Category Archive

I recently read A Rap on Race, the book-length transcript of a conversation between James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, recorded in
the summer of 1970. As I noted last week it’s a fascinating book, and I’m going to be posting excerpts every Wednesday for the next while.

Here’s the first, from the third page of the book:

MEAD: I recall a boy whose father married again, married a woman who had a son about the same age. They weren’t related, of course, they were stepbrothers. And then that father and mother, the father of the first boy and the mother of the second, had a child. And the first boy said, “Now I feel differently about it. We have a brother in common.”

BALDWIN: Ah, that makes a great deal of difference.

MEAD: You see, this is true in a sense. Because as far as I know — and this is all any white person in the United States can ever say — as far as I know, I haven’t any black ancestry. But you’ve got some white ancestry.

BALDWIN: Yes, yes.

MEAD: So we’ve got a brother in common.

BALDWIN: So we’ve got a brother in common. But isn’t the tragedy partly related to the fact that most white people deny their brother?

One of the crucial ideas that I try to get across to my students, when we’re talking about how race was constructed in the United States, is that it was designed to be a one-way valve. Whoever you were, whatever your race, you could produce black kids by having them with a black partner, but if you were black you couldn’t produce white kids by having them with a white partner. Race flowed in the direction of blackness, never the other way.

And this was, of course, a matter of politics and economics, not of biology or genetics. If the child of a white slaveholder and his black slave was white, that child would be free, and have a claim on the slaveholder’s estate — an estate which would include that child’s own mother. For this and a hundred other reasons, American racism could not operate in the absence of the one-drop rule and its many variants, and so that rule had to be invented.

Racism depends on white people denying their brothers (and their sisters). So much of American history flows directly from that fact.

For-profit colleges have boomed in the last decade, spurred largely by success in hoovering up public money — for-profit college students now account for a quarter of all Pell Grant disbursements, although they only make 12 percent of all college students. Between grants and loans, federal programs provide some 90 percent of all for-profit revenue.

All this would be fine if the for-profits were providing consistently strong education at a reasonable price — but they’re not. Many are no more than diploma mills, preying on uninformed students and providing them with worthless degrees while burdening them with major long-term debt. As a result, nearly half of all student loan defaults come from the for-profit sector.

This hurts the students at the for-profits, of course, but it hurts needy students at more reputable institutions too. Every Pell Grant dollar funneled into the pockets of a for-profit college shareholder’s pocket is a dollar that’s not available to a public community college student who could really benefit from it. The for-profits are gaming the system in an incredibly harmful way.

In light of all this Obama Department of Education announced plans for new regulations last year, promising to crack down on the worst of the culprits and cut off their access to federal money. As the New York Times reports today, the colleges fought those rules, hard, with a huge and expensive lobbying push … and won:

Rattled by the administration’s tough talk, the colleges spent more than $16 million on an all-star list of prominent figures, particularly Democrats with close ties to the White House, to plot strategy, mend their battered image and plead their case. …

In all, industry advocates met more than two dozen times with White House and Education Department officials, including senior officials like Education Secretary Arne Duncan, records show, even as Mr. Obama has vowed to reduce the “outsize” influence of lobbyists and special interests in Washington.

The result was a plan, completed in June, that imposes new regulations on for-profit schools to ensure they adequately train their students for work, but does so on a much less ambitious scale than the administration first intended, relaxing the initial standards for determining which schools would be stripped of federal financing.

There is one silver lining to this story, however. Though federal oversight has been scaled back, students are beginning to wise up on their own. New numbers released this August show huge declines in for-profit enrollment, with similar reductions in revenue. The last thing folks need in an economy like ours is an expensive, worthless, loan-burdened degree, and in spite of the government’s shameful inaction, Americans are figuring that out.

Even in the wake of recent criticism of the University of California’s use of violence to break up nonviolent demonstrations, one fact has gone largely unquestioned — that student occupations are unlawful, and may be properly ended by police.

Across the Atlantic in Britain, however, the opposite belief prevails. There, student occupations are considered lawful unless a court specifically rules otherwise, and an attempt by one university to declare all occupations presumptively unlawful is meeting with growing criticism.

From the Guardian:

When and in what circumstances students have the right to protest on their own campuses is a question of law and policy that has no one simple, universally applicable answer. The bounds of what is possible and permissible vary over time and from place to place.

