Enacting Critical Rhetorical Analysis in Pathways to Freedom

Pathways to Freedom links two or three sections of composition and history with a total of 40-60 students each year in a two-semester sequence roughly spanning the periods from the Revolutionary War to Reconstruction in the fall and the rise of Jim Crow to the 1960s in the spring. Students visit BHS to examine slave bills of sale in what was then called Breuckelen, analyzing eighteenth and nineteenth century transactions for a person whose name probably exists nowhere else in the annals of history in relation to the 1799 New York State Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery. Complementing these materials, among other texts, are Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, parts of his Notes on Virginia, and a paper by historian David Gellman about the tension between the New York State founding fathers’ abolitionist sentiments and their stronger commitment to nation-building. We ask the students to analyze the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and the 1799 Act in relation to slave bills of sale. To guide them, we assign parts of Bitzer’s essay concentrating on his idea that exigent rhetorical situations give rise to rhetorical discourses that “function ultimately to produce action or change in the world” (4). Thus students begin to understand, for example, how the response of historical figures like John Jay to the exigencies of the 1790s gave rise to a specific discourse of “gradual abolition” in New York State that subordinated their moral condemnation of slavery to their reliance on slaveholders’ support and their commitment to nation-building.

As students examine the divergence between the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and the realities of U.S. history, they not only learn that slavery was fundamental to nation building but also begin to question the dominant narrative of American democracy and reflect on their own subject positions. For example, a student discovered George Washington’s evolving view of slavery by researching his letter to financier Robert Morris. In the letter, Washington complains about a lawsuit filed by Philadelphia Quakers who sought to free a slave owned by a Mr. Dalby. Washington expresses sympathy for the plight of slaves—“there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of [slavery]”—but insists that the only proper authority for enacting change is the legislature and worries slaveholders would shun the city so as not to “hazard their property.” Starting with this primary document, the student traces Washington’s development from his early disparagement of blacks as “inferior and needless of rest” to his growing but mostly private sympathy for abolition. Through rhetorical analysis of the letter, she gains a critical perspective on who did what and why in history and deepens her understanding of complex personal and collective responses—including perhaps her own—to rhetorical situations.

In the second semester of Pathways, students study the rise of Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the civil rights movement, examining Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) papers at BHS and conducting oral history interviews with local civil rights activists for the Brooklyn Civil Rights Oral History Collection.⁷ They read Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, which bridges the yearlong course of study with a short history of the African American diaspora, along with other texts, including Ann Petry’s gripping story “In Darkness and Confusion” and an article by Brian Purnell about Brooklyn CORE protests in the early 1960s. In 12 Million Black Voices, Wright recalls the trauma of the Middle Passage and hundreds of years of captivity, and goes on to chronicle the everyday realities of black Southern sharecroppers under Jim Crow, their mass exodus to the urban North between 1890 and 1920, and the broken promises of northern city life that gave birth to the modern civil rights movement. Through his poetic chronicle of the African American experience, Wright underscores the contradiction between early white America’s “rebellion against tyranny” and its utterly dehumanizing extraction of wealth from slave labor (12).

This conundrum of “democracy,” properly understood, demands a dialectical explanation rooted in historical research of the sort the author of the paper on George Washington begins to pursue. By investigating Washington’s perspective on slavery, both through her analysis of his writing and through secondary sources that contextualize the primary document, the student complicates popular myths about the “father of our country” and arrives at a portrait of him that is neither heroic nor contemptible but human, shaped by his times, worthy of legendary status and disappointing in his failure to oppose slavery, which he increasingly understood was morally wrong and lacked scientific or religious justification. It is the same move in a more sophisticated vein that Wright makes when he contrasts the “devastation and despair” (12) experienced by African Americans to the transatlantic rise of “a passionate, humanitarian belief in the rights of man” in the early eighteenth century, underscoring their capacity for hope and struggle and the complexity of their response to the brutal history of enslavement and exploitation despite which “we black tools responded as fervently as did the rest of mankind to the call of Liberty” (17).

