Since this is our last day of class, I’d like you all to consider the intellectual, emotional, and activist journey you’ve been on this semester in our class. I look forward to reading your final reflective papers about your service learning experience, but let’s also talk about what else you’re taking away from this course.
FINAL QUESTIONS
Take a few moments and jot down an answer to each of the following questions:
What reading, discussion, or film impacted your thinking the most in this class? Why?
What was the most challenging moment, discussion, or topic for you in the class?
What do you feel is the most important thing you learned from this course?
How will your new awareness change the way you study, act, speak, etc. in the world?
If you could change one thing about the course, what would it be?
Students stand on the steps of Purdue’s Hovde Hall on Monday, demanding that administration act to combat racism prevalent in the campus community.
The march was a moving event, but it has also stirred the fires of those made nervous by the students’ activism. One of the march signs, left in front of Hovde Monday afternoon along with candles, was defaced with racist hate speech and was accompanied by the image of a body hanging from a tree, evoking America’s dark history of lynchings.
HOW TO JOIN IN
In response – and to maintain the productive energy rallied by Monday’s march, PARC (Purdue Anti-Racism Coalition) will be holding a meeting TONIGHT, in BRNG B323, at 5:30pm, right after our class. I would strongly encourage those of you who wish to help make our campus a hate-free, accountable environment to attend. People of any race, gender, etc. are welcome at the meeting. For more information, check out the “The Fire This Time” Facebook page.
Salt of the Earth (1954) is based on the real-life 1951 strike that Mexican-American mine workers in Grant County, New Mexico held against Empire Zinc (called “Delaware Zinc” in the film), the company that owned the mine where they worked. The filmmakers cast many real local miners and their families (only five in the cast were professional actors) who had been involved in the actual strike to cast the film. The miners were striking for fair wages (i.e., equal to those of their fellow Anglo, or white, workers) and better health and safety.
Filmed in the heart of the Red Scare and the McCarthy Era, the film was denounced by the United States House of Representatives for its Communist sympathies, and the FBI investigated the film’s financing. The American Legion called for a nation-wide boycott of the film: film-processing labs were told not to work on it and unionized projectionists were instructed not to show it. After its opening night in New York City, all but 12 theaters in the country refused to screen it. During filming, anti-Communist vigilantes fired rifle shots at the set and Rosaura Revueltas was deported to Mexico in an attempt to disrupt filming. Many years later, the film found a new life and an appreciative audience in the 1960s and gradually reached wider viewership through screenings held at union halls, women’s centers, and film schools. It is still often shown today.
Homework: Watch the film for Monday’s class and consider the discussion questions on your handout.
Toward the end of last year’s presidential election, the following footage, released by Mother Jones journalists, of Mitt Romney speaking in a closed meeting about America’s poor made headlines and hurt his campaign significantly. Watch the clip and consider his comments in light of the article you read this week by Adair, “Branded with Infamy,” especially considering the “patrolling images” (or negative stereotypes) we are given of the working poor and those on welfare in the U.S.
However, this isn’t an isolated incident; it may be the beginning of a new trend. Last year, another woman, Tanya McDowell of Bridgeport, CT, was sentenced to 5 years in prison for “education theft.” (Again, compare this to the lenient sentence the two Steubenville rapists received, and the differing impacts on the lives of those young men vs. single mothers like Williams-Bolar and McDowell.)
The Feminist Wire asks: “…when does American Dream seeking, innovation, motherly ‘instinct,’ and creative problem solving get celebrated and when does it get criminalized? Which mother’s children deserve the best, and which mothers are demonized for asserting their children’s worth?”
To begin to answer this question, we first need to determine what these two women have in common. Let’s go back to Adair:
“…systems of power produve and patrol poverty through the reproduction of both social and bodily markers” (233).
In other words, Adair, like the French Philosopher Michel Foucault whom she cites, understand that the body of a citizen becomes “written on,” or like a text that we all read meanings onto; and some bodies, like those of the poor and of minorites (like the students whose race marks them in Precious Knowledge) become texts we read, in particular, as warning signs. This, Foucault asserts, is how such systems of power disciplines the rest of us to behave or think in certain ways. Consider, in particular, the image of the welfare queen (see Adair, p. 234 and p.240).
