ENGLIT 2542

...tensions emanated from my dual role as community participant and researcher...I found that, from time to time, I was trapped by that ancient model of research that dictacted that any reference to one's self in a study as the researcher be done in an impersonal, dispassionate, third person way--the researcher. That model tries to erase the personal, affective experiences of researchers. When I fell into that trap (in which I was never a permanent resident), I would see my roles as community participant and researcher as opposing roles. That is, I feared that my role as a community participant who looked at African-American churches as rich resources for literacy instruction prevented me from being a rigorous researcher. 'Rigorous' researchers, I then thought, looked for the negative, the failures, the deficiencies. Because I did not stay in these traps permanently, I was able to dismiss my narrow view of the rigorous researcher as nothing more than the ravings of a scholar under the pressure of book and tenure deadlines

Some people have run with the idea that African American students are anti-intellectual. Nothing could be further from the truth. Some young people manage to excel academically despite being disrespected (by the educational system) from Kindergarten through the college curriculum anyway, retaining a positive Afrocentric sense of self and still identifying with their home communities and peers

...the [rhetoric and composition] community is not aligned either with the content-worldview of [black students]...Though there are numerous works about the unique, linguistic competencies of students of African descent, the dehumanizing experiences that these students face as endemic to their education have not been ameliorated

“'Can a Poem Stop a Jail from Being Built?' On Fugitive Counter-Ethics as Prison Pedagogy,” Meghan McDowell and Alison Reed.

...rhetoric that served to 'other' Obama by indicating that he thinks too well of himself or that he speaks too well re-inscribes the racist notion that there is a proper and prescribed role and place for a Black man in society - even a free Black man who happens to be President of the United States.

What is, so to speak the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.

Nevertheless, the benefits accrued through the juridical acknowledgement of racialized subjects as fully human often exacts a steep entry price, because inclusion hinges on accepting the codification of personhood as property, which is, in turn, based on the comparative distinction between groups" (77)

As a former constitutional law professor, surely President Obama is familiar with intersectionality, so why, then, would he commission a task force, and more recently his own nonprofit alliance, to address issues among boys of color that are very often just as prevalent among girls of color? Perhaps it is for the same reason that nearly fifty years ago Abbey Lincoln had to ask, 'Who will revere the black woman?' Black women and girls do not have political cachet or cultural capital. Yet, President Obama has positioned himself in a vulnerable space as the first black president and probably the most publicly prominent black man to claim a feminist identity.

The economic, educational, political, and social realities of black life in the twenty-first century are also being laid bare. More often than not, and not without being highly problematic, the realities being laid bare are framed as a black male crisis

...if I don't talk about race, how will my students ever know how their whiteness affects society before they leave their suburban neighborhoods and rural homes, go off to college or into the workforce, and carry on their lives as if slavery never happened?