Engaging in dialectical thinking remains a challenge for Pathways students as they are asked to draw connections between U.S. history and their own experiences in a period of unprecedented success for some African Americans and misery for masses of others trapped in cyclical poverty and the prison industrial system. Another challenge is the weakness—in some cases, absence—of the sort of public dialogue on these issues that a strong political left, capable of pushing back against neoliberal policies, might engender. In an effort to offset such challenges, we introduce students to new knowledge such as the iconic Woolworth’s sit-ins that began in 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina. While most of them already know something about the protest, learning how it spread to Brooklyn among other places helps them understand the scope and mass character of the movement. Next we might ask them to compare and contrast the overt racism of the Jim Crow era to current practices like restrictive voting bills and to reflect on how people in two different eras stand up and resist oppression. A third step, which I increasingly see as vital, is to guide students in a process of integrating their emotional responses to racism with their deepening political and historical knowledge. Last, we are finding that expanding the focus from African American to Native American and women’s eighteenth and nineteenth century history enables students to link these narratives horizontally and vertically, across and beyond that period, and alleviates the stress of zeroing in unremittingly on black history.⁸

Enacting Critical Rhetorical Analysis in the Field: The Transitions Project

In Writing in the Community (WiC), the advanced writing class I taught in fall 2013, students participated in the Transitions Project, for which they tutored teenagers remanded to a special high school for youth offenders. I assigned Alexander’s book to help the students situate their experience working with youth offenders in the historical context of the New Jim Crow. Alexander directly addresses the problem of post-racial ideology of colorblindness in her searing indictment of the prison industrial system. She punctures the myth of a post-racial society with chilling data about the dramatic increase of America’s prison population since 1980 from 300,000 to two million, observing that more black men are incarcerated today “than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began” (180).

She goes on to reinterpret American history as comprised of three periods of racial oppression and racialized control: slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. The students found Alexander’s critique of the criminal justice system profoundly disturbing, relating her analysis of the impact of the War on Drugs on poor, black communities to their experience working with youth who were responsive neither to their own program nor to our encouragement to reflect on their experience and learn to “talk back” productively to the school and wider communities. The teenagers’ fierce resistance to authority, including us, involved verbal abuse, tantrums, physical scuffles with each other, and refusal to learn or cooperate, ultimately resulting in their administration asking us to discontinue our visits.⁹ My students and I could see first hand the impact of incarceration, poverty, and racism on teenagers with multiple arrests, criminal records, and dreary future prospects.

In an essay titled “Catch 22: Literacy Education and the Public in Jefferson High School,”¹⁰ one WiC student, Samantha, begins with an epigram by Tupac Shakur: “As real as it seems / the American dream ain’t nothing but another calculated scheme / To get us locked up, shot up, back in chains / To deny us of the future / Rob our names / Kept my history, of mystery, but now I see / The American Dream wasn’t meant for me.” She describes the dramatic entrance of the most disruptive student to the classroom: “My gaydar flared immediately, followed by my sympathy: this girl must have it rough, a teenaged black lesbian already caught up in the justice system. The girl slammed her backpack onto a chair; it fell to the floor.” With perfect pitch, Samantha captures the girl’s gift for parody, her power, and her fragility: “‘You know what kind of school this is, right? You know we’re…’ She didn’t break her fierce eye contact … ‘juvenile delinquents?’ The other girls laughed. Nadia had asserted authority over me, challenged me, turned me into someone completely out of place.”

