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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Thursday, December 12, 1968
The 'good niggers' of education
Editor's note: The author's article was written for the UCLA Daily Bruin Spectra and has been reprinted in numerous student newspapers across the country. It is reprinted here because of its provocative reference to higher education and the university community.
By GERALD FARBER
Students are niggers.
When you get that straight, our schools begin to make sense. It's more important, though, to understand why they're niggers. If we follow that question seriously enough, it will lead us past the zone of academic . . . , where dedicated teachers pass their knowledge on to a new generation, and into the nitty-gritty of human needs and hang-ups. And from there, we can go on to consider whether it might ever be possible for students to come up from slavery.
First, let's see what is happening now. Let's look at the role students play in what we like to call education.
At Cal State L.A., where I teach, the students have separate and unequal dining facilities. If I take them into the faculty dining room, my colleagues get uncomfortable, as though there was a bad smell. If I eat in the student cafeteria, I become known as the educational equivalent of a nigger lover. In at least one building, there are even rest rooms which students may not use. At Cal State, also, there is an unwritten law barring student-faculty love-making. Fortunately, this anti-miscegenation law, like its Southern counterpart, is not 100 per cent effective.
Students at Cal State are politically disenfranchised. They are in an academic Lowndes County. Most of them vote in national elections, their average age is 26, but they have no voice in the decisions which affect their academic lives. The students are, it is true, allowed to have a toy government run for the most part by Uncle Toms and concerned principally with trivia.
The faculty and administrators decide what courses will be offered; the students get to choose their own homecoming queen. Occasionally, when student leaders get uppity and rebellious, they're either ignored, put of with trivial concessions, or maneuvered expertly out of position.
A student at Cal State is expected to know his place. He calls a faculty member "Sir" or "Doctor" or "Professor" and he smiles and shuffles some as he stands outside the professor's office waiting for permission to enter. The faculty tell him what courses to take (in my department, English, even electives have to be approved by a faculty member); they tell him what to read, what to write, and frequently, where to set the margins on his typewriter. They tell him what's true and what isn't.
Some teachers insist that they encourage dissent but they're almost always lying and every student knows it. Tell the man what he wants to hear or he'll fail . . out of the course.
When a teacher says jump, students jump. I know of one professor who refused to take up class time for exams and required students to show up for tests at 6:30 in the morning. And they did, by God! Another, at exam time, provides answer cards to be filled out, each one enclosed in a paper bag with a hole in the top to see through. Students stick their hands in the bags while taking the test. The teacher isn't a provo; I wish he were. He does it to prevent cheating. Another colleague onee caught a student reading during one of his lectures and threw her book against the wall. Still another lectures his students into stupor and then screams at them in rage when they fall asleep.
at them in right.
Just last week, during the first meeting of a class, one girl got up after about 10 minutes gone by. The teacher rushed over, grabbed her by the arm, saying, "This class is NOT dismissed!" and led her back to her seat. On the same day another teacher began by informing his class that he does not like beards, mustaches, long hair on boys, or capri pants on girls, and will not tolerate any of that in his class. The class, incidentally, consisted mostly of high school teachers.
consisted mostly of闷骚.
Even more discouraging than this Auschwitz approach to education is the fact that students take it. They haven't gone through 12 years of public school for nothing, they've learned one thing and perhaps only one thing during those 12 years. They've forgotten their algebra. They're hopelessly vague about chemistry and physics. They've grown to fear and resent literature. They write like they've been lobotomized. But, Jesus, can they follow orders! Freshmen come up to me with an essay and ask if I want it folded and whether their name should be in the upper right hand corner. And I want to cry and kiss them and caress their poor tortured heads.
Students don't ask that orders make sense. They give up expecting things to make sense long before they leave elementary school. Things are true because the teacher says they're true. At a very early age, we all learn to accept "two truths," as did certain medieval churchmen. Outside of
class, things are true to your tongue, your fingers,
your stomach, your heart. Inside class, things are
true by reason of authority. And that's just fine
because you don't care anyway. Miss Wiedemeyer
tells you a noun is a person, place or thing. So let it be. You don't give a . . .
The important thing is to please her. Back in kindergarten, you found out that teachers only love children who stand in nice straight lines. And that's where it's been ever since.
What school amounts to, then, for white and black alike, is a 12-year course in how to be slaves. What else could explain what I see in a freshman class? They've got that slave mentality: obliging and ingratiating on the surface but hostile and resistant underneath.
As do black slaves, students vary in their awareness of what's going on. Some recognize their own put-on for what it is and even let their rebellion break through to the surface now and then. Others, including most of the "good student" have been deeply brain washed. They swallow the ... with greedy mouths. They pathetically want to be pushed around. They're like those old grey-haired house niggers you always find in the South who don't see what all the fuss is about because Mr. Charlie "treats us real good."
because M. Chandler College entrance requirements tend to favor the Toms and screen out the rebels. Not entirely, of course. Some students at Cal State L.A. are expert con artists who know perfectly well what's happening. They want the degree or the II-S and spend their years on the old plantation alternately laughing and cursing as they play the game. If their egos are strong enough, they cheat a lot.
