Performing a Triple-Bypass on the Heart of the Heart of the Country

[For this entry, I’ve borrowed a preview technique used by The Believer: using key phrases and odd juxtaposition in order to pique your interest from beginning to end. Enjoy.]

Thoreau – Matthew Arnold – Bill Hicks – Will Smith – Stop Snitchin’ – Rap Capitalism –Martin Luther King, Jr. – The Friday Trilogy

I was fumbling over analogies while grading some quizzes the other day. We’d been reading, or trying to read, Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” the entire week. I had used a basic question about the reading as an opportunity to earn bonus points on this quiz. Suddenly, something urged me to fan through the stack of quizzes, paying close attention to the bonus question. I found that only one student had responded to the bonus. His response was, “Who is Thoreau?” All the while, said analogies were rolling around my head like the steel marbles in those two-tiered maze games and finally one of them fell through the hole: Teachers are missionaries…

…at least, teachers at rural schools. We travel from the city, a place not far from the town where it’s hard to believe many people have never left. We speak a language close to standard written English, or, at least, variations of English that would be acceptable to the Merriam-Webster committee. We think highly of education and its trappings, from vocabulary and critical thinking to acceptable behavior in social situations. We bring different values, norms and ethics. In every sense, we are outsiders.

* * *

A long time ago, Mathew Arnold, a British cultural critic, wrote that capital-C Culture is something to be perfected. Here is the thesis from his book Culture and Anarchy:

“The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.”

The interesting thing about Arnold is he believed that Culture, “the best which has been thought and said,” was for everyone, the saving grace keeping us off the brink of anarchy. I think the proposal is modest, however, there is the extremely difficult question of who decides what is best. Certainly it is best to read, write and speak in a common language in order to communicate. One would assume, speeding in the calm AC drone of their midsized sedan down an endless country road, that reading is the most basic and important tool a person can have. But no. This assumption is contested by the rural population. The tension some of us feel in this type of classroom is a clash of cultures. Rather than thinking, “I should learn how to read.” Many rural students do not see the use. When they see you kicked back with a book, they are thinking, to quote Bill Hicks, “Whatchoo readin’ for?”

* * *

Who sows the seeds of stupidity? The parents, of course. To use Will Smith’s lyric in a different context: “parents just don’t understand” (what they’re doing to their kids). It’s hard to blame a kid for hating to read when he grows up in a household with no books and parents whose English would make Don King cringe. What is left to learn on but the television?

We educated folks remember TV shows like Reading Rainbow, Sesame Street and 321 Contact, the joys of public broadcasting, but TV alone is not enough to reinforce the importance of reading, especially when these educational shows have to compete with Jerry Springer and MTV Spring Break. It doesn’t help that the kid controls the remote.

So what happens when these kids reach high school? Their perceptions are shaped by their idiot parents and bad television. What happens is something like Stop Snitchin’. What is that, you ask? It is an ethic likely to shake the foundations of our coddled, middle-class sensibilities. Stop Snitchin’ is the opposite of The Golden Rule. It’s a creed that dictates you don’t snitch, squeal on, rat out, or expose a crime if you know who did it.

Where did Stop Snitchin’ come from? Well, the streets, of course… but how do rural kids whose streets are not even paved come to hear about Stop Snitchin’? You know the answer: television. So not only is it an ethic, it’s a multi-million dollar marketing idea, materialized on the shirts, caps and belt buckles of students urban and rural alike.

Like most things kids say, or people who make money off what kids say, Stop Snitchin’ makes no sense. When my students bring it up, I hit them with a hypothetical: “I’m your neighbor. I’m sitting on my stoop getting high as Jah himself. I see someone breaking into your house. I know the guy. He’s an old friend who’s hard on his luck and addicted to crack. I know he’s just looking for some extra cash. He’s mah dawg, cuh, knowwhati’msayin’? I feel for this nigga. So when you come home the next day wondering who beat up your sister, and more importantly who stole your iPod, I ain’t tellin’ you shit. Belieeeeeeeeve that!”

