Mike Klonsky : Drive-By Teachers and the Great Charter School Scam

Drive-by teachers: The Wal-Mart model. Image from Gawker.

Drive-by teachers:
The great TFA/charter school scam

'Short careers by choice' translates into teachers being reduced to low-wage information-age delivery clerks while most 'learning' is done by students sitting in front of a computer screen.

By Mike Klonsky / The Rag Blog / August 27, 2013

Educator, activist, former SDS leader, and "Small Schools" advocate Mike Klonsky will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, August 30, 2013, from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live to the world. Rag Radio is rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA, Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. (EDT), and on Houston's KPFT HD-3 90.1 (Pacifica radio) Wednesdays at 1 p.m. (CDT). Podcasts of all shows are posted at the Internet Archive.

The August 27 New York Times carries a piece, "At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice," by Mokoto Rich. The notion that young, inexperienced short-timers, many with only five weeks of Teach for America (TFA) training, should form the backbone of the nation's teaching core, has become one of the lynchpins of corporate-style school reform.

The drive-by teacher strategy is being pushed heavily by the power philanthropists in the Gates, Broad, and Walton Foundations. It actually is based on the Wal-Mart model where about 70% of its poorly-paid workforce turns over within a year. This is what the reformers mean by 21st Century jobs.

At Success Academy Charter Schools, a chain run by Eva Moskowitz, a former New York City councilwoman, the average is about four years in the classroom. KIPP, one of the country’s best known and largest charter operators, with 141 schools in 20 states, also keeps teachers in classrooms for an average of about four years.

"Short careers by choice" translates into teachers being reduced to low-wage information-age delivery clerks while most "learning" is done by students sitting in front of a computer screen. The benefits to the charter operators include the elimination of pensions, tenure, salary increases, and union protection. This means more money going into the pockets of the charter operators. Moskowitz for example, pulls down about $400,000/year.

Rich says the notion of a foreshortened teaching career was largely introduced by Teach for America, which places high-achieving college graduates into low-income schools for two years. Today, Teach for America places about a third of its recruits in charter schools.

"Strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers,” said Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America. “The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.”

But studies have shown that on average, teacher turnover diminishes student achievement, writes Rich. Advocates who argue that teaching should become more like medicine or law say that while programs like Teach for America fill a need in the short term, educational leaders should be focused on improving training and working environments so that teachers will invest in long careers.

Reformers claim that this is all a generational thing where today's young teachers are "restless" and don't like to stay in one job too long. One young teacher, "who is already thinking beyond the classroom," is quoted, saying, “I feel like our generation is always moving onto the next thing, and always moving onto something bigger and better.”

I wonder, especially, with a shrinking job market and devastated middle class, what a real teacher would feel is "bigger and better" than teaching children?

This article was also posted by the author to Schooling in the Ownership Society.

[Mike Klonsky is a long-time education activist who teaches in the College of Education at DePaul University and is director of the Small Schools Workshop. He has spoken and written extensively on education issues and is active in the struggles in Chicago to save and transform public schools. A veteran of the civil rights and anti-war movements, Klonsky is a former National Secretary of SDS. He blogs at his SmallTalk Blog and you can follow him on twitter here.]

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Robert Jensen : Jim Koplin: Living Your Life Honestly

James Henry Koplin, 1933-2012. Image from JimKoplin.com.
Jim Koplin:
Living your life honestly

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / January 16, 2013

“Good teaching is living your life honestly in front of students.”

I don’t recall exactly when Jim Koplin first told me that, but I know that he had to say it several times before I began to understand what he meant. Koplin was that kind of teacher -- always honing in on simple, but profound, truths; fond of nudging through aphorisms that required time to understand their full depth; always aware of the connection between epistemology and ethics; and patient with slow learners.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Some background: Jim Koplin was, by way of a formal introduction, Dr. James H. Koplin, granted a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1962 with a specialization in language acquisition, tenured at Vanderbilt University and later a founding faculty member of Hampshire College, retired early in 1980 to a rich life of community building and political organizing.

I never took a class from him, though in some sense the 24 years I knew him constituted one long independent study. That finally ended on December 15, 2012, not upon satisfactory completion of the course but when Jim died at the age of 79. He left behind a rich and diverse collection of friends, all of whom have a special connection with him. But I hang onto the conceit that I am his intellectual heir, the one who most directly continued his work in the classroom.

So, with that conceit firmly in place and his death fresh in my mind, it seems proper and fitting that I offer lessons learned from Koplin to the world outside his circle of students and friends.

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in my 20 years of teaching at the University of Texas at Austin reflecting on Jim’s core insight, that good teaching is living your life honestly in front of students.

The first, and most obvious, implication is a rejection of the illusory neutrality that some professors claim. From the framing of a course, to the choice of topics for inclusion on the syllabus, to the selection of readings, to the particular way we talk about ideas -- teaching in the social sciences and humanities is political, through and through.

Political, in this sense, does not mean partisan advocacy of a particular politician, party, or program, but rather recognizing the need to assess where real power lies, analyze how that power operates in any given society, and acknowledge the effect of that power on what counts as knowledge.

Every professor’s “politics” in this sense has considerable influence on his/her teaching, and I believe it is my obligation to make clear to students the political judgments behind my decisions. The objective is not to strong-arm students into agreement, but to explain those choices and defend them when challenged by students. At the end of a successful semester, students should be able to identify my assumptions, critique them, and be clearer about their own.

I would recommend this approach for all faculty members, but it has been particularly important for me because I am politically active in fairly public ways, which students often learn about through mass media and the internet. To make clear the difference between the goals of Jensen-in-the-classroom (encouraging critical thinking) and Jensen-in-public (advocating political positions), I have taken extra care to be transparent in front of students.

This also was a product of my time with Jim, who insisted that if intellectual inquiry led one to conclusions about what is needed to advance social justice and ecological sustainability, then one should contribute to those projects. Jim’s life offered me a model for how intellectual work need not be separated from community and political work.

In one of my early conversations with Jim about this balance, he referred me to one of his elders, Scott Nearing, who said that three simple principles guided his life: the quest “to learn the truth, to teach the truth, and to help build the truth into the life of the community.” Each of those endeavors feeds the other two; scholarship, teaching, and community engagement are a package deal for me. But Jim always reminded me that what one does in front of students is not the same as what one does in front of a crowd at a rally, or in an organizing meeting.

Perhaps Jim’s most important contribution to my development as a teacher came in his advocacy of interdisciplinary undergraduate education. In the contemporary academy, the reward system and culture tend to push professors toward intellectual specialization over the big picture, and toward working with graduate students over undergraduate teaching. In my connection with Jim, I saw the importance of -- and joy in -- a truly interdisciplinary approach to knowledge that took as its primary task teaching at the most basic levels.

The first course I taught in the university-wide program called First-Year Seminars, “The Ethics and Politics of Everyday Life,” was straight out of Koplin: I had students read five books that touched on the political, economic, and ecological implications of our choices in our daily lives. Every time I worried that I would be pushing students too far, Jim would tell me that the students were hungry for honest, jargon-free radical talk, and he was right.

I devised my current interdisciplinary course, “Freedom: Philosophy, History, Law,” in conversation with Jim. As it came into focus, I told Jim that I wanted the course to not only challenge the culture’s simplistic definition of freedom but to undermine the confidence of anyone who thinks the term can be easily defined.