And, of course, even the Toms are angry down deep somewhere. But it comes out in passive rather than active aggression. They're unexplainable thickwitted and subject to frequent spells of laziness. They misread simple questions. They spend their nights mechanically outlining history chapters while meticulously failing to comprehend a word of what's in front of them.
The saddest cases among both black slaves and student slaves are the ones who have so thoroughly introjected their masters' values that their anger is all turned inward.
At Cal State, these are the kinds for whom every low grade is torture, who stammer and shake when they speak to professor, who go through an emotional crisis every time they're called upon during a class. You can recognize them easily at finals time. Their faces are festooned with fresh pimples: their bowels boil audibly across the room. If there really is a Last Judgment, the parents and teachers who created these wrecks are going to burn in hell.
The teachers I know are both college professors. Outside the classroom and taken as a group, their most striking characteristic is timidity.
going to order in here.
So students are niggers. It's time to find out why, and to do this, we have to take a long look at Mr. Charlie.
Just look at their working conditions. At a time when even migrant workers have begun to fight and win, college professors are still afraid to make more than a token effort to improve on their pitiful economic status . . .
Professors were different when I was an undergraduate at UCLA during the McCarthy era; it was like a cattle stampede as they rushed to cop out. And in more recent years, I found my being arrested in sit-ins brought from my colleagues not so much approval or condemnation as open-mouthed astonishment. "You could lose your job!"
Now, of course, there's the Vietnamese war. It gets some opposition from a few teachers. Some support it. But a vast number of professors who know perfectly well what's happening are coping out again. And in the high schools, you can forget it. Stillness reigns.
I'm not sure why teachers are so . . . It could be that academic training itself forces a split between thought and action. It might also be that the tenured security of a teaching job attracts timid persons and, furthermore, that teaching, like police work, pulls in persons who are unsure of themselves and need weapons and the other external trappings of authority.
As Judy Eisenstein has eloquently pointed out, the classroom offers an artificial and protected environment in which they can exercise their will to power. Your neighbors may drive a better car; gas station attendants may intimidate you, your wife may dominate you; the State Legislature may ... on you: but in the classroom, by God, students do what you say or else. The grade is a hell of a weapon. It may not rest on your hip, potent and rigid like a cop's gun, but in the long run it's more powerful. At your personal whim, any time you choose, you can keep 35 students up for nights and have the pleasure of seeing them walk into the classroom pasty-faced and red eyed carrying a sheaf of typewritten pages, with title page, MLA footnotes and margins set at 15 and 91.
The general timidity which causes teachers to make niggers of their students usually includes a more specific fear: fear of the students themselves. After all, students are different from yours.
To make matters worse, you may suspect that you yourself are not the most engaging of persons. What then can protect you from white bwana's pith helmet. So you flaunt that authority. You wither whispers with a murderous glance. You crush objectors with erudition and heavy irony. And worst of all, you make your own attainments seem not accessible but awesomely remote. You conceal your massive ignorance and parade a slender learning.
You might also want to keep in mind that he was a nigger once himself and has never really gotten over it. And there are more causes, some of which are better described in sociological than psychological terms. Work them out, it's not hard.
But in the meantime, what we've got on our hands is a whole lot of niggers. And what makes this particularly grim is that the student has less chance than the black man of getting out of his bag. Because the student doesn't even know he's in it. That, more or less, is what's happening in higher education. And the results are staggering.
education. And the results are fascinating.
For one thing, damn little education takes place in the schools. How could it? You can't educate slaves: you can only train them. Or, to use an even uglier word, you can only program them.
Educational oppression is trickier to fight than racial oppression. If you're black rebel, they can't exile you: they either have to intimidate you or kill you.
But in high school or college, they can just bounce you out of the fold. And they do. Rebel students and renegade faculty members get smothered or shot down with devastating accuracy. In high school, it's usually the student who gets it; in college, it's more often the teacher. Others get tired of fighting and voluntarily leave the system. This may be a mistake though. Dropping out of college, for a rebel, is a little like going north, for a Negro. You can't really get away from it so you might as well stay and raise hell.
How do you raise hell? That's a whole other article. But just for a start, why not stay with the analogy? What have black people done? They have, first of all, faced the fact of their slavery. They've stopped kidding themselves about an eventual reward in the Great Watermelon Patch in the sky. They've organized; they've decided to get freedom now, and they've started taking it.
Students, like black people, have immense unused power. They could, theoretically, insist on participating in their own education. They could make academic freedom bilateral. They could teacher their teachers to thrive on love and admiration, rather than fear and respect, and to lay down their weapons. Students could discover community. And they could learn to dance by dancing on IBM cards. They could make coloring books out of the catalogues and they could put the grading system in a museum.
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