Got this essay in my inbox today, and I'm still pondering it. And when I say "ponder," I mean seriously questioning the value of HBCUs, their future, and what the relationship of black faculty and students who survive and thrive (sometimes) in predominately white institutions of higher ed should be. My dissertation adviser specifically argued against my accepting a dissertation fellowship at an HBCU because such colleges were "run like plantations"! In other words, I'm feeling what Mark Anthony Neal is saying here:
"Black Schools Kill Smart Niggers"? Reconciling the Romance for Black Institutions in the Post-Soul Era
Mark Anthony Neal
When I accepted my first tenure track position at Xavier University of Louisiana in the summer of 1996, I was filled with the romance that only nine-years of undergraduate and graduate training at largely white public institutions in Western New York State could produce. Yes, I was happy to leave behind the regional phenomenon known as “lake effect” snow for the warmth and hotness of the “Big Easy,” but more to the point, as the only historically Black and Catholic university in the nation, Xavier offered me my first engagement with an Historically Black College and University (HBCU). As an African-American male from the South Bronx, my first 12 years of schooling were spent at an all-black Seventh Day Adventist school and a large specialized high school in Brooklyn, NY that defined the concept of urban cosmopolitanism. Yet my experiences in higher education were quite different, spending nearly a decade in classrooms in which I functioned, to borrow a term that Greg Tate once used to describe the career of Jean Michel Basqiuat, as a “flyboy in the buttermilk.” I was devout in my desire not to reproduce that experience, now that I was on the other-side of the desk, so to speak. Armed with a dissertation with enough post-modern jargon to choke the ghost of Baudrillard and still filled with the swagger of the late 1980s renaissance of black cultural nationalism, I “turned south” in hopes of finding my professional purpose. Having never experienced the presence of a black man as a teacher, on any level of formal schooling, I was also endowed with the idea that I needed to be at an HBCU to be on the front lines of saving the next generation of black “boys to men.” It was a heady romance indeed, but also a short lived one.
I was only at Xavier for six weeks when a lunchtime encounter with a very prominent black public intellectual led to the conversation that provides the title for my essay. “Black schools kill smart niggers” was the warning—still remembering the sense of clarity that I sought at the moment I heard the warning—and even before I could utter a word about my commitment to black students, said black public intellectual remarked, “there are black students everywhere that you can teach.” The conversation stayed in the back of my head until months later when my identity politics, in the form of my scholarly interests in black gender and sexual politics, my support of a black woman colleague who was being professionally hazed by the head of my department and as well as my distinct commitment to use “black vernacular” in the classroom made me a target of both my immediate supervisor and the Dean of Faculty. I can remember thinking to myself, as I left Xavier’s campus for the last time after only a year, accepting a position back in New York State, that for the first time in my life I had a firm grasp on the functions of a plantation. To be sure, I’ve experienced plantation life on many a university campus since that initial tenure track position, though places like Duke University, for example, are quite skilled in obscuring that reality. Nevertheless my experience at Xavier raised critical questions for me about the value of historically black colleges and universities, if not historically black institutions in general, particularly in the so-called “Post-Soul” era in which the totems of blackness flow so efficiently through mainstream culture, often to the effect of obliterating their distinctly black sources.
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Pictured: Fisk University Jubilee Singers.
4 comments:
I take exception with the comparative tone of both posts. We should be able to critique the running and function of HBCUs as institutions and then contextualize that within their mission to provide space for African American scholars (the comparative then being only within the concept of are they meeting their goal). To compare them to the larger educational system and argue that they are worse obfuscates the reality of 1: how the institution of higher ed perpetuates racism, tokenism, and the grinding down or out of anyone who does not play the game (something Neal has no doubt forgotten as one of the "chosen few" "super stars" of a white ivy) and 2. how higher ed, regardless of its designation, is organized around principles that are shared problems like the hazing he mentions, the targeting of women he mentions, the targeting of innovative or "urban" teaching styles, he mentions. None of these things are, as his prose implies, specific to HBCUs. They are played out every day in on college campuses across the country. The only difference is Neal and his ilk benefit from it, while still no doubt experiencing oppression as black men, and the rest of us occassionally benefit from their patronage. Wow that's like moving from the slave quarters to the big house. Forgive me, but I prefer my revolution without the master's tools.
As for the HBCUs, I'd like to see a discussion of their efficacy that really delves into how they are run, what their purpose is and if they are meeting it, and what they have meant to intellectual development, scholarship, and, for lack of a better word, "uplift." B/c these things deserve investigation in their own right. And by taking them seriously, and not as some off shoot of white institutions, maybe we can come up with revolutionary changes not just argue that we should all return to the crab barrel and hope we can do ethnic performance well enough to reach up to the top of the barrell on the backs of our fallen and outcast colleagues. (And no, starting an insular organization to cherry pick faculty of color successors which is just an act of exclusion on the left, doesn't change the system either. And again I say, a revolution requires different tools.)
duuuude. somebody had a case of the cranks didn't they. ;P
I agree that HBCUs need to be studied in their own right and not in a comparative model. I also agree that what is listed in the excerpt is in fact common in all types of higher ed and the real problem is the desire for utopia as if we do not all live in the same society.
I don't know, to me diversity programs in higher ed that limit hires and admissions, while claiming to be creating equity, are probably worse than anything at an HBCU. I'm sure no student at the later assumes your a "diversity higher" and therefore ignorant and unqualified.
"you're" not "your"
sorry.
“Post-Soul” era...scary thought.
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