jane rohrer / englit 2542

In the writing of this book, I was asked by several readers to compare and contrast what happens in these churches with what happens in White churches. I chose not to respond to those requests for several reasons. First, this was an ethnographic study of specific African-American churches. To study White churches would require a separate study. Second, and most importantly, to compare and contrast what people in African-American churches do with texts with what people in White churches do with texts suggests that only through this comparison and contrast with the dominant power group in American society can the actions of another group be validated

The predominance of underpaid and/or under-trained educators in secondary schools, particularly as it relates to the multiple literacies of young people of colour, mirrors the structural racism that has organized much of the schooling that working class/working-poor Black and Latino students have received all along. We know from education research that working class/working-poor Black and Latino students are more likely to have instruction delivered to them from the most underpaid, novice and/or uncertified teachers; and, most critically, this kind of structure has had dire consequences on these students’ achievement

The value of individualism is consonant with White supremacy when large groups of students of color fail to achieve under its account. White supremacy in my usage refers to practices that confer privileges to white-skinned Anglo Americans at the expense of disprivileging people not of white skin, a form of racism. The percentage of students suffering under this paradigm is far beyond that of a smattering of lazy or cognitively deficient individuals who can’t measure up. The failure is not individual, but ethnic and cultural groups are underachieving under the present (decades long) practices. This indicates that the problem is structural

This is not to say that these communities are without hope, but these are the harsh conditions under which hope dares to blossom. Opportunity deserts are the racial underside of a society that has turned its back on poor black people. This indifference to the poor allows most white Americans to be willfully ignorant of what happens in such places and to ignore the history of racism in this country that has cosigned so many black people to poverty with little to no chance of escaping it. Most white Americans never go there--literally or metaphorically--and have a hard time imagining that such places exist

After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong

If demanding recognition and inclusion remains at the center of minority politics, it will lead only to a delimited notion of personhood as property that zeroes in comparatively on only one form of subjugation at the expense of others, thus allowing for the continued existence of hierarchical differences between full humans, not-quite humans, and nonhumans. This can be gleaned from the “successes” of the mainstream feminist, civil rights, and lesbian-gay rights movements, which facilitate the incorporation of a privileged minority into the ethnoclass of Man at the cost of the still and/or newly criminalized and disposable populations (women of color, the black poor, trans people, the incarcerated, etc.).

Like generations of white teenagers before them, white teenage rap fans are listening in on black culture, fascinated by its differences, drawn in by mainstream social constructions of black culture as a forbidden narrative, as a symbol of rebellion. Kathy Ogren's study of jazz in the 1920's shows the extensive efforts made by white entertainers and fans to imitate jazz music, dance styles, and language as well as the alarm such fascination caused on the part of state and local authority figures. Lewis Erenberg's study of the development of the cabaret illustrates the centrality of jazz music to the fears over blackness associated with the burgeoning urban nightlife culture. There are similar and abundant case for rock'n'roll as well

What the novel and the lyrics highlight to me is a real need for hip-hop feminism to be engaged with all aspects of black girls’ lives—we don’t want to be accused of being irrelevant to young black women in the ways that some of us have categorized academic black feminism. It makes no sense to pick and choose images and the artists who create the images and lyrics by deeming some negative and some positive, all the while creating false dichotomies. The issues and the artists are much more complicated than these simplistic readings allow. Rappers like Tupac Shakur, Dead Prez, Common, Mos Def, and others are nothing if not complicated and sometimes conflicted young men. A cursory look at their work shows us that. Hip-hop feminism needs to be bolder in its critiques, even if it means calling out the so-called good guys every once and a while