Samantha recalls that the English teacher answered another student’s question about relevance: “I’m sorry you don’t like the essays but maybe you can see it as a life skill. Sometimes life gives us something we don’t necessarily like, right? And we work with it as best we can.” Interpreting these scenes “through the lens of education as a political act, incarceration as a political concept and the written word as a site for radical subversion,” Samantha challenges the teacher’s response to the student, concluding: “True revolutionary pedagogy, then, is more than teaching the right books or giving the right tests . . . [or] providing a public forum . . . for airing students’ contributions to national discussions. Revolutionary pedagogy requires a massive, multilateral shift in the social and political environment in which teachers work, day by day, to educate against all odds.” In an early draft of the paper, Samantha imagines what might have happened if the girls had shared each other’s writing, mostly autobiographical stories written in response to a prescribed nonfiction curricular unit. “One girl wrote about moving from Brooklyn to Senegal when she was five. Another wrote what was technically fiction but was obviously about her and her boyfriend navigating the shifting alliances of family members and school friends . . . .” Samantha goes on to suggest that “discussing [the stories] in a forum designed as a rhetorical public . . . could have revealed an element of a community in crisis.”

Although Samantha came into the course with a commitment to social justice and prior exposure to critical education (she cites Freire, for example, whose writing I did not assign), her response to Alexander’s book and the Transitions Project resonated with that of her WiC classmates. More advanced than the Pathways students, WiC students were better able to link slavery and Jim Crow to the current era of “colorblind” ideology that obscures racist practices and policies and has led in many respects to far worse conditions for vast numbers of African Americans than existed in the 1960s. Although they appreciated Alexander’s analysis of mass incarceration, they did not always agree with her. Pointing to the complex, deracinating effects of poverty and racism that complicate such situations, students of color, in particular, questioned her critique of police surveillance of poor black neighborhoods, reminding us that many residents who feel under siege by local dealers and gangs welcome a police presence, and emphasizing the interplay between the rhetoric of race and crime and the reality of high crime rates in predominantly poor, nonwhite communities. As a whole WiC students were disappointed that Alexander’s call for a “radical restructuring of our approach to racial justice advocacy” (260) lacked discussion of alternatives to capitalism or explicit linkage of the prison industrial system to neoliberal policies such as privatization and public and corporate austerity programs that contribute to high unemployment rates, particularly among black men.

Learning from Social Movements: Political Literacy, Resilience and the “New Activism”

The belief that ghetto conditions were caused not by racial discrimination but by black pathology helped preserve the illusion of the North as a liberal sanctuary and spin the “classical narrative” of a triumphal civil rights movement. Through the study of Brooklyn history, including slave bills of sale and CORE flyers, pamphlets, and news clippings, Pathways students come to understand the civil rights movement as a “long” movement instead of a single victorious decade between Brown v. Board of Education and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. If we succeed in getting them to think critically about history, they also grasp what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall describes as the “conservative interregnum that, for good or ill, depending on one’s ideological persuasion, marks the beginning of another story, the story that surrounds us now” (1234). That narrative unfolded with the ascent of Black Nationalism, the reification of a black culture of poverty, and a rising black middle class—a post-racial story purveyed by liberals in support of civil rights but afraid of radical black politics and by conservatives seeking reconsolidation ever since the turbulent New Deal politics of the 1930s.

One Pathways student who researched Operation Clean Sweep started her essay by noting that despite having been born and raised in Brooklyn, she knew little about the borough until her first year of college when she had “the chance to learn its history.” She learns that conditions in the 1960s were “horrific” and that Brooklyn CORE “decided to take on the task of improving living conditions because it highlighted the different ways racism was expressed in the North than it was in the South, which is what made this group so significant.” She proceeds to recount the main events of the anti-garbage campaign and to emphasize the politics of discrimination that led black residents to view unequal sanitation service as indicative of pervasive racism, while “Whites believed that the causes for the living conditions in Bedford Stuyvesant were due to the black population that lived there.” But for her classmates and her, the racism of the 1960s still belonged mainly to the past. She concludes, “The streets are much cleaner, discrimination is now over, and everyone has an equal opportunity.” I understand this response complexly both as a sign of hope—that young people now have indeed experienced a different reality than that of their counterparts in the 1960s—and an indication of the extent to which post-racial ideology permeates American society, underscoring the need to foster students’ capacity for social and political critique.

