Precarious Progress or Why I Love Teaching in Newark

Last year a few weeks before I was to teach my first class at Rutgers, I was working on my laptop at a café in Newark furiously trying to complete the syllabus.

“What you got going on there? You a writer?”

The voice attached to these questions was so enthusiastic and friendly I probably would have told this stranger all the details of my life, but, thankfully, stopped short with

“I am a professor of African American studies working on my course.”  

“African American Studies? He was incredulous. “Isn’t that kind of irrelevant?”

Although I tried to dismiss this stranger’s response with the self-assurances that he was ill-informed and culturally deprived, I can not help but to continually reflect on what his statement means for how most folks think about the study of African American life and history – even or especially African Americans. The advent of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day brings me back to this brief encounter with the patronizing stranger. What does it mean to celebrate what has been shortened to MLK day beyond offering the obligatory sigh of relief for a federally approved day off work? If attending to the entire history of African Americans is deemed by some to be passé, how do we now understand Martin Luther King, Jr. and his day?

The first question I posed to my class that fall semester was whether or not they bought the pundit supported concept of a post-racial society.  I wondered with my students what the real impact of the media inspired Obama effect was in their lives. We thought about how to read Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream and measure the progression of equality through the figure of one African American man not yet, but sure to be, President of the United States. It became clear very early on that these young adults, primarily Black and Latino from low-income and working class backgrounds, had a very complicated understanding of what they could hope for and the ways their dreams might be realized or dashed.

Although I have to admit that I was stunned by their lack of knowledge of key historical events, my shock was far outweighed by my excitement in discovering that they comprehended history in a much more profound way. For example, their animated debates on what they saw as the lack of social consciousness among the black middle class would have made E. Franklin Frazier proud even though they didn’t know who he was until they were assigned his classic, Black Bourgeoisie. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were familiar names, of course, but their philosophies were at first only discussed on the surface of “I have a dream,” and “by any means necessary.” However, these young people passionately talked and wrote about their belief that the seeds of social transformation could be found in their own neighborhoods in ways that echoed King and Malcolm’s most insightful and revolutionary words.  They were committed to identifying and responding to the inequities they witnessed in their communities, and challenged the ways in which these inequities have been concealed with talk of dysfunctional ghetto related behaviors.

In the media’s dichotomized categorization of people into easily digestible labels, African Americans have one of two options: redemptive good Negro or ever-threatening menace to society. My students pose an undeniable threat to the trope of the disaffected, socially marginalized youth of color in urban America usually positioned as the counter-image to the Corey Bookers and Barak Obamas of our world. Everyday, these young people embody the fearless seeking of justice in all of its forms for all people – the hallmark of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life. And, contrary to popular belief, this new generation of thinkers are inspired not by the force fed proliferation of  a corporate driven hip hop that we are to assume represents authentic black life, but by the very real lives of the people they know working to improve their local and global communities.  This is not to say that they aren’t excited about the possibility that Obama is a harbinger of more change to come, just that young people, at least the ones I have been fortunate enough to learn from, realize that Obama’s blackness does not make him the answer. They understand his position as leader of the free world is not necessarily a sign that they are more free. Systems of power, they know, are so resilient because they bend just enough to accommodate revolutionary acts so they may be subsumed, deactivated. Martin Luther King may have said it best:  “all progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.” 

We need only look to the recent events in Haiti to truly understand Dr. King’s prophetic words in another, yet related, context. It seems incomprehensible that anyone could respond to this recent and continuing tragedy with the sentiments of ignorance and hate expressed by Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh. I cringe to even mention these men alongside Martin Luther King Jr. but need to make the point that we must, in the spirit of Dr. King, nurture and support the voices of those young people who have been misidentified as “at-risk” and peripheral. It is their perspectives that we need as part of the chorus speaking back to those who profit from misinformation, divisiveness and hate, and it is they who remind us that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his day are not irrelevant.  Dr. King told us that “darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Let us use this day (and all others) to locate the light within and offer our love to what may seen the dimmest of places or the shadiest of hearts. I believe that is what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would want, and think my class would agree. 

love.

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