octobor, 1969
the ram's horn
page 7
s Nigger...
l^0if egos sre strong enough, they cheat a lot. And, of course, even the Toms are angry
deep somewhere. But it comes out in passive rather than active aggression.
Mfiey're unexplainable thick-witted and subject to frequent spells of laziness. They
'misread simple questions. They spend their nights mechanically outlining history
'(iiaptere while meticulously failing to comprehend a word of what's in them.
he saddest case among both black slaves and student slaves are the ones who have
throughly introjected their masters' values that their anger is all turned inward. At
State, these are kids for whom every low grade is torture, who stammer and shake
!hen they speak to a professor, who go through an emotional crisis every time they're
lied on in class, you can recognize them easily at finals time. Their fkes are
itooned with fresh pimples; their bowels boil audibly across the room. If there
lly was a Last Judgement, the parents and teachers who created these wrecks would
lurn in hell.
jSo students are niggers. It's time to find out why, and to do this, we have to take a
ong look at Mr. Charlie.
Professors afraid to better status?
he teachers I know best are college professors. Outside the classroom and taken as a
up, their most striking characteristic is timidity. They're short on (Bleep! Bleep!),
ljust look at their working conditions. At a time when even migrant workers have
jgun to fight and win, college professors are afraid to make more than a token effort
;o improve on their pitiful economic status. In California state colleges, the faculties
e (Bleep) regularly and vigorously by the Governor and Legislature and yet they still
n't offer any solid resistance. They lie flat on their stomachs with their pants down,
mbiing catch-phrases like "professional dignity" and "meaningful dialogue."
rofessors were no different when I was an undergraduate at UCLA during the
Carthy era; it was like a cattle stampede as they rushed to cop out. And in more
;ent years, I found that my being arrested in sit-ins brought from my colleagues not
much approval or condemnation as open-mouthed astonishment "You could lose
rjob!" •
! Now of course there's the Vietnamese war. It gets some opposition from a few
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teachers. Some support it. But a vast number of professors who know perfectly well
what's happening are copping out again. And in the high schools, you can forget it
Stillness reigns. . . . .
I'm not sure why teachers are so chickenshit It could be that academic training itself
forces a split between thought and action. It might also be that the tenured security of
teaching job attracts timid persons and, furthermore, that teaching, like police wor
^ulls in persons who are unsure of themselves and need weapons and other externa
ti'appings of authority.
At any rate, teachers ARE short on (Bleep! Bleep!). And, as Judy Eisenstein has
''oquently pointed out, the classroom offers an artificial and protec e ^
^hich they can exercise their will to power. Your neighbors may drive a better ^r, gas
‘Nation attendants may intimidate you; your wife may
egislature may shit on you; but in the classroom, by God, students do what you
^y-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.
Fear of students
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 just like black people. You stand exposed in front of them, knowing that
their interests, their values, and their language are different from yours. To make
matters worse, you may suspect that you yourself are not the most engaging of
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persons. What can protect you from their ridicule and scorn? Respect and Authority.
That's what It's the policeman's gun again. The white bwana's pith helmet. So you
flaunt your 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.
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 a 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 field. 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 in; in college, it's more often
the teacher. Others get tired of fighting 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 power. They could, theoretically, insist
on participating in their own educatian. They could make academic freedom bilateral.
They could teach 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 on the IBM cards. They could make museum. They could
raze one set of walls after another rnd let life come blowing into the classroom. They
could raze another set of walls artJ let education come blowing out and flood the
streets. They could turn the classroom into where It's at—a "field of action" as Peter
Marin describes it And believe it or not, they could study eagerly and learn
prodigiously for the best of all possible reasons—their own reasons.
They could. Theoretically. They have the power. But only In a very few places, like
Berkeley, have they even begun to think about using It
•The bleeps were inserted so as not to overly offend the readers.