Notes on Terrible Educations: Auto/Ethnography as Intervention to How we See Black

Introduction

Out of a commitment to act on what Black girls taught, and continue to teach us, and an urgency to mobilize queer love as a necessary ingredient to social transformation, Hill L. Waters (HLW) was birthed. As a Black feminist love praxis project birthed by two scholar artists, Durell M. Callier and Dominique C. Hill, HLW engenders healing through community accountability and artistic productions and dialogue. The scope of our work includes workshops, classes/lectures, community organizing, and performances which all highlight: Black love; race, gender, and sexuality as interwoven systems of oppressions; feminism in action; and the power of self-affirming spaces.

Utilizing imagery, poetry, and fictionalized accounts, we illuminate our experiences of traversing through pivotal moments of terrible education. These instances serve as pathways into our assertions of what education should be, what schooling tells you education is, and invites readers to consider the ramifications of Black bodies subjected to schooling void of education. What follows is a representation of our original performance at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in May 2017.

A continuation of our Black feminist auto/ethnographic practice, we move forward with Bambara (1996) still on our lips, ¹

Of course we know how to walk on the water, of course we know how to fly; fear of sinking, though, sometimes keeps us from the first crucial move, then too, the terrible educations you liable to get is designed to make you destruct the journey entire. (p. 255)

Where do we learn terrible education? What do they teach us? And how might we (un)learn the lessons of terrible educations? This performance interrogates these very questions and offers up our own life histories as means to inquire into each of the aforementioned. Differing slightly from the performance, we provide reflections between each performative piece, offer a poem detailing the importance and relevance of imagining educations beyond the terrible and close with what it means to see Black, Blackness, and Black people through the lens of formal education in particular and education as a larger enterprise in general:

Hill: “WHO LOOK AT ME,” [and] “WHO SEE” (June Jordan, p. 7)

What are the life chances and possibilities for Black youth? and,

What factors, tropes, and circumstances inform teachers’ determination?

Terrible Educations I: The (Mis)Education of a Poet

Waters:

Way down in the jungle deep when Black folks knew how to fly and OJ was free and bobo’s were still in style and high-top fades were not on the comeback. Back before Baltimore became synonymous with the melodramatic HBO series The Wire, a half-baked depiction of my city. Back before No Child Left Behind became an empty promise for generations of Black genius standardized test have yet to latch on to. Back when I believed without question that Black folks could be anything they wanted to be. When why not was not a possibility, how was not important, and when simply a matter of time.

Back then, I wanted to be the first African-American president of these United States of America. The year 1992, the same year Barry Barack Obama solidified his “can do no wrong card.” Black man fresh out of Harvard law, marrying the one and only Michelle LaVaughn Robinson who would be the only reason I halfway trusted her too smooth-talkin-sellin-us-hope-and-responsibility-freedom-preachin-drone-droppin-only-reflection-I-got-in-44-elected, husband.

Me and my round, pound cake colored self, you know the inside part, had moved through all of the p’s possible before settling on president. There was being a police officer, then I wanted to be a politician, and for a brief moment as if foreseeing my own future I wanted to be a preacher. Pilot did not make the cut at all, neither did parole officer, nor pharmacist or paramedic. My momma was at that time a paramedic but I wanted to be THE FIRST African-American president.

But pound cake colored boys, you know like on the inside, who come from my side of the tracks, cannot be the President of much else except prisons. That is what Ms. Stansberry told me, in front of the whole class. So she says, through bright pale purple lipstick “Hmph, what do you want to be when you grow up.” Sharply, without missing a beat, “the first Black president.” “Hmph, the first Black president? Silly as you are won’t be much else than the president of somebody’s penitentiary.” Silence falls. The dialogue ended. Point one for the infamously dreaded substitute teacher with frizzled orange hair, slightly balding in the middle, on brownie colored skin. Ms. Stansberry strikes again!

It is now way after watching Mandela become elected president of South Africa. Just some time after I realized Ru Paul really was not a woman, meaning that my mama had been right all along, like mommas tend to be, even if they do not say it out loud. Just a little after Black women’s love came and found me, for who knows what umpteenth time this is. Sometime after we lose MJ to some weird combination of fame, vitiligo, and being Black in America and after we realized Whitney had been drowning all along, and that there are just some things an autopsy will never tell us.

It is after kids no longer play outside, after metal detectors are in every school on the Southside of Chicago yet Sandy Hook still rocks parts of our nation. Yes, even after the Million Man March, all of the 50 year commemorations of the Civil Rights Movement, and just after Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is repealed, marriage equality is gaining traction, and school choice is the only choice. It is well after selfies are a thing, and Twitter beefs are real, and after Blue Ivy is almost trademarked, and after we ask Black girl gold medalist Olympians to not only win gold but look good while doing it.

