Outside the Walls of Academia

For a time, it was fashionable for whites to teach African American literature or Muslim women's literature. On the other hand, I remember trying unsuccessfully to convince a white English department chair that there was a need for a Women of Color course or a Black Studies course. In 2000, at this University of Wisconsin campus at Parkside, after an ugly scene of abuse of power, I was given an office in the education department, ultimately, where I was among a few other colored faculty, including a black female chair. I had taught at the college levels for decades by then, but my presence in the English department would have send the wrong message to the predominately white student body.

I had taught African American literature courses at Loyola University Chicago where I received my doctorate in modern American literature before arriving at the University of Wisconsin Parkside. In fact, I had been teaching literature since the 1980s. Bypassing the chair of English, I introduced myself to the white male South African chair of Ethnic Studies who agreed to me teaching an African Diaspora course, as well as that Women of Color course before the spring term. In the meantime, the women (white) of the campus didn't want to have anything to do with me; they never invited me to a meeting.

It wasn't long after I arrived at another University of Wisconsin campus that the chair, not the chair who hired me, but one keen on informing me that I wouldn't be staying long. She happened along in her car one day, and asked me to hop inif I wanted a lift. I had been shopping for a small, collapsible chair.. I was leaving a little shop in the town where I just purchased a small, collapsible chair. I noticed she had a friend in the passenger seat, so once I settled into the backseat, she glanced back at me, saying something about how fortunate I was to find something portable. Easy for you to move when the year is up, she added.

I sat along in my home one day recalled the moment this woman approached me, waving a publication of the Callaloo Journal, a Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters. A smile filled her face while her hands flipped through the pages of the journal, landing on the first page of her article. I stood nodding and smiling but finding no evidence of sisterhood in her sharing gesture. While I stood next to her, I recalled that her credentials indicated that she was a scholar in the study of Anglo-Saxon literature.

At the end of the fall term, she praised my accomplishments in the classroom: Above the call of duty! When I returned in spring, however, I heard nothing of those accomplishments and neither did anyone else, for I had only a few students signed up for my classes and only one older white female faculty dared speak to me the whole term.

Another white faculty's scholarship was in history, Western history; however, she taught courses in Muslim women's literature.

I doubt if the literature of African American and Muslim women is so fashionable now.

I taught African American women's literature at the University of Wisconsin Madison where, again, a black woman scholar in black studies hired me and then left. I was scheduled to teach what was Professor Nellie McKay's course, African American Women's Literature. McKay had come to the city and established African American studies decades before. I had talked with her once, by phone, when I was still at Parkside. I asked her what was going on? Why so much fear and hate?

I don't recall McKay's response, but when this opportunity came about to teach her course, I was honored. Then, a week or two into the term, Professor McKay dies of cancer, and I thought of leaving the campus. I was to encounter now someone black who had already threw up her hands. If I left, she would have to teach the course, and she didn't want to teach it!

I checked this woman's biography. Her study focused on the works and ideas of W. E. B. DuBois. DuBois! Certainly Madison could use a course or two in DuBois! But no!

This was 2006. I wasn't to talk with my own TA! I wasn't to influence this young black women with ideas of resisting the tyranny of authoritarian rule. This black tenured faculty was determined to see to it that this younger women succeed and clearly I wasn't the best mentor to push her along that worn-out road.

The next year, there was a moment when this tenured woman became my sister. Expressing surprise that I hadn't a classes to teach, and we were in the middle of summer, she agreed to talk with the white male chair. Another week or two passed, and I never heard from this woman or the chair again. Quickly, I applied to teach an English composition class. How many times had I taught this course since the 1980s? Yet, I was asked to come to an interview! At that interview, it didn't take long to see why the department insisted I attend an interview.

Familiar with the chair, but here was a face I hadn't seen before. Administration, I thought to myself as I took the only available seat. It faced both white men. I looked at the weak attempt to smile from the chair and the more sinister smile of the other man, and I knew the decision was made already. I was to be crushed. Resoundingly chastised like a child for making the mistake of seating in that seat!

Had I made any mistakes?

A cold face matching cold eyes.

*

I witnessed so much complicity in the 1980s. So many black and latina opted to join the status quo rather than refuse to give up the achievement of a democratic society. I experienced injustice and witness plenty. I knew too much about the workings of white supremacy, imperialism, and genocide. The US was complicit when it wasn't the instigator, supplying the capital and the weapons for a struggling nation to incarcerate, torture, and kill its own. It's patriotic to say that this isn't the country fit for anyone to fight for, let alone live in, raise a family, and become educated in values and beliefs that don't require the oppression or the slaughter of someone else.

While black Americans confronted a draconian justice system and others pursued anything that didn't remind them of the slavery, white scholars eagerly accepted courses in African American studies or latino studies, thus fulfilling the government quota of offering electives in race studies, but without the discomfort of having to imagine the cruelty and violence of slavery or Jim Crow or the Trail of Tears from someone experiencing the legacy of those events.

It's always possible that a white teacher, such as the former students I had who are now professors, to confront the violence of the past and render an honest interpretation of texts focusing on the experience of the historically oppressed. It's possible to be white and teach the dirty parts of Beloved, without, as one Madison librarian suggested in 2006, on radio, eliminating any discussion on those what might be too painful for the professor or for the students.

