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Don't Judge a Book by its Title (How the N-Word Changes Everything)

January 20, 2011

Picture_17
Could the N-word stop a book from being shared?  

Last week, just a few days before the 25th anniversary of the national holiday celebrating the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I finally released an audacious collaborative ebook on Scribd.com;  a collection of 34 essays by students from my fall 2010 racism course at Baruch College-CUNY. We unanimously chose to call the ebook of op-eds about racism COULD YOU BE THE BIGGER NIGGER?  But the title has been causing a little anticipated controversy, and some unexpected concern. 

Since my first ebook on Scribd had reached over 1100 ppl fairly quickly over the last 9 months, and my 2nd collaboration with a group of students in my anthropology course a year ago reached almost 5000 in less than 6 months, I was hoping people could trust me and read the ebook to get the point explained below but it was clear from early responses that some change was needed. But I couldn't undermine the students' vote.  

 

Then I got a Facebook message from a trusted friend from Nashville whom I've never meet in person. We adore one another on Facebook so I wanted to respond to his concern. After reading the ebook, he wrote:


i'll be honest ... i posted the link to the essays on racism that you had on your wall. i struggled greatly doing it because of the title but i felt like the value far outweighed my reservations. anyway ...

As a result of Jim Palmer's message, last Monday I made a little tweak to the title so it could be read as COULD YOU BE BIGGER? without betraying the students' decision. Someone reminded me not to "don't judge a book by its title" and that gave me the opening needed for this post to launch the ebook. Here goes... 

 

Don’t Judge a Book by its Title

The title "Could You Be the Bigger Nigger?" may alarm you but 34 students arrived at it by a unanimous consensus. One of them said, “they’ll get it when they read our essays.” The price 15 year-old Elizabeth Eckford (the cover photo is attached) paid so that we all gained access to our educational civil and human rights must have required that she be “bigger” than she and especially whites “knew” her to be as a so-called “nigger.” In 2011, racism may be less overt for many blacks and perhaps more overt for Muslims and gays. These essays are our testimony to being the “bigger nigger” or simply, being “bigger” that we ever imagined when it comes to racism. Who we are in the small, ordinary moments that offend us around race and racism matters.

Racism Is Not Personal

At the start of BLS1003: The Evolution and Expressions of Racism, most students considered racism “a collection of individual-level anti-minority group attitudes” (L. Bobo in Gallagher 2009, 157). During the course we discovered the persistent structural inequities found in symbols (i.e., skin color), discriminatory laws and practices, and social group position, power and privilege that we all were born into whether experienced or not.

Why Op-Eds and Why Students Writing Op-Eds?

Last summer, I participated in The OpEd Project with the support of a grant for women in the Baruch College community given by philanthropist RuthAnn Harnisch. The intention of the OpEd Project, created by Catherine Orenstein, is to expand and increase the volume of female thought leaders in the world. I have a similar aim for college students as they embrace their adulthood.

According to data from 2009, of the over 307 million people living in the U.S., over 14% or almost 43 million are between the ages 15 and 29. According to the U.S. Department of Education, there were 18.3 million college students in 2007. Why is it that we so seldom hear, or listen to, the voices of young people and young adults in key public opinion forums when so many key issues directly affect their future? Writing op-eds (crafting a lede, learning to create an argument in various ways, crafting a “to-be-sure” response to anticipate opposition to your argument, and a conclusion) and then publishing them together disrupts the structural inequity and age subjugation that often separates each and every college student from publicly engaging in her/his own adulthood, learning to openly voice their citizenship and influence humanity.

Voicing Adulthood 

Why not take 34 emerging thought leaders and have each of them link an individual experience with racism to a systematic inequity or embedded disadvantage known as “structural racism.” Have them cite evidence from assigned readings and individually connect to the often elusive or overlooked of race as a social construct. The brilliance here is the collective wisdom from reading the stories of a student who is black with a white, a woman with a man, or––relative to the nationally-recognized ethnic diversity at Baruch––a Asian American with a Bangladeshi-American, a Pakistani Muslim with a Syrian Jew, a disabled mother with a Pagan lesbian and an undocumented student from North America (Mexico). Having these voices in op-eds about racism, publishing them together in a free e-book, has been the most powerful and emotional final project with a real-world or public impact I could ever imagine and fulfills what students ask for.

