raise your hand if your grandfather was a slave.

this is my thursday post. i’ll be more likely to write on thursdays, because that’s when i sit at a desk and stare at a computer. so i can write blogs when i’m not small talking about stocks, or hernias, and eating bacon flavored chocolate with coworkers. oh, coworkers.

this is partially a venting post. this is me seeing if other people share my frustrations. or have something to say about them.

…

the course is about music, race, class, and identity. (i don’t want to get too specific, so as to not inadvertently pop up in a google search and have to be revealed by an aspiring peer. part of the beauty of blogs anyway is the degree to which you control your own anonymity. in my opinion.).
so the course is about race.

we’re talking about how berry gordy’s grandfather was born a slave. born a slave. wow. slavery was so recent. who would have remembered?

the classroom is mostly white, but seemingly “diverse” by our standards. of about thirty students, there are a few colored faces present. five of which are black. four of which are either dominican, hapa, south asian, or puerto rican. ask me how i know.

the professor is raving about how unbelievable it is that berry gordy’s grandfather was a slave. how surprising, almost. he was the son of a white planter who made sure he knew how to read and write, then he was free, then he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. the original american dream.

the professor addresses the class: “how many of you have grandfathers who were born into slavery?”

no one raises their hand.

he looks around the room, scanning the faces, truly only scanning the faces of people who could possibly answer the question. like me. like her. or her. or maybe her.

“are there any people here who have slave stories that they can share?”

you are asking me.

you are asking me to tell you the story that i don’t know. about my grandfather, or my great grandfather. my grandfather and great grandfather that i never knew. i’m sorry, professor, but i have no slave stories for you and your classroom of white faces. no slave boy narrative to whet your appetite for normalizing tragedy. to authenticate your blackness. to legitimize your authority to even teach this class about black people and poverty and music.

he’s not satisfied.

“ok,” he says. “i love doing this. especially in a classroom with so many different people.” he turns to the white boy next to him. “what’s your ethnicity?” he smiles. so excited and so curious and hungry. “where is your family from? what’s your background?”

and so his game begins. we go around the classroom figuring everyone out. discovering if we were right about what we assumed when we looked at their skin color, hair texture, facial features. by the end, we know how to judge properly. oh shit, girl you haitian? i thought you were black.

we go around. and white people just love when they get to be ethnic. ever since they were told by their parents in fourth grade that they could dedicate small pieces of their heritage pie chart to different places in europe, they’ve rejoiced in their diversity. they’re not one thing. they’re “mutts,” and proudly so. they’re not just white, oh no. surely, you thought that when you saw them. but in fact you were fooled. they are actually hungarian, irish, slovakian, russian, armenian, swedish, and of course — cherokee.

in the midst of white people getting a kick out of themselves and how their spoken identities somehow trump their whiteness, we get around to me. the first black girl to go.

“and you, what’s your background?”

“america.”

“ok. wow. do you know where they were from before that”

“no.”

“ok well, do you know when they came to america?”

“no.”

i don’t. i have an idea. but even if i knew, the point is that i don’t. i’m one of the two people in the room with no answer to your question. (i’m not sure about you.). and i’m one of many people who doesn’t know. we know virginia. we know georgia. we know mississippi. we know black and white photographs. we know resorts named after plantations. we know the lineage of violence that is our own skin. we know our reflections. we know the same stories you know. the same mythologies you were taught. and probably more. but i’m not going to sit here and tell you and your white pets about my family as some sort of casual testimony to living pain and buried history. as some real life example and reminder that slavery did in fact happen. and wow, it wasn’t so long ago after all.

and now that you’ve really got me feeling black, i just admitted to myself that i don’t like this class. with its organized consumption of black culture that you so comfortably moderate. how easy you make it for us to face ourselves, professor. for us to sleep and laugh and shit without shame.

look at the way they just feel so much with the world. look at how they’re so much in their skin. how they move their feet, shake their bodies. how they gyrate their hips. how carnal they are. they learned most of that in the church, you know. or from those long days in the field when they had a moment to themselves. oh, just look at their smiling eyes. and their grins. it’s almost… funny. black people were picking cotton outside of the studio where wilson pickett recorded mustang sally? wow. they were still picking cotton at that time in alabama? who would believe it? hehe. how ironic and … well, funny.

i’d like to climb down from this ride while it’s slow. i don’t wish to participate in the telling of this story. to carry the burden of having to educate this class almost single-handedly. to become part of this black spectacle. in-house posterchild. you’ve made that your job, professor. so dance.

Students Getting A-rab Money?

So I’ve been wrestling with this idea of paying people for doing well in school. When I first saw economist Roland Fryer talking about “paying kids to learn” on CNN’s special The Black Problem In America, I quickly dismissed the idea as a bunch of bullocky. I thought it instilled in children capitalist values of fierce individualism, and a distorted vision of money as the sole motivator to learn, to work, and ultimately, to live. I figured that all the money Fryer and friends were handing over to kids could be better spent on things like text books, art and music classes, or teacher training. maybe if 4th graders weren’t eating hormone pumped chicken fingers for lunch they’d be able to focus more? Or if their recess wasn’t contingent on whether the teacher felt like walking them downstairs? I wasn’t opposed to rewards per se, but money struck a weird chord with me. It seemed to not even allow young people the opportunity to try to do something because they loved it, or to find something they loved enough to do it. For reasons unrelated to capital.

But then I talked to a friend about it and she seemed to like to idea of “paying kids to learn.” It was yielding results, she said, and for those children it was a tangible reward that their parents didn’t have the resources to provide. This made me realize that in many ways it’s become a privilege to even dream of doing something because you love it. She also pointed out that the money was put into a savings account, as opposed to handed to the child. I was like hmm. Then recently, I read that Melinda and Bill Gates are working on their new education plan (aptly named Education 2.0), and they are considering paying students at community colleges to enroll in and complete courses — “Performance-based scholarships”:

They would reward completion of a degree or certificate rather than mere enrollment. Pennington cites a pilot program in New Orleans that gave low-income students a $250 reward for registering for a minimum number of courses at a community college, another $250 when they got their midcourse grades, and $500 for finishing the semester. Students in the program earned significantly more college credits and were more apt to stay enrolled than nonparticipants even after the scholarship ended.

So now I’m like wait, is this a good idea? Empirically, it “works”. But are we only concerned with the outcome? What about the procedure… the underlying implications about values, and the overarching issues with American education at large? I mean, I can’t lie, I wish someone would pay me for getting a BA that is otherwise only really good for cocktail conversations. But I also think a decrease in tuition/living costs would relieve that burden of debt a little more directly.
Perhaps paying students is the gateway to making education more accessible? It’s starting to look like money is the ill and the drug.

Your thoughts on students getting Arab money?