It is well after we know the price of silence in Rwanda. And I want to go back to the silence, back to Hilton Elementary. Back to the day, my round, pound cake colored self, you know like on the inside, squared off with Ms. Stansberry and lost. Back to the moment I had gotten in trouble one too many times for the same thing that has gotten most black boys and girls alike in trouble, our mouths. Either talking too much, not at the right time, not talking enough, caught whistling at white girls, quenching thirst with Arizona tea, daring to kiss girls and like it, asking the wrong questions on Fruitvale platforms on New Year’s Eve. Black mouths whether open or shut do not seem to have access to the Barry Barack Obama “can do no wrong card.”

I would like to go back and say something like, “Well you know what, my grandmother, and my mother, and my uncle, and Sistah Mabel, and Rev’ren Bailey, and Mama and Papa Isabelle, and Sistah Louise, and Sistah Shirley and Miss Marva, allllllllll seem to think I could be. They keep tellin me, I can be anything I wanna be when I grow up.” Score one, for the pound cake colored boy, you know like on the inside. The class is hysterical. There are oooohs and ahhhhs and he’s gonna get it and giggles, nobody liked Ms. Stansberry, and I mean noooooobody. (Callier, 2016)

Ms. Stansberry was my (mis)education. Before graduate school where I learned words like “culturally responsive pedagogy” or “critical theory,” I was intimately familiar with the concept of “terrible educations” (Bambara, 1996, p. 255). In spite of Ms. Stansberry and the multiple iterations of her in society as disciplinary limits, conservative education research methodologies, and an over emphasis on schooling versus learning, I learned that education was expansive. Because of my community, I learned education should be emancipatory, culturally relevant, artistic, kinesthetic, accessible, and communal (see also Bambara, 1996). Learning and education should not be measured and equated with traditional schooling processes. It is time that we have research methods and questions, which reflect the reality that education takes place beyond schools (Callier, 2016).

Terrible Educations II: “When It Gets in the Blood”

Hill:

He entered me/

Red Toupee wearing, Mr. Dodd/Entered me/

Fix me/

Tried to/

Be a lady–Why are you sitting like that?

Why you being so Black/ So stupid/

He entered me/

Stabbed my thighs closed/

Felt like/Thought I heard/Don’t be so Black/

Come here, I’ll fix you/

Without my permission/He entered/

Exited/

Entered, This time a woman/

No old white man/

Women who raised me/

Fix me/

Tried to/

Be more ladylike

Books on my head/

My posture fixed, temporarily/

She, they entered me/

Exited/

Entered/

Teacher/

Another, Another, Then another

Fix me/Tried/Well meaning/

Good intentions/Fix me/

More like break me/My spirit/

Without permission/Enter me/

Try to/Fix me/

Success!/

It’s in my skin/

I cry/fix, you try/

Broken, I am/

It’s in my skin/

Without permission, entered/

Exited/Entered/They did/

But it/ never left/

(Dominique C. Hill 2013)

Short circuit tempered Mr. Dodd. With little patience for his active, curious, and not about to just accept anything students, he found every opportunity to snap and insult. At least it felt that way. Countless occasions he insisted that his previous teaching experiences at a different school, a school known to be more white and more selective, was better. That we were “stupid” and just didn’t care. He made fun of how I and others sat in our seats. Insisted that us girls sit up straight with our legs closed.

Mr. Dodd, my fifth grade teacher, taught me domestication. Mr. Dodd instructed me on the rules of engagement regarding being successful in school. He pointed out proper moves I made during my pursuit of fifth grade success. But Mr. Dodd, my short White toupee’ wearing fifth grade teacher quick to yell epithets that indicated a lack of respect for and little belief in our ability to achieve academically, did not disappear upon my move to sixth grade. Instead, he haunted me until later in life. In my mid 20’s, I came to see Mr. Dodd as a noun, an evolving and chameleon-like character vessel serving up training lessons on how to practice domestication. To Mr. Dodd is to implement policies and inflict harm, explicit or implicit, that create restraints and confine imagined life chances and possibilities resembling sociocultural structures and realities.

Terrible Educations III: The Stakes

DMC: Terrible Educations are dangerous.