On the first day of class, I tell students that the minute they think they have nailed down a definitive definition of freedom, some new experience will force them to modify that. It is the struggle to understand the concept that matters, and I am just another person struggling with them, albeit with the advantage of more extensive reading and experience.

That reflects another of Jim’s other lessons, the understanding that a good teacher learns alongside students. That doesn’t mean pretending that students have as much to teach me as I have to teach them (if that were the case, why am I the one getting paid?); the excitement comes from genuinely being open to that discovery with students.

As a teacher, I shape -- but cannot control -- the experience. There’s always a certain kind of thrill in that process, especially in front of a class of 300. There are days when I feel a bit like I am doing an intellectual high-wire act. Those tend to be my favorite classes.

That thrill is rooted in another Koplin lesson: Good teaching is based in recognizing our intellectual limits, our ignorance. By that, he did not just mean that any single teacher can’t know everything. Instead, Jim meant that we humans are always more ignorant than knowledgeable, that even in fields in which we have dramatically deepened our understanding of the world, there is -- and always will be -- far more that we do not know than we do know.

I have come to realize that the longer I teach, the more I know and the less certain I am about what I know. The more aware I am of the limits of my knowledge, the better teacher I become.

Jim also believed that all teaching required an appreciation of the arts, and he taught me to look for wisdom in poetry. To the best of my knowledge, Jim never wrote a line of poetry in his life, but that made him only more appreciative of the form.

I cannot remember if I shared this poem with him or vice versa; at some point, as it is with a good teacher, the flow of information and insight was two-way and impossible to track. Whomever it came from first, Jim and I came across the poem “Dropping Keys” by Hafiz, the 14th century Sufi poet from Persia.

The small person
Builds cages for everyone
She
Sees.

Instead, the sage,
Who needs to duck her head,
When the moon is low,
Can be found dropping keys, all night long
For the beautiful,
Rowdy,
Prisoners.

For too many students, education too often feels like a cage. If we aren’t careful, we teachers can find ourselves building cages, guarding cages, and then locking ourselves inside those cages.

Jim Koplin never stopped dropping keys for me. To honor his memory, I will try to do the same for my students.

This article was also published at New Left Project.

[Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of Arguing for Our Lives: Critical Thinking in Crisis Times (City Lights, coming in 2013). His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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Steve Russell : Hiding Behind a Girl

We are all Malala. Photo from Reuters.
I am Malala:
Hiding behind a girl

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / January 10, 2013

It is we sinful women
who come out raising the banner of truth
up against barricades of lies on the highways
who find stories of persecution piled on each threshold
who find that tongues which could speak have been severed.

-- Kishwar Naheed (Urdu-to-English translation by Ruksana Ahmed)

In the time suck that is Facebook, I changed my profile picture to one of Malala Yousafzai. Besides improving the visual appeal of the page, what was I trying to accomplish?

Malala is a 15-year-old student from the Swat Valley in Pakistan, an area formerly ruled by the Taliban, Islamic fundamentalists who believe that educating girls is sinful. This policy, coming from God, is not negotiable. Enforcement of the policy is up to any devout Muslim, as the God the Taliban follow is apparently too puny to enforce its own rules.

Enforcement in areas infested by the Taliban has included burning of schools and throwing acid on girls seeking to study.

At age 11, Malala began a blog published in English and Urdu by the BBC called “Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl” under the nom de plume Gul Makai (Corn Flower). When the Taliban fled, Malala’s identity became common knowledge. Fluent in English, the girl appeared on British and American television advocating that Islam does not ban education of women.

What does this have to do with us?

In Afghanistan, American troops have been dying in the longest war in the history of this nation. It began in 2001 when the Taliban refused to surrender the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden.

Our troops ran the Taliban out of the cities and into the Pashtun tribal area along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. The Taliban had the support of the Pakistani government until we started shooting at the Taliban and demanded that the Pakistanis choose a side.

While Pakistan ostensibly chose our side, the Taliban are still a potent political force. We’ve seen this movie before. Only the Pashtun people can root out the Taliban insanity. Not the Pakistani army, and certainly not the U.S. army.

On October 9, a Taliban gunman attacked a school bus and shot Malala Yousafzai in the head. Two other girls were critically injured, but Malala was the target. “Malala was using her tongue and pen against Islam and Muslims,” the Taliban said, “so she was punished for her crime by the blessing of the Almighty Allah.”

So far, it appears that this crime has not received the blessing of the Pashtun people. Within the week, street demonstrations in Pakistani cities were displaying pictures of Malala.

Many years ago, world opinion was outraged when the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddhist statutes. The banning of television, sports, and music upset even local opinion. But by attempting to kill a young girl for the crime of wanting to go to school, the Taliban may finally have put themselves in a place where no decent person will shelter them.

What does this have to do with me, other than the fact that my son is a GI?

I would hope that no man with daughters would ask that question. Both of my daughters are well educated, and I’m proud of them. Two of my granddaughters are in college right now. One granddaughter is a toddler with a twin brother. While I know I will not live to see what they become, I have dreams for them both, no greater for the boy than for the girl. And there is another granddaughter who is Malala’s age.

I hate to trouble children with the existence of evil, but I hope my grandchildren will identify with Malala, with her courage and her ambition. They are Malala; all of our daughters are Malala. And so I am Malala.

Malala’s pen name, Gul Makai, comes from the heroine of a Pakistani folk tale, a Romeo and Juliet story, where the lovers meet at school. The romance between Gul Makai and her lover, Musa Khan, creates a war between their tribes.

Gul Makai goes to the religious leaders and persuades them, by reference to the Holy Quran, that the grounds for the war are “frivolous.” Inspired by the teachings of a girl, the leaders place themselves between the warring parties, holding the Quran over their heads, and persuade the two sides as Gul Makai has persuaded them. To seal the peace, the lovers are united in marriage.

According to the English translation by Masud-Ul-Hasan, “Most of the love stories generally have tragic ends; in the case of... Musa Khan and Gul Makai... events took a different turn. The credit for this goes to Gul Makai. She did not rest content to love, and die. She was a woman of action; she loved, won, and lived.”

Until Gul Makai, Malala Yousafzai, the lover of knowledge, is out of the hospital, this old retired teacher will hide behind the face of a brave young girl. I am Malala.

UPDATE ON January 4, 2013. I’m happy to report that people happening on my Facebook page will once more have to endure my mugshot, as Malala was released from the hospital today.

In the meantime, the Pakistani government has been moved by the international reaction to Malala’s shooting to publicly commit to girls’ education. Of course, like any other government, what the commitment means will depend on who is watching and who the players in government are from time to time, but saying as a matter of public policy girls can expect to be educated is a colossal step in the opposite direction from the one the Taliban were demanding when they tried to kill her.

Finally, Malala Yousafzai has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She would be the first child to win that honor. I hope all of us with daughters are rooting for her.

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / C.E. McAuley : Jonah Raskin's Bio of 'Pedagogical Pilgrim' James McGrath

Jonah Raskin's biography of artist/teacher James McGrath was designed by Rag Blog art director James Retherford.
Pedagogical pilgrim:
Jonah Raskin's new bio of
artist/teacher James McGrath

Raskin's new biography is no simple valentine from one teacher to another. It is an in-depth and compelling look, not only about McGrath’s life journey, but also the sacrifices he made along the way.