THE WELFARE QUEEN IN PRECIOUS
Take, as one example, the following scene between two of the main characters from the film Precious (based on the novel Push by Sapphire). In the film, the actress Mo’Nique plays Precious’s mother, and Precious is played by Gabourney Sidibe. In this scene, Precious’s mother angrily confronts her teenage daughter after a white social worker has come to their apartment to investigate their living conditions and the welfare of Precious’s two children (both conceived because her father has raped her). Listen to the rhetoric of the accusations Precious’s mother heaves at her in this scene, particualrly the invocation of “sacrifice”; then consider Adair’s breakdown of how we “read” the bodies of women we imagine to be welfare queens below.
Warning: the following clip contains cursing, abusive language, and domestic violence.
PRECIOUS
So here’s Adair analyzing how our culture “reads” the body of the welfare queen:
The welfare queen’s body is portrayed as “the embodiment of dependency, disorder, disarray, and otherness. Her broken and scarred body becomes proof of her inner pathology and chaos, suggesting the need for further punishment and discipline. In contemporary narratives welfare women are imagined to be dangerous because they refuse to sacrifice their desires and fail to participate in legally sanctioned heterosexual relationships; theirs is read, as a result, as a selfish, ‘unnatural,’ and immature sexuality” (240).
There are any number of extra credit opportunities out there this month, given the ridiculous number of events happening on campus in the next two weeks. These include, of course, this week’s LGBTQIA film festival. While I passed the flyer around in class, below you’ll find the link to the site, which includes trailers for every film being shown this week so you can take your pick. The films represent a wide range of genres and include a few international films as well.
I will count attendance at any of the films for extra credit (excepting the 5-minute short titled “Flyers,” unless seen in addition to another film or short).
Last year, Arizona’s public school system received a great deal of attention after Superintendent Huppenthal shut down the state’s acclaimed Mexican American Studies program (called Raza Studies), claiming that it fostered resentment toward white people and promoted ethnic solidarity and disrespect toward American (i.e., white western European) history, or “anti-Americanism,” and that it inculcated leftist ideas.
Students and teachers from the Raza Studies program protest to protect ethnic studies programs in Arizona’s public schools.
To put this whole issue in perspective, let’s first remember that parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas used to be Mexico.
The following quote is pulled from the documentary Precious Knowledge (2012), about Arizona students’ and educators’ battle to keep the program:
“The [Raza] program was a national model of educational success — 93 percent of its enrolled students graduating from high school and 85 percent going on to attend college, bucking a statewide trend that saw only 48 percent of Latino students graduating at all. The program taught Mexican and American history, as well as Central and South American literature and culture. But the political tide shifted in Arizona in the 2000s. The state passed extremely controversial immigration laws…”
So why would state officials shut down such a successful program? Huppenthal cited Arizona House Bill 2281 to make his arguments that what the teachers in the Raza Studies program were teaching was illegal. Read an HB 2281 excerpt below:
“A school district o charter school in this state shall not include in its program of instruction any courses or classes that include any of the following:
Promote the overthrow of the United States Government.
Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.
Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.
Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”
AND NOW?
As of March this year, an Arizona judge upheld certain provisions of a state law that bans ethnic studies in Tucson’s schools;however, the judge ruled that the section of the law prohibiting courses tailored to serve students of a particular ethnicity was unconstitutional, a small win. The teachers of the Raza Studies program – some of whom have been volunteering their time to continue teaching ethnic studies to interested students in the community – are continuing to fight the decision.
QUESTIONS
What connections can you make between Kozol’s “Preparing Minds for Markets” and recent attacks on ethnic studies programs?
How do race and ethnicity make students vulnerable in educational institutions?
How do you see recent public debates about immigration reflected in Arizona’s reactionary education policies?
We’re often told that education is the great equalizer, that access to public education is what levels the playing field for anyone willing to study, work hard, and get good grades. Rich calls this into question in her essay from the early 1970s. In short, she argues that even though women are now allowed to enter into higher education – in fact, during the second wave, women were flocking to universities in unprecedented numbers – their education was anything but equal.
Ultimately, what Rich asks us to consider is whether mere access to dominant institutions is enough to create equality. And whether the particular values and power promised (to some) by such institutions is, indeed, what we were really looking for.
Think back, too, to this argument about “pretended choices” made by Audre Lorde in “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”:
“[We] face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power” (118).
Institutions like the academy (and the military and even much of government) were designed to accommodate the needs, ideas, and values of upper and middle-class white men – certainly not women or minorities, and most definitely not the poor or immigrants. Given this knowledge, is simply adding such groups and stirring enough to change such institutions and make them more equal – or make them more equalizing? Or, as Rich worries, will they continue to breed masculine privilege as they were designed to do?
First, let’s think about the big picture. The follow short video is by Nayyar Javed, a Canadian therapist and social activist.