Currently, however, the policy put forth by an authoritarian regime in the White House takes away the decision such as Beloved, one way or the other. Once eliminated, it's difficult to initiate a discussion about the dirty parts, that is, about the terrorism surrounding a culture of rape. The defilement of young teens, routine during slavery, is now a topic that is in violation of the authoritarian regime in Washington D.C. The elimination of any discussion of the dirty parts from the university classroom is intended to leave today's youth with the impression that pedophiles and child-sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell are newcomers on the block. Altogether, the banning of Beloved or Fire Next Time or Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, send whole generations of young Americans down a memory hole while leaving the lie that the black experience is limited to the justice system, courts, and prison cells to represent truth. After all, black people are predators and criminals but never the historical victims of hundreds of years of systemic rape and sexual abuse.

Black Americans are being erased while Confederate villains are being declared heroes. I'm dare to be upset. Dared to speak out. I sit surrounded by the books I once taught. Is this nation headed towards a world like that in 1984, in which my memory, too, is to be repressed, or will I be committed to declare 2 + 2 = 5, and, ultimately, my love for Big Brother?

In the novel, They, the authority has the right to enter the homes where there are still libraries and remove books from shelves, until none exist.

*

Recently, I read professor Rashid Khalidi's letter to the acting president of Columbia University. In the letter, Professor Khalidi, the Edward Said professor emeritus of Modern Arab studies at Columbia, explains why he has decided not to teach his course in Modern Middle East history, his scholarship for 50 years. It is impossible, Khalidi writes, to teach this course (and much else) in light of Columbia's adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

Doing so, Khalidi continues, would acknowledge that he agrees with the IHRA's deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflating Jewishness with the policies of the nation of Israel in Gaza. Any criticism of Israel's policies toward Palestine is a criticism of Jews. While the ancient evil of Jew-hatred is to be condemned, it's not, Khalidi, argues, the same as calling out genocide in Gaza.

What makes Columbia's capitulation to IHRA so egregiousness is that any discussion to be offered by students or their teaching assistants would come under the scrutiny of a vice-provost initially tasked with surveilling Middle East studies. What qualifies this monitor to interview all agreement-related individuals, and visit all agreement-related facilities, trainings, transcripts of agreement-related meetings and disciplinary hearings and reviews? In addition, Khalidi writes that this monitor is allowed by the administration at Columbia to screen teaching syllabuses and scholarship of some of the most prominent academics in their fields.

All this, Khalidi writes, so the cover-up of genocide in Gaza remains intact and no one is permitted to protest or support opposition to what amounts to a crime recognized around the world.

The professor ends the letter vowing to conduct public lectures, focusing on some of the material he would have covered in his course at Columbia. Only now, he plans to conduct these courses elsewhere.

Columbia University's leadership is now fully complicit in a crime.

Those who managed careers in higher education and who are newly retired and have been financially rewarded should think to offer courses outside the walls of academia. I'm not thinking in terms of a second career or any career that supplements social security or pensions.

Before Trump and his regime began the process to dismantle institutions of higher education, many of us, as bell hooks once wrote, were already looking in from the outside even when we were inside. We were marginalized and our subjects considered nothing more than electives. The important business of becoming an educated American, an educated human being, didn't have anything to do with a study of enslavement in the US or the US's slaughter of millions of indigenous in a US genocide. Few Americans are familiar with the history of the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the Anglo-Saxons determination to ousts the Spanish and the Native Americans in order to settle white Americans in the West.

We called for a restructuring of and subsequent review of values and goals of higher education in the US. Human beings existed in African and in what is now the Caribbean and South and North America long before the Anglo-Saxon arrived and declared Manifest Destiny something the American native and the world had to contend with or else.

War and nuclear devastation then. Today, tariffs and bribes.

Because we are facing an existential crisis, I'm thinking of teaching that takes place outside of the institutions of higher education. As part of the Civil Rights movement, organizations such as SNCC offered Freedom Schools, education that occurs outside of the system. Freedom Schools offered a progressive approach to learning the basics, that is, writing, reading, history, literature. As the website Civil Rights Teaching recalls, disenfranchised African Americans, as a result of improving basic skills, became active political actors on their own behalf. It's understandable how such an approach to learning for African Americans to truly fight for democracy and justice would threaten Americans fearful of the success of such a program that would educate blacks to speak truth to power?

The US, if it's to survive this authoritarian turn to cruelty and exclusion, must have those willing to think outside the box and carry out liberation events, also, outside the box. That is, hold courses at at parks, in school gyms, in church, in homes, wherever, but let the halls of academia seethe with the ones speaking of hate and holding hate-rallies as did Old Miss, the University of Alabama, even Kent State University.

Before incoming freshmen take courses in science, anthropology, social science, law, or medicine, those students should be introduced to themselves and others and others not as the dreaded immigrants or foreigners. The others are the majority of the world. The others will teach US students a great deal about their domestic history and current policies as well as their historical relations with people in Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean, and South America.

According to Trump, Americans want no part of progressive thinking. It's not a matter, however, of progressive thinking. It's a matter of truth-telling. And, in fact, Americans are out in the streets and on the rural roads of America protesting against Trump's fascist agenda. Courses held outside the walls of academia would join those already risking all to protest. Outside!

Imagine free courses offered not only to the 18- to 21-year-old, but to whomever wants to engage in a meaningful fight against the takeover of this country by authoritarians.

Don't believe the fascist narrative, for fear isn't welcome and ignorance isn't strength!