By C.E. McAuley / The Rag Blog / December 7, 2012

[James McGrath: In A Class By Himself by Jonah Raskin. Preface by Bill Ayers; book design by James Retherford. (2012: Santa Rosa, CA: McCaa Books); Paperback; $18.]

Teaching, when done correctly, is an all-consuming passion. There is a popular saying from a popular book: “Teach like your hair’s on fire.” In author Jonah Raskin’s new biography, James McGrath: In A Class By Himself, he writes about a teacher who taught like his life was on fire.

Raskin should know. Beyond being a prolific author, poet, and journalist -- Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, has also written biographies of Jack London, Allen Ginsberg, and Abbie Hoffman -- he was a professor for over 30 years, teaching topics ranging from literature to media law and everything in between.

He himself has a cadre of dedicated former students whom he has mentored over the years and he recently became the first ever Professor Emeritus in the history of the Communication Studies Department at Sonoma State University. But his new biography is no simple valentine from one teacher to another. It is an in-depth and compelling look, not only about McGrath’s life journey, but also the sacrifices he made along the way.

Early on McGrath discovers himself as an artist and finds that his creative spark lights up not only his life but what would become his teaching as well. It would be a spark that would become an all-consuming flame, though. One that would destroy his relationship with his wife and strain his relationship with his children.

Some of the relationships are now under repair. It’s something McGrath doesn’t like to talk much about -- but his absence of words speaks volumes about the sacrifices that many teachers and artists have to make for their teaching and art and for teaching as an art.

McGrath grew up in Depression-era Tacoma, Washington. Though he first considered life as a geologist and studied at the Central Washington College of Education, a poor algebra grade led him to reassess and a $1,500 scholarship to the University of Oregon at Eugene helped McGrath find his true artistic path. While getting his M.F.A. from the University of Washington McGrath began teaching at Columbia High School and his legendary journey began.

And when teaching and art fused together McGrath found his life’s purpose. Raskin deftly captures McGrath’s journeys around the globe in what he calls “the life and times of an extraordinary American teacher, mentor, cultural ambassador, and Pedagogical pilgrim.”

McGrath with students at Hopitutuqaki (the Hopi School), Hotevilla, Arizona. Image from James McGrath: In a Class By Himself.
Traveling the world teaching art, making art, and mentoring generations of students may sound inspiring to some -- and it is -- but Raskin does not shy away from describing McGrath’s intensity, toil, and sacrifice as he struggles to bring art and the ways of creativity to students from Asia to Europe and the American Southwest where he became a leader in the Institute of American Indian Arts.

McGrath found himself working across cultures and finding a place where cultures can be shared and honored, and he was also a teacher and administrator at U.S. Army bases across the world.

As a teacher and advisor in the Institute of American Indian Arts, McGrath, the program, and its students rose to national prominence -- garnering the attention of presidents and the national press of the 1960s and 1970s. It was a time when the American Indian Rights movement held the national attention, a time of social foment and revolutionary ideas and ideals.

But even this, perhaps McGrath’s crowning achievement, was not without controversy as he was a Caucasian teaching and helping to bring American Indian art to the forefront. Despite that, his students considered him to be the same as them -- just as his students in Asia and Europe did. It was in that sense that McGrath’s philosophy of creating -- from the center out and expressing oneself genuinely whatever the cost -- transcended racial and ethnic boundaries.

And, as he aged, it also transcended the boundaries of time as his students became artists and teachers themselves. It is not too much to say that McGrath, who is still creating today, is revered as a friend and legend among those who have been a part of his teaching -- and it is a testament to the man’s personal philosophy of art as life and teaching art as life.

Raskin has done an assiduous job researching McGrath and interviewing McGrath and those who have been in his sphere of influence for decades. His compelling writing style brings readers into a book about someone they, likely, have never heard of but need to hear about. As such, this book is a must read for teachers and students.

The world is filled with bad teachers. And good teachers. But, it’s not filled with many extraordinary teachers or extraordinary biographers. And I believe a book about an extraordinary teacher, such as this one, could only be written by another extraordinary teacher and extraordinary writer. Raskin fills both roles with aplomb.

Far too often people want to read biographies about people they’re already familiar with. Most often political figures like Churchill or Kennedy and entertainers or Nobel laureates. And something can be learned from doing that.

But it’s in hearing the stories of the unsung greats -- such as James McGrath -- that people can come to learn the power of one individual, one regular man who became an extraordinary teacher, and who has made a positive difference in the world.

This is an all-true-tale of a teacher who is still teaching after 60 years and continuing to inspire generations. Jonah Raskin has given us a special gift by telling us the story of James McGrath. And I hope one day someone will tell his story just as well.

[Charles “Chip” McAuley is an instructor in the Communication Studies department at Sonoma State University and adviser to the STAR, Sonoma State University’s award-winning student newspaper. He is also a widely-published freelance writer.

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Sarito Carol Neiman : History, Herstory, Mystory, Mystery

The Perfect Teacher. Cartoon from susanohanian.org. Inset cartoon below by Mark Anderson / Andertoons.
Shredding the envelope:
History, herstory, mystory, mystery

I discovered I am actually very good at getting up and talking to a bunch of kids about stuff. And even, for the most part, keeping their attention as long as it’s interesting stuff.

By Sarito Carol Neiman / The Rag Blog / September 13, 2012

[In another rare appearance of her very occasional column, Shredding the Envelope, Sarito gets a firsthand look, among other things, at what all the fuss is about when teachers make a fuss about standardized testing and its use in evaluating both student and teacher “performance.”]

Wow.

Let me first of all say that I have a whole new appreciation and respect for my sisters and everybody else I’ve ever met who are / have been teachers day in, day out, for much of their grownup lives.

Actually, I had a blast.

I didn’t have much fun in the anticipation of it. Like... “why did I pick up that call when the phone rang?” And once I’d picked it up, why did I just say yes instead of making some “not now, but call me again” excuse (like call me again after I’ve had time to get used to the reality of it instead of just the idea). And like being terrified. Because it was at the middle school, on top of it. The age group I told myself was the one I could probably least well handle. Texas History and U.S. History, 7th and 8th grades respectively, which I can remember really not liking very much at all when I was in school.

But what to do, I’d already said yes! So... I did a whole Google thing, got together a bunch of really interesting quotes about “history” that we could talk about -- just in case the teacher didn’t leave a proper lesson plan. Or in case he did leave a lesson plan, but I couldn’t make any sense out of it. And marched on over there to meet my fate.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

I discovered I am actually very good at getting up and talking to a bunch of kids about stuff. And even, for the most part, keeping their attention as long as it’s interesting stuff.

I did things like write the words “History... Herstory... Mystory... Mystery” on the board. And talked about how it’s the STORY that makes history interesting, not just memorizing the dates and the places and the names. And who writes that story matters very much to whether it actually tells us very much about what is real.

And in the midst of that, the absolute thrill and rightness of this little snippet that came “out of the blue” and unprompted by me in its specifics:

Kid in class: “When did racism start, anyway?”

Me: “I dunno, I think maybe it’s been around almost forever. At least long enough that hundreds of years ago a bunch of white people went and stole people from Africa and took them back to their countries to be slaves.”