We try to foreground the relevance of the past to the present by focusing toward the end of the semester on policies like “stop and frisk” and the Supreme Court’s ruling in the summer of 2013 that struck down the key elements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We ask students to research the resegregation of neighborhoods and schools, the persistence of hunger and homelessness, the extreme inequality in global wealth—according to a staggering 2014 Oxfam report, 85 people own as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity (Fuentes-Nieva and Galasso 2)—and the disproportionate number of impoverished black and Latino families. At the same time, we understand the appeal of a post-racial society and the complex realities of our students’ lives. The students’ sense of how much society has changed since the 1960s is both accurate and false. At urban campuses like mine in which white students constitute only 28 percent of the student population, diversity is the rule, not the exception; nor does a black/white binary apply to today’s global and interfamilial mix of ethnic, national, and cultural identities. Post-racial ideology is confirmed on the one hand by highly visible “black exceptions”—President Obama, Colin Powell, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z—and unsettled, on the other, by countless examples of racism, including the students’ own encounters with racial injustice.

Activism—old and new—takes place outside the classroom. By historicizing the production of race and engaging in rhetorical analysis of history in class and in the field, students lift the veil of neoliberal, post-racial ideology to reveal widening racial and class inequalities and begin to explain them as a result of human actions, past and present—a prerequisite for political activism if, to paraphrase Marx, the point is not only to interpret the world but to change it. However, as my colleagues and I have discovered by testing this thesis with successive cohorts of students, more than intellectual engagement is needed to forge a new historical and political consciousness. Learning about some of the most heinous, murderous chapters of human history—especially when such knowledge dispels firm beliefs in American democracy, freedom, and equality—can sap the energy right out of a classroom of eighteen-year-olds.

Perhaps the most crucial lesson for me in teaching these two classes is to link critical analysis to explorations of resilience. Despite many examples of resistance, from slave rebellions to civil disobedience, neither class emphasizes resilience adequately. I recently heard a panel of students attest to a life-changing course they took called Against All Odds: The Black Experience, co-taught at Evergreen State College by professors Joye Hardiman and Kabby Mitchell and aimed at: “Enhanced appreciation and comprehension of those elements that result in resiliency and indigestibility while in the belly of the beast.” Teaching political literacy in an age of colorblindness requires lifting a powerful ideological veil. Students may feel despair, frustration, and anger in response to what they learn. In Against the Odds, students explore how black men and women found the “insurmountable courage to deconstruct and reconstruct their lives.” Such courage sparks activism and lets us disentangle ourselves from the guilt and pain of a collective history that implicates all of us. Understanding our very personal stake in global justice, we might shift from identification as a racialized, gendered body to identification with others in a move that can free us from the constraints of disabling subject positions like white liberal guilt or that sense of “twoness” Du Bois understood as alienation.¹¹ This shift might in turn enable a critique of oppressive systems as we embrace the just causes of all people whether or not they are different from us.

Thus, in addition to learning how U.S. history contradicts the rhetoric of the founding fathers, we want our students to respond—personally and politically—to how this historical pattern continues to unfold in all our lives, and to understand what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. meant when he declared in 1968 that, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring” (158). Previously, we concluded each semester with a story circle in which everyone told about a time they witnessed, experienced, and/or stood up against injustice. Almost always among the students’ stories are personal accounts of racial profiling, “stop and frisk,” use of the “n” word by police; it is in the course of sharing these visceral experiences that the post-racial dream collides with realities they have personally experienced, ushering in a new synthesis of what they know and what they think. Going forward, we plan to make the story circle a more regular feature of the class, a collective practice aimed at deeper, more integrated learning. A new activist movement will require “resilience and indigestibility,” a lesson one Pathways student hints she has taken away from the class when she describes her self as having been “injected … with a little activist blood.”