Create & Share a Racism Op-ed E-book

We invite your class or organization to publish op-eds together. Help us create a social media movement of student thought leadership. We used Scribd.com but whatever you use, SHARE it widely with your family and friends through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Share it with leaders in your school and community. Send it to your principal, dean or local politicians! Don’t limit learning to the classroom. Give it away! Social and collaborative learning can reach thousands or more. A former anthropology class published SPEAK! The Miseducation of College Students in May 2010. Speak! has been read by over 4500 people in less than 6 months.

Dare to be Different: Go Public!

Think about it! Publish a “little” idea, a little story with your classmates’ little ideas on race or social justice. Say to yourself “Maybe I’m right!” rather than starting from what if I’m wrong. Practice trusting yourself. Practice trusting your students. What young adults have to say matters! Openly sharing prepared (and not-so prepared) thoughts in public is the best education there is. Be the audacity of that!

Warmly,

Kyra Gaunt

 

-- 
Kyra D. Gaunt, Ph.D.   
2009 TED Fellow
Associate Professor at Baruch College-CUNY
Voicing "the unspoken" through song, scholarship and social media

http://kyraocityworks.com 
http://www.google.com/profiles/kyraocity

An idea worth spreading: Agree to be Offended & Stay Connected. Reveal Your Connection to the Remarkable Oneness of Humanity.

"I have learned silence from the talkative, tolerance from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strangely, I am ungrateful to these teachers" -- Kahlil Gibran 

Filed under  //   bigger   diversity   ebook   education   greatness   higher   learning   n-word   nigger   op-ed   racism   teaching  
Posted by Kyra D. Gaunt, Ph.D. 

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?uestion: Are We Being Served?: Lunch Counters, Racism, and the Real-Time Web of Twitter

February 5, 2010

(rev. 2/5/2010)

My day started with an amazing Haiti Teach-In at Baruch College-CUNY with my colleague Haitian Carolle Charles, who was featured on the cover of the NYTimes this same day (above the fold, no less). That was immediately followed by a great 3rd meeting of my Intro to Cultural Anthropology class where I introduced social constructs. Did you know that the "weekend" is a social construct?

a social construct is an idea which may appear to be natural and obvious to those who accept it, but in reality is an invention or artifact of a particular culture or society.

The “weekend” do not exist in nature, per se, and yet it is perceived as natural and obvious though at some point long, long ago, human beings invented it as a sort of technology to deal with the work week. Social constructs are odd discourses, like race, because changing something we have agreed seems so natural and real (“that’s the way it is”) requires a lot of hard and endless work to achieve simply because we have forgotten it was invented. LOL. Signs of its persistence abound but in reality we keep social constructs around by talking about them over and over again. Thus the persistence of stereotypes and all the larger structural implications of racial discourse. When I returned to my office in the late afternoon, I learned that a whole brouhaha had erupted hours earlier about a "Fried Chicken menu" at NBC's 30 Rock cafeteria.

FROM SIT-INS TO TWEET-INS
Almost to the day fifty years ago, a group of "Negro" students from North Carolina A&T staged a non-violent protest at lunch counters in a fight for equal rights for all. Because of their darker skin, they were refused service at a Woolworth's lunch counter. To protest, they remained seated while waiting to be served. The anniversary of their pivotal acts of non-violence remind me of how young people’s actions turned the tide of the Civil Rights movement.  Twitter wants to become a similar platform for people to voice their racial dissent in real-time. The only problem is that certain geographical and social disconnects of class and nation between “black” actors cannot be galvanized in the same way as the sit-ins. Life on Twitter is much more unexpected and unpredictable leading to clashes of culture as was experienced today, February 4th, around a tweet about a menu in honor of Black History Month. The tweet transformed NBC's ordinary cafeteria, at least for a NY minute, into a 21st century "lunch counter" of racial stereotyping about fried chicken and black-eyed peas.  The sit-ins of the past because a tweet-in of the present over what and who was being served at NBC.

IS FRIED CHICKEN TOO P.C. FOR NBC OR ARE WE? (#blackhistorymonthfail)
In honor of Black History Month, the NBC menu read: "Fried chicken, collard greens w/ smoked turkey, white rice/black eyed peas, and jalapeno cornbread" @Questlove, aka Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, currently of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon fame, tweeted a link to a photo of the menu that he captured himself along with "Hmm HR?" The menu seemed to offend many in the Twitterverse as I scanned through the day’s streem of tweets. One tweet that followed read: black.history.month.fail. Sparked by hundreds of retweets, NBC Universal replied on Twitter: "The sign in the NBCU cafeteria has been removed. We apologize for anyone who was offended by it."