Class, in unison: “Whaaaaoah!!”

I also discovered, on the other hand, that I am not very good when it gets down to the nitty-gritty of “covering points 1-15 in the textbook.” For all kinds of reasons including all the reasons I didn’t like history very much when I was in school.

I was so touched by the kids. All of them…

The “very good, Straight-A students” who always had their hands up and always knew the textbook answers made me a little sad. Because they are trained so well in being eager to please the teacher that I was pretty sure the only thing they were learning was how to please teachers and pass tests.

The bright and inquiring ones who, before I realized that passing around fortune-cookie strips of history quotes made it impossible to get anywhere near covering points 1–15 in the textbook, chose the deepest and most challenging quotes when I asked what they really liked and wanted to share.

The kids, mostly boys, who were either so overmedicated for their ADHD, or suffering from such a horrible situation at home, they were almost catatonic and with a look of ancient suffering in their eyes.

The ones struggling with just the basics of reading comprehension, never mind getting a grasp on what “history” might mean in their lives and why it might be interesting to study it.

The grumpy ones who probably should be spending most of their days in art and music and writing classes.

The loud and boisterous ones who should be spending most of their days out running around in nature, digging in the dirt, catching frogs and snakes, and playing in the water.

The rare gift of seeing one of those “borderline” kids suddenly light up, say “aha, yes! and you know what THAT makes me think of is...”

And my immediate concern that too much of this can’t be allowed, or the principal is going to show up at the door because it starts to sound, from outside, like nobody is in charge here.

Each one of those classes should have been at least three or four smaller classes. Of six or seven kids each.

I probably won’t make a very good regular substitute teacher.

But... I might find some other way I can go spend time with some of those kids and help them find what they want to learn, what they’re excited about, how to cope with the limitations of the textbooks and the need to do well on the tests.

I had a blast.

[Sarito Carol Neiman (then just “Carol”) was a founding editor of The Rag in 1966 Austin, and later edited New Left Notes, the national newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). With then-husband Greg Calvert, Neiman co-authored one of the seminal books of the New Left era, A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New Capitalism and later compiled and edited the contemporary mystic Osho’s posthumous Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic. Read more articles by Sarito Carol Neiman at The Rag Blog.]

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INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Fred Klonsky and the Chicago Teachers' Strike

Chicago teachers on strike. Photo by Fred Klonsky / The Rag Blog.
An interview with Fred Klonsky:
Chicago teachers in red and on strike

If the city of Chicago wins this strike it will very likely give the green light to big cities such as Los Angeles and New York to go after teachers’ unions there.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / September 13, 2012

Fred Klonsky, 64, retired in June 2012 after 30 years of working as an art teacher in grades k-5 in the public school system in Illinois.

He doesn’t go into the classroom to teach kids anymore, but he hasn’t retired from political activism and from protesting 101. A long-time president of his local union, he’s as politically active now as he’s ever been. With Chicago teachers on strike, he’s out in the streets with tens of thousands of other teachers and like them wears a red shirt. He also writes about the strike almost daily on his blog, FredKlonsky.com.

If the name Fred Klonsky rings a bell it might be because he’s a former SDS member and because his older brother Michael was national secretary of SDS in the late 1960s. Twenty years old in 1968, Fred participated in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the Vietnam War era. He attended Los Angeles City College and the University of Illinois at Chicago where he graduated in 1984. “Solidarity Forever,” the old union slogan, still lights a fire in his belly.

Fred Klonsky. Photo by Anne Klonsky / The Rag Blog. Inset photo below by Fred Klonsky / The Rag Blog..
Jonah Raskin: What’s at stake in the teachers’ strike that’s going on in Chicago now and that has been getting national media attention?

Fred Klonsky: Everything! The city is attacking the unions and collective bargaining rights. The Democratic Party administration wants to make it difficult if not impossible for teachers to go on strike. They want to break the back of the teachers’ union and they want school principals to have total control of the hiring and the firing of teachers.

It sounds like they’d like to put the old patronage system in place.

Chicago is famous for people getting jobs based on who they know not what they know or what they can do. They want to apply the same principle to education.

It seems to me to be an intense power struggle.

If the city of Chicago wins it will very likely give the green light to cities such as Los Angeles and New York to go after teachers’ unions.

Are you an observer or a participant in this strike?

I’m some of both. I’ve been on picket lines. Two days ago I was on the line from 6:30 a.m. to noon. I’m also writing about the strike.

What’s it like out there on the street?

I’ve been at a lot of demonstrations over the years, but there is nothing like what’s happening here. It’s beautiful. The striking teachers are wearing red shirts and at the rallies there’s a sea of red. The picket lines are spirited and lively. I’ve seen former students out there, too, and that’s gratifying.

What’s the ethnic make up of the striking teachers?

In 1987, which is when the last teachers’ strike took place in Chicago, over 50% of the teachers were African American. Today it’s about 19%. If the mayor wins and we lose I think that the number of African-American teachers will plummet even more. Moreover, the goal will be to serve wealthier kids not the most needy kids.

Does the city want to gentrify the schools?

Chicago is following the European model in which the wealthy live in the center of the city and the poor and the working classes in suburban enclaves.

What is the big demographic picture in Chicago?

Once upon a time there was white flight. That pattern has reversed since the 1970s. The 2010 census shows that the African-American population has declined sharply. Young white professionals have settled in the center of the city, but they leave when their kids are of school age.

So the city wants the public school system in Chicago to reflect demographic changes and bring the wealthier kids back into the school district?

Yes, the city wants to do that and to privatize schools and educational services which are a multi-billion-dollar a year business.

Why are teachers demonized and made the scapegoats in our society? Are they in the way of the corporations?

To a large extent the union movement in the private sector has been destroyed. The powers-that-be are aiming to destroy unions in the public sector. The National Education Association (NEA) with three- and-one-half-million members is the largest union in the United States. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has one million members. That’s a combined total of four million organized workers. They’re the last union men (and women) standing.

In this strike the city is depicting teachers as greedy folks who are against change and who want to keep the status quo. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Are Chicago schools typical of schools elsewhere?

They are like urban schools everywhere. There are 360,000 students in the Chicago public school system that now mainly serves the poorest of the kids from the poorest of families. Eighty-five percent of the students qualify for free lunches. That means they’re very poor. Those who can afford to have taken their kids out of the public schools and put them in charter or private schools. The public schools have very few supplies and very few books. They do not have adequate resources.

Is Chicago different?

The union leadership here is taking a real stand. There is real backbone among union members. Moreover, the unions for the police and for firemen are supporting the strike. There’s real solidarity here.

What grade would you give Mayor Rahm Emanuel so far in the strike?

A failing grade and not only because of what he’s done during the strike. He has said that no matter what, 25% of students will fail. That’s unacceptable to teachers and their union. Emanuel has only been in office for a year, but violence in the city has skyrocketed. There have been more murders here in the last year than in Afghanistan. He’s turned my city into crap. Harold Washington, who was the mayor in the 1980s, was far better. He actually paid attention to the needs of the most needy. Rahm Emanuel doesn’t.

Will the strike affect the presidential election?

I can’t imagine that Obama is happy about the strike. So far he has had no comment. Of course, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have offered their support to Mayor Emanuel. We have a Democratic mayor putting Republican educational policies into practice. It’s a sad day for the city of Chicago.