In August 1970 James Baldwin and Margaret Mead sat down to talk about race, culture, history, and the United States of America.

Mead, 68 years old, white, and liberal, was the most famous anthropologist on the planet. Baldwin, 46, black, living in exile in France, was one of the most prominent novelists of his era. The two had never met before. Their conversation, carried out in three long sessions over two long days, was tape recorded, transcribed, edited, and published as a book:  A Rap on Race.

I recently finished A Rap on Race, and it’s a weird and fascinating document. The early pages read like a slightly demented graduate seminar, or the opening hours of the best first date ever — all jousting and empathy and audacity.

It bogs down later, as our heroes start getting irritated with each other. They gradually stop interpreting each others’ statements generously, start nitpicking, start interrupting. As they each struggle to synthesize what’s come before, they drift farther away from discussing lived experience and begin to retreat into metaphor and platitude.

But these are two very sharp people, and when they’re on, they’re on. The book exasperated some readers at the time, and subsequent academic assessments have dismantled many of its arguments, but I was mesmerized. Forty years after A Rap on Race was first published, I read it not as a weighty intervention in the world’s problems or as a serious addition to scholarly literature but as an artifact of its moment — a conversation between an aging white observer of world cultures and a middle-aged black expatriate, both struggling to make sense of their own histories and the country that was changing around them.

Here in 2011, we Americans have a pretty settled narrative of the civil rights era. What Betsy Ross and George Washington were to older generations, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King are to us. We know the stories by heart, and we tell them again and again. But it’s easy to forget how short that era really was — just twelve years passed between Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus and the gunshot that took King’s life. Twelve years, four months, and three days.

Mead and Baldwin were both adults when Rosa Parks took her stand — Mead an acclaimed scholar, Baldwin an established author. Both came of age in the time of Jim Crow, and they met well after the movement that ended it had run its course.

And so the civil rights movement is not a central concern of their discussion. When Medgar Evers’ name comes up, it’s in the telling of a story about white supremacy’s stifling, deadly grip on the South. King is mentioned in passing, but Huey Newton (for instance) is a much more immediate presence.

This is a book, in other words, not about civil rights but about two subjects Americans don’t talk much about at all — what came before, and what came after. It’s a window into two eras in American history that we rarely contemplate today, two eras which together did more to construct the one we now live in than did the brief moment that separated them.

Over the next few months, I’m going to be posting a series of weekly excerpts from A Rap on Race. Some of those passages I agree with, some I find ridiculous, some I’m not sure what to think about. Sometimes I’ll share my own thoughts in the original post, sometimes not. In all cases, I welcome questions and comments and disputation.

Hope you enjoy it all, and I hope you feel moved to bring the conversation forward. This should be fun.

(And yes, if you’re a longtime reader, you’ve seen this before.  I started this series last summer, and I’m rebooting it now. Look for the latest installment every Wednesday morning.)

I took a great trip out to Rutgers on Saturday for their “Practical Guide to Changing the World” conference — a really sharp, really well-conceived, really well-executed daylong event.

If you’re a student activist or a student government type looking to kickstart organizing on your campus, you could do far worse than to follow the “Practical Guide” model. They started with a keynote and Q&A (your humble servant, in this case) over lunch, then broke for four one-hour workshop sessions. There were about a dozen workshops in all, with five slots per hour, so almost all of the workshops were offered twice.

And that was it. A rousing speech, a slate of practical trainings — everything from how to run a meeting to legal rights of demonstrators to using social media in organizing (me again) — and done. Six hours in all, everyone still fresh at the end, very little flakeout at the end of the day. It really was a model of a one-day, campus-based organizing training conference, and if anyone would like to hear more from the folks who put it together — or bring me out to your campus do my thing — just let me know. I’d be happy to hook you up.

But the conference itself, as it turns out, was just the beginning. Afterwards I was invited to tag along to an organizing meeting with Rutgers folks and various organizers from other NJ public campuses, and without giving too much away I can definitely say that spring 2012 is going to be an interesting season for higher ed organizing in the Garden State.

Also, New Jersey students have been in the process of setting up a statewide student association (SSA) for a while now, and they’ve just received a major grant through the United States Student Association to fund a full-time staffer for the next two years. SSAs are a crucial part of the student activist infrastructure in the United States, and this one seems to be off to a great start.

Oh, and that grant? It’s one of three. Similar projects are underway in Michigan and Colorado as well.