionally, an important feature of this course is my insistence on identifying and defining terms most students have never interrogated before, including: power, politics, freedom, leader, leadership, movement, and struggle. Insisting students are informed and intentional when using these terms encourages them to pay attention to how others theorize about or deploy these concepts beyond the classroom. The most gratifying aspect of this class is that it engenders a unique bond between the students in the course, which, as I have witnessed, often lasts for the remainder of their time at the college, sometimes in casual friendship, but often in social change or justice actions.
The seminar allows for greater immersion in the project rooted in the lecture. In the seminar, we focus intensely on how and why historians or other scholars have approached a particularly history as they have and how it matters beyond academia. This involves examining methods and sources, of course, but also much consideration of scholars’ positionality (e.g. what, if any responsibilities do white cis men and women have when writing about African American history?). These discussions impress upon students that scholarship is the creation of knowledge, and thus inextricably tied to power.
What are the five most salient materials from your course, and why is each important?
The syllabus (seriously)
I ask my students to recognize the syllabus as a text, a narrative, and a blueprint, that is the result of a series of choices (worthy of evaluation) and reflects an agenda. Students should care, and hopefully ask about, why their teacher chose the materials she/he/they did. I want them to understand that they have entered an imbalanced learning experience (in that I am the “authority” on the subject), which makes them vulnerable to consuming the curriculum without interrogating it. I want them to question the logic of a curriculum – the reading materials and assignments; not for the sake of criticism (although…), but for the sake of being better equipped to determine how that learning experience can be most useful to them beyond the classroom. One question I encourage my students to ask of their teachers is “What would you have assigned if you had more time; in other words, what didn’t make the cut and why?” I love answering that question because I love to share good scholarship, it makes students aware of more resources, and it emphasizes the point that choices have been made.
Walter Johnson, “On Agency” (2003)
This is the first scholarly article students read in any of my courses that focus on Black people and their histories. Johnson criticizes social historians of U.S. slavery who, in their well-meaning efforts to attribute agency to Blacks, and particularly enslaved Blacks, conflated agency, humanity, and resistance. Johnson laments that the project of “restoring agency”—which held finding evidence of agency (in the form of resistance) as the end goal—precluded historians from asking questions about the complex political and cultural contexts in which Blacks have operated, which certainly resulted in varied and conflicting theories, experiences, and practice; in other words, questions that got to the complexity of the Black experience, but also Black people. I assign this article to discourage students from reflexively expecting or making Black historical actors “moral resistors” always engaged in and defined by their struggle.
Nikki Giovanni, “Nikki Rosa” (1970)
Similar to Johnson, this poem cautions students about going in with assumptions or looking for a particular Black person or experience – or, worse yet, assigning one. It concludes:
…
And I really hope no white person ever has cause
To write about me
Because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they'll
Probably talk about my hard childhood
And never understand that
All the while I was quite happy.
Robin Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (1994)
I assign the introduction and first chapter of this book (respectively, “Writing Black Working History from Way, Way Below” and “Shiftless of the World Unite!”) because Kelley asks (and helps) us reconsider the meaning of politics. In particular, he argues that if we use traditional definitions of politics, in which only certain formal institutions (e.g. Congress, political parties) and activities (e.g. voting, running for office) are political, working class people fall out of view. As a result, we cannot understand how they organize or act on their behalf often in ways that are informal, spontaneous, and “invisible by design.” This article is helpful to me in encouraging students to look for and question absences in the histories they read and to pay attention to the mundane stuff that goes into negotiating and combatting racism.
Etheridge Knight, The Essential Etheridge Knight (1986)
I use this book when discussing the evolving mass incarceration of Black people and, in particular, Black men. Etheridge Knight served an eight-year prison sentence during the 1960s. While incarcerated, Knight began his career as a poet, writing about his experiences as a Black man, drug addict, veteran, felon, and prisoner. Knight’s poems offer students a different source – and a primary source at that – for examining how systemic racism evolved and took form in the prison industrial complex and how that affected the greater Black community. I typically pair this book with chapter five of Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, which – entitled the “New Jim Crow” – presents much of the book’s main arguments. While I vary the selection of poems, I always use the following one.