[Jonah Raskin, professor emeritus at Sonoma State University and the author of biographies of Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack London, is a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Harry Targ : Remembering Malcolm and Manning

Image of Malcolm X, above, from The Daily Grind. Manning Marable from NewsOne.
Remembering Malcolm and Manning

Telling Malcolm X’s story was Marable’s way of advocating for fundamental social change in a deeply troubled world.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / July 18, 2011

And finally, I am deeply grateful to the real Malcolm X, the man behind the myth, who courageously challenged and transformed himself, seeking to achieve a vision of a world without racism. Without erasing his mistakes and contradictions, Malcolm embodies a definitive yardstick by which all other Americans who aspire to a mantle of leadership should be measured. -- Manning Marable, Malcolm X, A Life of Reinvention, 2011, 493

Professor Manning Marable was a member of the Political Science and Sociology Departments at Purdue University during the 1986-87 academic year. His scholarship, activism, and ground-breaking books and articles inspired faculty and students even though his stay at our university was brief. His classic theoretical work, "How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America," along with over 20 books and hundreds of articles, inspired social science scholarship on class, race, and gender.

His weekly essays, "Along the Color Line," were published in over 250 community newspapers and magazines for years. He once told me that writing for concerned citizens about public issues was the most rewarding work he ever did. He was a role model for all young, concerned and committed scholar/activists. -- Harry Targ, Purdue University Black Cultural Center Newsletter, April, 2011

I just finished reading the powerful biography of Malcolm X authored by Manning Marable. My encounter with this book was as fixating and transforming as I remember was my reading of Malcolm’s autobiography in the 1960s.

While I lack the deep sense of Malcolm X’s impact on African American politics and cultural identity that others have, I feel compelled to write something about this reading experience. (Bill Fletcher’s review and analysis of the Marable biography provides much expertise on the subject. “Manning Marable and the Malcolm X Biography Controversy: A Response to Critics," from The Black Commentator, July 7, 2011.)

During my first year at Purdue University in north central Indiana in 1968, I requested to teach a course called “Contemporary Political Problems.” Since I was on the cusp of becoming a political activist in belated response to the civil rights and anti-war movements, I thought I could use this course to have an extended conversation with students about where we needed to be going intellectually and politically.

My plan was to assign a series of books that reflected different left currents, politically and culturally, and get us all to reflect on their value for understanding 1968 America and what to do about it. We read Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey, Herbert Marcuse, the Port Huron and Weatherman statements, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

While my students and I embraced, endorsed, or rejected various of these authors, we were profoundly impacted by the power of Malcolm X’s personal biography and transformations from the streets to the international arena. As the word got out about the course, and largely because of Malcolm X, sectors of the Purdue campus got the word that there was a new “radical” in the political science department. Therefore, I owe my growing enrollments to Malcolm X.

More important, during the second semester in which I taught the course, I had a very quiet and respectful African American student in the class. He was a member of Purdue’s track team. One day, after he showed up at the local airport sporting a very thin, almost invisible, mustache the track coach ordered him off the plane. Why? Because he had unauthorized facial hair. His modest symbolic act, growing the mustache, set off extended protest activities over several weeks.

Shortly before this incident, we had spent a couple of weeks in class discussing Malcolm X’s autobiography. During one class period this very quiet person announced to the rest of us that we should consider ourselves lucky that he chose to participate in this class.

I saw him 40 years later for a fleeting moment. He remembered me and said that he had read Malcolm X’s autobiography for the first time in my class. The student’s emerging boldness and his articulated sense of pride must have had something to do with his reading of Malcolm X.

Reflecting on the Marable biography, I was struck by the capacity of people to change their ways of thinking, their ideologies, and their practice. Marable attributes some of Malcolm X’s development to his conscious desire to reinvent himself and to do so as he told his life story to Alex Haley, his autobiographical collaborator.

Despite the world of racism, repression, and theological rigidity Malcolm experienced, Marable records how Malcolm X’s experience and practical political work were in fact transforming.

Different people gleaned different things from reading Malcolm X’s autobiography, and the same is true of a reading of Manning Marable’s stirring and frank biography. While those of us on the left were most inspired by the last two years of Malcolm X’s life, my student was probably impacted as much by Malcolm’s developing sense of pride and self-worth in a society that demeaned and ridiculed people of color

Reading Malcolm and Marable reminds us that, while we bring change through our organizational affiliations, each individual can have a role to play in achieving that change. Not all of us can be Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Dolores Huerta, or Mother Jones. But we can make a difference.

In addition, Manning Marable makes a particularly strong case for Malcolm X as an internationalist. The United Nations had adopted a Declaration on Human Rights in 1948 but human rights discourse was not part of the language of international relations until Malcolm X demanded the international community address the issue.

For Malcolm X, United States racism, while violating the civil rights of its Black and Brown citizens, was also violating the fundamental human rights of peoples at home and abroad. At the time of his assassination, Malcolm X was working to build a coalition of largely former colonial states to demand that each and every country, and particularly the United States, respect the human rights of all peoples. Multiple problems including racism, poverty, disease, hunger, political repression, and sexual abuse were problems at the root of twentieth century human circumstance AND the United States was a major violator of human rights.

Marable describes in great detail Malcolm X’s frenetic travels through Africa and the Middle East to build a coalition of Black and Brown peoples to demand in the United Nations and every other political forum the establishment of human rights. Bombing Vietnamese people and killing Black children in Birmingham were part of the same problem.

And, this campaign was being launched at the very same time that the countries of the Global South were struggling to construct a non-aligned movement to retake the resources, wealth, and human dignity that had been stripped from peoples by colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism. This was the position that Dr. Martin Luther King came to in 1967, as articulated in his famous speech at Riverside Church in New York. Malcolm X was introducing this global human rights project in 1964.

Marable’s Malcolm X therefore transformed himself from a minor street hustler, to a Black Muslim, to a visible world leader advocating a global human rights agenda. This is the Malcolm X that has meant so much to us over the years, along with his insistence that Black and Brown people be accorded respect everywhere and that they should honor and respect themselves.

But, Marable carefully documents Malcolm X’s flaws as well as his strengths. He was anti-Semitic, misogynistic, not unsympathetic to violence, and a man engaged in intense, some times petty, political struggles with his organizational colleagues.

Manning Marable humanizes Malcolm X. Humanizing our heroes makes our efforts to pass the messages and symbols of the past to newer generations of activists more convincing. Young people do not need to see progressive heroes as untainted by their own humanity. And when we present those who make a contribution to building a better world to new generations, the examples of their flaws make it clear that no one is beyond personal and political redemption.

Finally, the biographer, Manning Marable, as my statement at the outset suggests, was a profoundly important scholar/activist. Marable used his historical knowledge, social scientific analytical skills, and political values to craft a career of writing and activism that impacted his students, his academic colleagues, and his fellow socialists in the struggle for a better world.

Telling Malcolm X’s story was Marable’s way of advocating for fundamental social change in a deeply troubled world.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

Also see:

• BOOKS / Tony Bouza: Manning Marable's 'Malcolm X' / The Rag Blog / July 11, 2011

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Michael Meeropol : 'L'Affaire Kushner' at New York's City University

Tony Kushner. Photo by Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters.
L’Affaire Kushner:
Give and take at the
City University of New York

CUNY awards honorary doctorate to playwright Tony Kushner, takes it away, then -- after 'firestorm' of protest -- gives it back.