DCH: Because 8 year olds are committing suicide

The law ain’t just and the education system flawed

Kelley Williams-Bolar put her kids in a better school

Black mothers in buffalo are being accused of neglect for taking their kids out of school and giving them education at home

DMC: They teach us, train us even to act against our self- interest, against actualizing our gifts

(Altogether) Because we need to shift the gaze and we need to do it now

DCH: Because a 175$ fine was all Lamya’s teacher received for cutting her hair

DMC: Zero tolerance affects, scratch that targets, non-white, non-hetero, non normative youth

Zoning is still real

DCH: (some) Preservice teachers believe working class parents don’t value education

Students are introduced to high stakes testing in third grade

Refrain: On Seeing Black

“The first thing you do is to forget that I’m black. Second, you must never forget that I’m black,” Black lesbian poet Pat Parker (2016) asserts as a productive pedagogical approach for White people who wish to befriend her (p. 76). In other words, see all of me but do not make particular parts of me, race for instance, the sum total of it all. “Erasure is violence,” and the erasure to which we are interested in are the erasures of slight, misrecognition, and nonrecognition in how we look at, away from, and see Blackness (Fleetwood, 2011; Morris, 2016). Specifically, our aim in this essay has been to explore the sorts of blind spots and erasures, which are epistemic and ontological in nature. These erasures are foundational to how we understand and value knowledge informing our education system and educational practice in the United States. At best, these erasures disappear the histories of Black children, their innate genius and the genius of the communities in which they reside and come from. At worst such erasures diminish them and the attributes of their communities to stereotypes of poverty (see Emdin, 2012; Love, 2014).

If looking is subjective, what might it mean then for us to look Black (Brown, Carducci, & Kuby, 2014; Fleetwood, 2011)? In posing and answering this question, we recognize the political nature of narratives. Moreover, we have offered our own narratives here as a means to offer up gazes. Gaze, a communicative process between the gazer and the object in view, is steeped in history and culture. In relationship, then, it follows that accountability for what is seen and understood should be shared between and across the two. However, this is not so, especially as it pertains to non-White, nonbinary, nonmale, and other bodies marked by socially constructed normatives as nondominant. These bodies inhabiting nondominant identities become casts as abnormal and even deviant (Cacho, 2007; Cohen, 2004).

Over time then, gaze from people with dominant identities onto those with nondominant ones create narratives that evolve into definitive and static constructions. Canadian Black feminist Katherine McKittrick (2006) notes the inconvenient work of Black bodies in particular:

But this geographic work—acknowledging the real and the possible, mapping the deep poetics of Black landscapes—is also painful work. The site of memory is also the sight of memory—imagination requires a return to and engagement with painful places, worlds where Black people were and are denied humanity, belonging, and formal citizenship; this means a writing of where and how Black people occupy space through different forms of violence and disavowal. (p. 33).

McKittrick’s articulation frames Blackness across space and time, or diaspora, as well as individual Black bodies as landscapes. Moreover, she stitches together location of memory and injury (the body) and the possibility of healing (the sight). Implicit in this understanding is that that seeing is vital to the processes of doing harm and inciting healing. Thereby, our turn to gaze is an invocation to redistribute accountability for what is engendered from gazing and insist that education require those looking at bodies, especially those bodies non-White, nonbinary, nonmale, and overall nondominant to take in the history, culture, and politics embedded in their gaze. Our site and sightseeing provide us important cartographic orientations. We use orientation here, as a way to think about how we turn to, or turn away from particular objects/subjects, and consequently, the ways we then direct our attention and energy (Ahmed, 2006). As Ahmed (2006) notes orientations provide directions, which serve as instructions “about ‘where,’ but they are also about ‘how’ and ‘what’: directions take us somewhere by the very requirements that we follow a line that is drawn in advance” (p. 16). Receiving directions, to be oriented, is not simply an individual matter but also pertains to the way collective direction is given, received, and performed by a nation or imagined communities (Ahmed, 2006). How might we orient ourselves toward Blackness? And how might our orientations see Black?

Our narratives, poetry, and performance have served as flashpoints demonstrating the politics, possibilities, and problems in how we see, do not see, obfuscate, obliterate, or see Blackness through astigmatic lenses. In acknowledging these issues, we also acknowledge that

You could build a world out of need or you could hold everything black and see. You give back the lack.

You hold everything black. You give yourself back until nothing’s left but the dissolving blues of metaphor. (Rankine, 2014, p. 70)

We give the lack back. We hold everything Black. Giving ourselves over and over again until there is nothing but the complex truth of our genius. The stakes are high—self-determination, increasing the life chances and life opportunities of Black youth and people, actualizing freedom. And moving beyond terrible educations is imperative. So, we ask again, who look, who see?