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2010/02/04/oops-nbc-offends-black-musician-fried-chicken-cafeteria-special-honor-bl#ixzz0edH7tEBJ

Fueled by popular (meaning “everyday”) perceptions of NBC as unfavorable to black audiences and actors (think 10 seasons of NBC's Friends devoid of funk in the whitest New York City ever witnessed on Must-See TV), the tweet by Questlove would inadvertantly trump the local efforts of black folk working behind the counter who had spent the last two seasons of Black History Month at NBC struggling to get their culture ON the menu not off.  What's ironic about the brouhaha is that the menu was actually requested by black staff for Black History Month. One disheartened cook from the cafeteria explained (see video). Their efforts were eclipsed, though not necessarily forever, by all kinds of blogs and reports about the reaction to the tweet. For instance, if you Google "NBC" and "Blacks" right now, all the top hits are about this controversy without much mention of the folks who took a stand for minority representation in their own workplace. They, who work beyond the glare of cameras and late night jokes at NBC Universal, learned of the thwarting power of Twitter by those who have access versus those who don’t. 

DON’T EAT THE MENU: REPRESENTATIONS VS. REALITY
For Questlove "Hmm HR?" was likely a perfectly innocent tweet for a man who once called himself "BROther ?uestion". But as I told my students earlier this week, people often take their views of maps as if that's the way the real world looks, as if North is actually UP (see the Peters Map or a South-Up Australia-centered map). Questlove made an assumption from the surface about what might be going on without considering the other implications as most people on Twitter do day in and out. Somehow I think this links to the ways in which race as skin-color works. Such a cursory glance presumed everything about a person just from the surface of their skin.

There are menus and then there is the meal. If you eat the menu, you will NEVER be satisfied--social constructs 101. When we consume ideas of race and racism or even look for injustices at the level of individual, sometimes we get caught in the flatland or a superstition like the once held “truth” that the earth is flat. Thinking from ideas that are not based in reality—or initial perceptions are often disconnected from the social resources, labor, costs and technologies of intellect and community that lead to the moment. It often leads to what I call "kooky" behavior. Jumping to conclusions because things seem perfectly real or obvious often leads to a dangerous, slippery slope to hell where our perceptions severely limit our perspectives and the possibilities of seeing beyond the moment to connect to others’ liberation that may not look like sitting at the lunch counter. What does it say that the protest is being lodged from BEHIND it? (rev. 2/5/10)


SERVING BLACKS ON NBC: A FORGOTTEN PAST
Since its Black History Month, here's a little trivia for you. What was NBC once endearingly called by many blacks in the 1940s thru the 1960s? The "Negro Broadcast Company"! My mom, who was raised in the D.C. area, recalled that NBC was the only channel that prominently featured blacks. From my own research on Ethel Waters (1896-1977), the richest woman (and I didn’t say black woman) in Hollywood and the most powerful on Broadway during her day, was the very first black to have her own TV show The Ethel Waters Show on NBC in 1939. It was called an "experiment" at the time. The Nat "King" Cole Show is more popularly remembered as the first show on television featuring an African American which was also on NBC. It was a fifteen-minute weekly musical variety show in November 1956.

In more recent decades, with the exception of the Bill Cosby era of the 1980s and its spinoff A Different World, NBC is no longer considered an innovator in Black programming. The only caveat might be the fact that The Roots are the house band on the LATE show (visions from Spike Lee’s Bamboozled are dancing in my head right now SMH). I should be glad the brothers are getting paid every night. Everybody's gotta sleep n eat, right!? <tongue deeply in cheek>. One outcome of their regularly being in NYC is their regular $10 shows at the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan. The sit-ins of 1960 will be remembered in pictures just as the tweet-in yesterday might be, sparked by a pic Questlove sent about fried chicken on the NBC menu. But there are many other "lunch counters” where a tweet-in might redefine rather than disrupt everyday workplaces that need to be transformed. When Twitter starts making a meal of such social inequities, a 21st century March on Washington is a distinct possibility. Hope we don't have to wait til 2013.