By Michael Meeropol / The Rag Blog / June 8, 2011

NEW YORK -- On June 3, the playwright Tony Kushner, whose work Angels in America has been justly celebrated as an outstanding contribution both to American theater and to our general understanding of life in the late 1980s, received an honorary doctorate from John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York (CUNY).

Since this was his seventeenth honorary degree, it probably would not have warranted much attention. However, as he acknowledged in his speech to the graduates that day, this honorary doctorate would remain “the most interesting one I had to work the hardest to get.”

You see what should have been a routine ratification of the decision made by John Jay College by the CUNY Board of Trustees at their May 2, 2011, meeting became anything but.

Their decision that day to table Mr. Kushner’s degree -- in effect denying him that degree -- launched what The New York Times called a “firestorm” of protest.

At that May 2 meeting, Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld [see picture on right below] attacked Kushner for being “anti-Israel." He read some snippets of quotes from Kushner that had been assembled as part of an effort to have Brandeis University rescind an honorary degree that Kushner had received in 2006.

”Israel was founded in a program that if you really want to be blunt about it was ethnic cleansing and that today is behaving abominably towards the Palestinian people. I’ve never been a Zionist, I have a problem with the idea of a Jewish state... it would be better if it’d never have happened..." The Israeli reporter questioning Mr. Kushner says, “But you are saying then that the very creation of the state of Israel as a Jewish state was not a good idea,” and Mr. Kushner answered, “It was a mistake.” (1.)

Without a word of discussion, without a word raised in Kushner’s defense, four other members of the CUNY Board joined with Wiesenfeld to block Kushner’s honorary degree. The opinions of the faculty of John Jay College -- the college that nominated him and where I am currently working -- were swept aside.

To get an idea as to how disrespectful this was to the process by which honorary degrees are awarded, we should note that nominations are made by faculty members at any City University College for degrees to be awarded at that college’s commencement exercise. The nominators are kept secret from the faculty committee that, after extensive deliberations, makes recommendations to the college’s administration.

By the time it gets to the CUNY Board of Trustees, three levels of the academic hierarchy, the faculty of the nominating school, the administration of the nominating school, and the Chancellor of the City University, have all made their considered judgment. The Chair of the Interdisciplinary Studies program, Dr. Amy Green, and I were the two nominators and we wrote a very detailed letter describing Mr. Kushner’s artistic achievements that in our view made him eminently qualified to receive such an award. [See picture of Michael Meeropol on left below.]

The Board’s decision on May 2 was the first of its kind. Since being established in 1961 the Board had NEVER overruled a nomination that had passed all three stages.

Neither Mr. Kushner nor the faculty of John Jay College took this insult lying down. Mr. Kushner penned a vigorous response to Mr. Weisenfeld’s attack, explaining that the views attributed to him were false and that the direct quotes from him had been taken out of context.

The chair of the faculty senate of John Jay sent a strong protest letter demanding that the executive committee of the Board immediately meet to authorize the degree. Had they waited till the next scheduled meeting of the full Board, it would have been too late, as John Jay’s commencement was June 3.

Seventy faculty with the rank of Distinguished Professor from all over the City University signed their own letter of protest.

A number of individuals who had previously received honorary degrees from the City University publicly asked how they could return their degrees in protest at the outrageous action.

Despite his strong differences with Kushner on Israel, former New York Mayor Ed Koch was quoted as saying that not only should the Board reverse the decision, but that Mr. Wiesenfeld should be removed from the Board for abusing his authority.

Trustee Wiesenfeld was clearly expressing an extreme point of view. He was quoted in The Atalantic that his mother would call Tony Kushner a CAPO -- a Jewish guard at a Nazi Concentration camp. In an interview with The New York Times he revealed even more about himself:

I [THE REPORTER] tried to ask a question about the damage done by a short, one-sided discussion of vigorously debated aspects of Middle East politics, like the survival of Israel and the rights of the Palestinians, and which side was more callous toward human life, and who was most protective of it.

But Mr. Wiesenfeld interrupted and said the question was offensive because “the comparison sets up a moral equivalence.”

Equivalence between what and what? “Between the Palestinians and Israelis,” he said. “People who worship death for their children are not human.”

Did he mean the Palestinians were not human? “They have developed a culture which is unprecedented in human history,” he said. (2.)

However, all this is beside the point. Though Wiesenfeld grossly mischaracterized Kushner’s views, even if he hadn’t, it would not be grounds for the denial of an honorary degree.

Board Chairman Benno Schmidt candidly acknowledged that the Board’s action had been a violation of principle and called an Executive Board meeting to rectify the error.

He said the following:

Freedom of thought and expression is the bedrock of any university worthy of the name … it is not right for the Board to consider politics in connection with the award of honorary degrees except in extreme cases not presented by the facts here.(3)

The story has a happy ending. On May 9, exactly one week after the outrageous action taken by the trustees, the Executive Committee unanimously approved Mr. Kushner’s honorary degree. Unfortunately, as I and my students watched the proceedings of the Executive Committee meeting, we noted that there was no apology tendered to Mr. Kushner and we feared the experience had left such a bad taste in his mouth that he would refuse the degree. We should not have been concerned.

In an extraordinary display of magnanimity, Mr. Kushner did accept the honorary degree. Chairman Shmidt’s statement served as such an apology.

In an even greater act of generosity, since John Jay has such a large student body, commencement occurs in two sessions. Mr. Kushner agreed to attend both -- something honorees rarely do -- and he basically gave the same speech twice.(4)

But the story remains a cautionary tale. Four members of the Board allowed themselves to be swayed by Trustee Weisenfeld’s accusations.(5) No one saw fit to respond the way Chairman Schmidt did four days later. And this failure to respond applies to Chairman Schmidt as well. (Though his silence at the first meeting is partially corrected by his decisive action four days later.)

At least one of those four was quoted in The New York Times as changing her mind on this issue, but why did it take a firestorm of protest to wake these people up?

I believe it would be a very legitimate question to ask those members of the Board: What they were thinking when they blindly followed Wiesenfeld after he had launched a vicious and unjust political attack on Mr. Kushner, undeniably a great creative artist and one of our foremost public intellectuals.

What were they thinking?

Photos above: (Right) CUNY Trustee Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld. Photo by Michael Appleton / New York Times; (Left) Rag Blog contributor Michael Meeropol who, along with Dr. Amy Green, nominated playwright Kushner for the honorary degree. Photo by Thomas Good.

[Michael Meeropol is Visiting Professor of Economics, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. Read more articles by Michael Meeropol on The Rag Blog.]

References:

1. The full transcript of Mr. Weisenfeld’s remarks as relates to Mr. Kushner follows:

Now to Mr. Kushner: I chose with Mr. Kushner not to look at pro-Israel websites that would give insight into his feelings of Israel. Rather, I went to the website of one Norman Finklestein, another discredited individual that mercifully we rid ourselves of at this University and he pridefully displayed key quotes of Mr. Kushner on his website... which are accurately reflected elsewhere and by Mr. Kushner’s record itself and I quote Mr. Kushner.