REHABILITATION & TREATMENT IN THE PRISONS OF AMERICA
The Convict strolled into the prison administration building to get assistance and counseling for his personal problems. Inside the main door were several other doors proclaiming: Doctor, Lawyer, Teacher, Counselor, Therapist, etc. He chose the proper door, and was confronted with two more doors: Custody and Treatment. He chose Treatment, went in, and was confronted with two more doors: First Offender and Previous Offender. Again he chose the proper door and was confronted with two more doors: Adult and Juvenile. He was an adult, so he walked through that door and ran smack into two more doors: Democrat and Republican. He was democrat, so he rushed through that door and ran smack into two more doors: Black and White. He was Black, so he rushed–ran–through that door–and fell nine stories to the street.
What is a dream course that you’d be interested in teaching in the future?
I am dying to teach a historical methods course (currently, my department does not offer one, which I find absurd). Lecture courses do not allow enough time or depth for sustained concentration on how historians do their work. In the seminar, students focus on the work of historians through a reading-intensive curriculum; but their skills aren’t put to the test until the final paper. It is a setup to assign students an extensive research paper, without having walked them carefully, step-by-step through the steps of research, analyzing research, and articulating findings based on research. Moreover, a methods course allows the opportunity to discuss different methods and sources, the politics of interpretation and narration, and the ethics of doing responsible research; as well as to discuss the world of the historian: academia, conferences, research trips, archives, journals, fields of specializations, etc. A central tenet of my philosophy as a history teacher is that all history courses should expose students to what it means to be a historian. I went through college without truly understanding that history was an actual discipline and doing history was a legitimate profession. And, because I also knew nothing about graduate school, my path to becoming a historian was unnecessarily long and circuitous. I do not want someone who wants to be or should be a historian leaving my courses without knowing they can be and without some sense of how to make it happen.
What is a book that changed your life as a high schooler?
Many are surprised to learn that I barely attended high school. I hated it, due in large part to the extremely “white” education I received in a large white high school. I only graduated due to the sheer persistence of my mother and one astute counselor. All of this to say, I liked very little and remember less about what I read in high school. But. One of my courses required that I read Their Eyes Were Watching God (I honestly can’t imagine which one of my high school teachers would have assigned that book) and I distinctly remember thinking, “I’ve never read anything like this, I didn’t know you could write like this.” Consider the opening lines of the book and imagine their effect on a disaffected, Black teenage girl:
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. They act and do things accordingly.
I tell my students that its important they read various genres for the sound of the language; otherwise, the generic voice of academia (which, make no mistake, is the voice of the dominant class) will crowd out, if not strangle their own. When I’m looking for, or at risk of losing my voice, I turn to Hurston, as well as Giovanni, Knight, Gloria Naylor, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, Julia Alvarez, Gabriel García Marquéz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Adrian Louis and James Baldwin (“God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!”)
Hurston’s writing was the first that impressed the sound of language upon me. Take for example, a passage about how Janie, the protagonist of Their Eyes, experienced a hurricane while living and working in the Everglades.
The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.
I mean, come on!
What is one piece of advice that you’d give to new teachers?
Do not pretend you know things you do not know! For one, you will get caught and it will undermine your credibility. More important, however, you will create unnecessary anxiety for yourself if you think you need to perform all-knowingness. You will be much more relatable and effective if you approach your students with the mindset that you are the authority (because, of course, you are) and remember that, while they may ask questions for which you have no answers or they may have information you don’t, none of them, ever, has given more thought to the materials or the topics at hand. If necessary, I remind my students of this; but it is most important that I remember it.
Not knowing something is a great opportunity to demonstrate learning for students. “I actually don’t know the answer to that. Does anyone else have an answer [“have an answer,” not “know the answer”] for so-and-so?” “Can you email me that question so I don’t leave here and forget it? Then I’ll let you know what I find out. Or, hey! Better yet, why don’t you let me know what you find out!” My student evaluations routinely include effusive praise for my willingness to admit when I do not know something (a common occurrence!!), which indicates this is somewhat unique in students’ experiences.