"MEN ARE NOT DISTURBED BY THINGS, BUT BY THE VIEW THEY TAKE OF THEM"   -- Epictetus

Accordingly, seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us....I supposed that all the objects (presentations [i.e., tweets]) that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had
in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams (René Descartes, 15)

Questlove wrote about 8 hours ago "i think i need a twitter break. i done started something. and now i must put out fire." The discourse--the process of reasoning--surrounding race and racism, whether face-to-face and on Twitter, are a special kind of conversation or languaging that we take to be real--they were invented not much differently than maps and passed around, displayed and we simply forgot it's not the thing, its our view of things that upsets us. Upsets persist as if they are as real as the color of my skin. They are not.

The social construct of race spins its complicated web over time and space and a "real-time" tweet launched by a popular black musician on Twitter with 1,287,559+ followers at the time of writing this piece, calls a popular proverb to mind: "Too whom much is given, much is expected". Said in redux "Too whom many follow, much is expected". Tweets ignite meaning. Folks are listening to those #140 characters or less and running with them, often without context. But such lessons in the real-time Internet are to be learned in hindsight. And perhaps ought to be so. Twitter needs to add the new three Rs to the old set--Reflection, Relationships and Resilience (Daniel Siegel) and that comes with time.

Despite Twitter's treasured values of transparency, connectedness and blurring the walls that more or less separate top from bottom in society and despite the ascension of Obama as POTUS, conversations of race and racism on Twitter are not any less complicated than they are in real meatspace (face-to-face). They might be that much more complicated by the lack of limitations in a real-time Internet. We have forgotten that tweets are still laced with racial residue from its senders, that past injustices seep into the Twitter stream through the pigments of our social and historical hands that grasp and hold on to the ideas of our racialized bodies with the same national and international discourse of white privilege ingrained in our subconscious..

We have yet to really deal with a future full of diverse followers ready to tweet hundreds of cliché reactions about race and racism into the Twitter stream. Tweets that at their start may be misconstrued or misunderstood observations. Last summer's twensorship of the #thatsafrican trending topic is perfect example, but that's a story for another anniversary.

AGREE TO BE OFFENDED + STAY IN THE CONVERSATION
As some people celebrate Black History Month, others do not. They choose instead to celebrate black culture & history every day.  While some of us ("us" here in all instances means all people not just black), while some of us love fried chicken and acknowledge its Southern and/or black roots, others do not. They choose to disassociate with it because, well, it’s too black, too fried or too chicken (for the vegans in the house).

So I ask why don't we just Agree to Be Offended and Stay in the Conversation i.e., Stay Connected. Perhaps we can have our fried chicken and collard greens with smoked turkey (instead of hamhocks) and celebrate America's history too. As I said in a quibble on Twitter two days about repeating the stereotypes about angry black women in praising Mrs. Michelle Obama's appearance on...yes NBC's Today Show, perhaps the dismantling doesn't need our additional pointing to the past that once was. Perhaps it also doesn't mean rejecting our love for traditions, fried chicken and black eyed peas. Collard greens and, yes, watermelon because it really doesn’t mean all that mumbo jumbo anymore. Yes, there’s fried chicken on the menu AND perhaps we won’t need a segregated month of history to cure our social indigestion.

WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOUR REACTIONS AND YOUR THOUGHTS ON WHETHER WE ARE TRULY BEING SERVED (i.e. FULFILLED) BY THE CONVENTIONAL FORMS OF REACTIONS AND CONVERSATIONS CURRENTLY EXPERIENCED AROUND RACE and/or RACISM? Leave comments below. And check out the 3 photos, too!
--
Kyra D. Gaunt, Ph.D.  
2009 TED Fellow
Associate Professor at Baruch College-CUNY
Voicing "the unspoken" through song, scholarship and social media
http://twitter.com/kyraocity

An idea worth spreading: Agree to be Offended & Get Connected (TM). Reveal the remarkable Oneness of Humanity.
"I have learned silence from the talkative, tolerance from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strangely, I am ungrateful to these teachers" -- Kahlil Gibran


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Filed under  //   30 Rock   Baruch College   Carolle Charles   Haiti   Kyra Gaunt   NBC   NYT   NYTimes   Questlove   The Roots   civil rights   lunch counter   menu   racism   sit-ins   social construct   tweet-in   twitter  
Posted by Kyra D. Gaunt, Ph.D. 

Comments [2]