First while Mr. Finklestein praises the candidate, Kushner also deplores the brutal and illegal tactics of the IDF, which I might add is the only force of its kind in the world that has the high code of ethics that the Israel defense forces has and the deliberate destruction of Palestinian culture in the systematic attempt to destroy the identity of the Palestinian people. He is also on the board of an organization which opposes the security fence, a unified Jerusalem, or military aid to Israel, recommends Norman Finklestein’s notorious books and supports boycotting and divesting from the state of Israel.

Now to Mr. Kushner’s quotes: "Israel was founded in a program that if you really want to be blunt about it was ethnic cleansing and that today is behaving abominably towards the Palestinian people. I’ve never been a Zionist, I have a problem with the idea of a Jewish state... it would be better if it’d never have happened.“ Kushner said that “establish a state means F-U-C-K-I-N-G people over, however I think that people in the late 20th and 21st century having seen the Holocaust, having seen the 20th century and all of its horrors, cannot be complacent in the face of that." The Israeli reporter questioning Mr. Kushner says, “But you are saying then that the very creation of the state of Israel as a Jewish state was not a good idea,” and Mr. Kushner answered, “It was a mistake.”

I think you get the idea... I don’t want to bore you all with the details. Let me just say that when people identify themselves politically in principal or principally by these types of viewpoints, yes, it could be said by other trustees or by members of faculty that it has a chilling effect when a trustee brings up these types of matters but I think it’s up to all of us to look at fairness and to consider these things especially when the state of Israel, which is our sole democratic ally in the area, sits in a neighborhood that is almost universally dominated by administrations which are misogynist, anti-gay, anti-Christian and societies that are doing today to the Christians what they did to 500,000 Jews who lived in the Arab world in 1948 at the time of the creation of the state of Israel: dispossessing them, murdering them, deporting them.

And so I have to say that even though I am the lone dissenter that it’s time that... It would be much worse for the reputation of the University not to mention this, especially after the appointment of an individual at Brooklyn College, Mr. Overton, who has some equally specious scholarship. Thank you, Mr. Chairman!”

2. The New York Times: A University Trustee Expands on His View of What Is Offensive

3. Board Chairman Schmidt’s full statement issued on May 6, 2011 follows:

I believe the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees needs to reconsider the Board’s decision to table the motion to approve the award of an honorary degree to Tony Kushner. I would not ordinarily ask for reconsideration of a decision so recently taken. But when the board has made a mistake of principle, and not merely of policy, review is appropriate and, indeed, mandatory.

Freedom of thought and expression is the bedrock of any university worthy of the name. If it were appropriate for us to take politics into account in deciding whether to approve an honorary degree, I might agree with Trustee Wiesenfeld, whose political views on the matters in controversy are not far distant from my own. But it is not right for the Board to consider politics in connection with the award of honorary degrees except in extreme cases not presented by the facts here.

The proposed honorary degree for Mr. Kushner would recognize him for his extraordinary talent and contribution to the American theater. Like other honorary degrees, it is not intended to reflect approval or disapproval for political views not relevant to the field for which the recipient is being honored. Any other view is impractical as well as wrong in principle. Would we want it thought that we approve of the politics of everyone who receives a CUNY honorary degree? Certainly I have moved the approval of honorary degrees for persons with whose opinions I differ.

In addition, I am concerned about the procedural unfairness of our action. The objection arose at the eleventh hour without any opportunity for research and preparation necessary for the presentation of a full and balanced appraisal. Accordingly, the Chancellor and I agree that reconsideration of the motion to table the honorary degree for Mr. Kushner is not only the right thing to do, but is our obligation.

I will ask the Secretary of the Board to convene an Executive Committee meeting to reconsider this matter.

4. In the morning he told the students that he was going to deliver two speeches that day. He asserted that the morning students would get the “good speech” and that the afternoon one ”sucks." In the afternoon, to great laughter, he referred to what he had told the morning graduates and said, “I lied... you get the good speech.”

5. The four members who voted with Trustee Wiesenfeld are: Judah Gribetz an attorney with a long distinguished record of public service dating back to the 1950s; Peter S. Pantaleo, another lawyer who is Vice Chair of the Board’s Committee on Fiscal Affairs; Carol A. Robles-Roman, Deputy Mayor of the City of New York (the person who changed her mind between Monday, May 2 and Friday, May 6 and who is yet another lawyer who also serves on the Committee on Fiscal Affiars; and Charles A. Shorter who appears to be the only one of the four with ties to the academic side of higher education -- he is adjunct associate Professor in the Master of Science Program in Real Estate Development at Columbia University. Members of the Board of Trustees appear to all be political appointments either by the Governor of the State of New York or the Mayor.

Links to New York Times articles:

• CUNY Blocks Honor for Tony Kushner
• Outrage on CUNY Vote to Shelve Playwright’s Award
• CUNY Shamed Itself (editorial)
• After Reversal, Honor Is Likely for Kushner
• CUNY and Tony Kushner: A Firestorm (Letters to the Editor)
• The Playwright and the CUNY Trustee: Act II (Letters to the Editor)

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Robert Jensen : Toni Tipton-Martin and the Politics of the Kitchen

The many faces of Aunt Jemima. Image from The Jemima Code.
The Jemima Code:
Toni Tipton-Martin explores the
politics of the kitchen, past and present

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / June 5, 2011

AUSTIN -- In the cafeteria-turned-classroom at UT Elementary School, Toni Tipton-Martin struggles to keep six restless boys focused on hot cocoa, the day’s nutrition lesson. She starts with a store-bought cocoa mix, guiding the students through the list of “all those crazy ingredients” -- the tongue-twisting list of scary-sounding additives and preservatives -- before explaining how they will use four simple ingredients to make their own.

The students are eager to measure and mix, but Tipton-Martin is also teaching critical thinking -- and patience -- in her SANDE mentoring and training program. She has them examine various kinds of chocolate, encouraging them to “taste with your sense of smell -- the cinnamon makes it Mexican chocolate,” trying to engage these youngsters of the digital age in a more embodied way of knowing.

When she is satisfied that they understand what they are doing, the boys go to work with their measuring cups and mixing bowls, producing their cocoa creations that will go home with them in a plastic bag.

When the lesson is over, Tipton-Martin walks the students back to their homeroom, past the vegetable-and-herb garden that is also part of SANDE (the acronym stands for “Spirit, Attitude, Nutrition, Deeds, and Emotions”). She isn’t just trying to teach young people to cook healthy food and understand nutrition, but to understand where food comes from and why it all matters.

Folks in the United States are coming to understand that all this does matter very much. Industrial agriculture and fast food still dominate, but more and more people are shopping at farmers markets, seeking out healthy food, and recognizing the social costs of reckless eating habits.

For Tipton-Martin -- an African-American chef teaching mostly black and brown kids -- it’s a particularly opportune moment to be working on these issues, as Michelle Obama is using the First Lady’s pulpit to focus attention on childhood obesity. Last June, Tipton-Martin was one of the chefs and nutritionists on the South Lawn of the White House to promote Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, and this week she’s front and center at the annual conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals being held in Austin (she’s chair of the host city committee).

So, all in all, it’s been a good year for Tipton-Martin, as her career takes a turn around another of several bends. Her resume includes newspaper journalism (a food writer/editor, first at The Los Angeles Times and then the Cleveland Plain Dealer), cookbook writing and editing, and non-profit work (a four-year stint at Southern Foodways Alliance , a center dedicated to documenting and celebrating the diverse food cultures of the American South, housed at the University of Mississippi).

Since moving to Austin in 1999, she’s created a niche for herself as a writer/activist/social entrepreneur, a status marked by the Community Leadership Award she received from the University of Texas in 2010.

Yet for all the success, the 52-year-old Tipton-Martin is a woman haunted, not by traumatic memories from her own life but by Aunt Jemima. Not just by the Aunt Jemima caricature -- the commercial persona for the “Mammy” figure from plantation life that has sold pancake mix and syrup -- but by the real African-American women in kitchens through the centuries, during and after slavery, whose work and wisdom has been ignored.

That’s why, no matter which of her current enterprises is consuming her time, Tipton-Martin is always working on cracking “The Jemima Code,” her phrase for getting past the caricature to the real lives of those women.

Drawing on varied sources -- oral and written histories from both slaves and slave-holding families, old cookbooks, and people’s stories -- Tipton-Martin has for the past two years been adding stories of those women to her website by that name, convinced that there’s a deep lesson in how white Americans, especially in the South, have dealt with these women.

In one of her blog entries, Tipton-Martin explains that “Aunt Jemima became the embodiment of our deepest antipathy for, and obsession with, the women who fed us with grace and skill.” Many white families depended on Jemima and despised her at the same time, leaving these women who cooked and cared for families on the lowest rung of the social ladder. Rather than merely pity such women as exploited laborers or romanticize them as the ultimate maternal figure, Tipton-Martin wants to tell the stories of their skill and creativity:

Why don’t we celebrate their contributions to American culture the way we venerate the imaginary Betty Crocker? Why wasn’t their true legacy preserved? Can we ever forget the images of ignorant, submissive, selfless, sassy, asexual despots? Is it possible to replace the mostly unflattering pictures of generous waistlines bent over cast iron skillets burned into our eyes? Will we ever believe that strong African women, who toted wood and built fires before even thinking about beating biscuit dough or mixing cakes, left us more than just their formulas for good pancakes?

Tipton-Martin’s interest is not merely historical; by telling the stories of these women, she hopes not only to remind the black community of their strength but also to give white people an opening for honest self-reflection.

When Tipton-Martin says she is haunted by those women, it is really the racism, sexism, and economic inequality they faced that haunt her. And it’s not really those historical forces, but the enduring presence of those inequalities in American life that Tipton-Martin can’t shake.

“These women create ways for me to interact with my own past,” she says, and struggle with the present.

Toni Tipton-Martin talks to UT Elementary students as they head to the garden. Image from UT Blogs.
Tipton-Martin grew up in the middle class in Los Angeles at a time when more opportunities were opening up for some blacks, especially those who were trained to fit into white society. Tipton-Martin was one of them, a good student who took to journalism and early on learned how to live “in costume,” offering a profile that wouldn’t scare white people.

That kind of bargain with the dominant culture can be soothing but is rarely satisfying, and Tipton-Martin’s own struggles run through “Jemima Code.” For example, she tells the story of Vera Beck, who was the test kitchen cook at the Cleveland newspaper. Tipton-Martin writes that Beck “forced me to circle back and confront [my] ‘contrary instincts’”:

I thought I was contented -- a thirty-something food editor living far away from home on the eastern shore of Lake Erie, enjoying amazing and exotic world cuisine -- the daughter of a health-conscious, fitness-crazed cook whose experiments with tofu, juicing and smoothies predated the fads. In the few short years we had together at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Vera taught me a few life lessons while showing me the way to light and flaky buttermilk biscuits.

Among those lessons was the recognition that Tipton-Martin’s upbringing in a more integrated world also had cut her off from a tradition based on observation and apprenticeship in the kitchen, which was about more than cooking. “It was entirely possible that I would stumble blindly through the rest of my life without ever discovering the Aunt Jemima spirit living in me, if it hadn’t been for Vera Beck,” she writes.

Tipton-Martin is blunt in describing the complexity of the race and gender politics of her life. Being light-skinned with naturally straight hair -- “I look like the Jezebel house servant mulatto girls of slavery” -- made it easier to enter the middle class, she says. But at the same time, her appearance meant she had to “overcome the stereotype that I’m Barbie, too.” She speaks about the advantages she’s had, but doesn’t ignore either the racism or sexism of the culture.

As time goes on, Tipton-Martin is less willing to don the costume, less interested in presenting herself and her work in ways that make it easy for others. Rather than cashing in on the moment by writing a breezy recipe book that exploits the women of the Jemima Code -- something along the lines of “Mammy’s sassy lessons for healthy cooking” -- she wants to write a book that confronts the social and political issues. “Everybody’s intrigued,” she says, when she takes the idea to agents and publishers, but wary.

Tipton-Martin knows well how the white world rewards people of color who fit in, rather than challenge, white norms. But she finds it more and more difficult to smile away the racist or ignorant comments.

An example: At the opening event for the new Foodways Texas project (she’s a board member), Tipton-Martin said a white woman told her that this work on food and nutrition is so important because “those people” come from cultures with bad diets. “I used to just smile” at such comments, she says, “but that day I told her the problem was not ‘their’ cultures but fast food and processed food, which is an American problem."

Tipton-Martin has increasingly less patience for what we might call “the ignorance of the privileged” -- the desire of people with status and wealth to explain away problems of inequality as simply the failure of “those people” rather than think about the injustice of the system, from which the privileged benefit.

But she also recognizes that people struggling in difficult circumstances -- especially the kids from poor neighborhoods, disproportionately black and brown -- need more than political analysis. She rejects the simplistic “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” prescription of conservatives but believes that young people need role models. That’s where the women of the Jemima Code come in:

For me, they are important role models. They’re the closest I can get to saying to this [younger] generation that there are women who had it harder than you. Even though you think your life is really hard -- and it is, and there are all these forces against you -- you can persevere. The women of the Jemima Code took control of their lives under circumstances in where they didn’t even have control of their own bodies, but they were able to claim their dignity.

For Tipton-Martin, those women are not just potential role models for young people but for herself as well. She writes, “I discover that the woman I am becoming is a mere shadow of the women they were: patient and loving; smart, talented, hard-working; strong physically and emotionally, compassionate; multi-tasking.”

Tipton-Martin has a habit of engaging in the critical self-reflection that she asks of others, which leads to a professional and personal restlessness. She was raised to assimilate, to fit in, to prove to the dominant culture that she could make it under the rules written by white people, by men, by the wealthy. She was fitted for “the costume,” but found it increasingly uncomfortable.

“As long as I could just keep popping from costume to costume, I didn’t have to reconcile any of this and find out what it is that I hoped to accomplish,” Tipton-Martin says.

Negotiating life without a costume means talking honestly about a history -- collective and personal -- that the dominant culture desperately wants to ignore. That means not only highlighting the skill and accomplishments of the women of the Jemima Code, but facing the pain, anger and shame that comes with living in a system that still values white people, men, and the wealthy over others.

For Tipton-Martin, that conversation can start at dinner by giving a voice to the women who for so long put food on the table.

LINKS:

• Tipton-Martin’s website
• The Jemima Code website
• Watch Tipton-Martin’s talk on the Jemima Code to the Culinary Historians of Southern California in November 2010.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009) and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing, which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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