Many students see the point and accept or dismiss it. With others, it’s like talking to a brick wall. My ideas upset their worldview, which is complicated by the fact that they’re all basically poseurs. That is the most amusing aspect of working at a rural school: many students aspire to be city. Ironically, to them, city is comprised of the caricatures the TV people come up with to simplify life so as to not hurt our sensitive brains.

* * *

Sadly, these perceptions contribute to their ideas about life goals. Maybe I’m forgetting my childhood naiveté to a certain extent. Regardless, it is better to learn the statistical improbability of making it into the NFL or NBA before assuming it will be your primary income. Better to successfully spell “entrepreneur” before wanting to become one. But sports and rap are the main influences on the children I teach. They will trust Fiddy Cent before they trust me, because I have not been shot… in other words, I am not familiar with their ghetto lifestyle.

The irony, which can seem endless with these kids, is that their ghetto lifestyle is based on a mode of production (capitalism) that doesn’t care about the culture they’ve internalized and adopted as their own. They are too young to remember the brief moment in the 90s when “intellectual” or “thoughtful” hip-hop was cool. The popular style now, which in turn means the style yielding rappers/role models the big bucks, is gangsta rap. But what happens when, like all fads, gangsta rap goes out of style, and will no longer make giant corporations tons of money? Well, Fiddy Cent will be the new MC Hammer, and rather than see him on TV surrounded by bling and bitches, he’ll be schilling for Geico or Taco Bell. And those poor, dedicated gangsta rappers in their home studios will realize they’ve been abandoned by a system that doesn’t care about art. That being shot 9 times was not street credibility, but marketing. That they spent a lot of hard-earned money at a shitty job on Flex’s Lugz, Jay-Z’s vodka and Fiddy’s clothing line.

If you’ll indulge a pretentious analogy: T.S. Eliot didn’t have to be middle-aged to write brilliantly about a midlife crisis in “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.” The poem has substance without the image of Eliot, the credibility is in the art itself. But with Rap Capitalism, image comes first and it is ultimately an illusion playing on these young minds in order extract the little money they have.

These students are putting their hopes in a crapshoot. The mentality of making it big is similar to the mentality of the Florida Lottery (your gambling well spent on education, by the way, but no other funding): Get lucky, get rich, leave the poor behind in the same state. In terms of art, Rap Capitalism discourages folk culture, a regional realism like that of some Dirty South rappers who rap about what life is like not because it makes them rich, but because they’re making art tied to a specific time, place and situation. But my students, especially the ones obsessed with rap, are confronted with the troubles of adolescence: they don’t know what to think, they are not interested in learning about the world, and thus they keep their skewed, TV realities, and may never truly discover a way to creatively express who they are.

* * *

If you have not inferred that a central part of this rural culture is “blackness,” then let it be known. Not all students at this school are black. In fact, I’m ignoring a whole other segment of rural culture, that of the cross and the Klan. But I’m basing this analysis on my students. And one evening, while analyzing my approach, feeling quite a bit like a missionary, I thought: What better way to make Thoreau relevant than to follow it up with Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Surely MLK has contributed to “the best which has been thought and said.” In fact, there’s a whole canon of literature my students can familiarize themselves with in order to ground themselves in some sort of positive identity and tradition: WEB Dubois, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, so many authors and thinkers I’m only skimming the surface.


But their attention span is short, their knowledge incomplete, perhaps intentionally, in order to reduce intellectual discomfort. I was amazed at how little they knew about the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks: yes, but what’s a boycott? What’s a sit-in? What is non-violent direct action? Many of them understood eventually, but many also ignored the intensive lessons we had on the “Letter.”

The final lesson, for many, was not turn the other cheek. They continued to speak like Black Nationalists, quoting Malcolm X, but, just as they forgot about the second-tape downfall of Scarface, they, too, forgot that Malcolm X went to Mecca and came back changed, sounding more like Dr. King than Marcus Garvey. Rather than study, they prefer to run around the halls yelling Jenna 6, which is a case we discussed one day, and not knowing what they hell they mean by it. If you asked them about “Going to Meet the Man,” they would not recall a short story, but instead a trip to the precinct to post bail for cousin Ray-Ray.

* * *

But hey, there’s hope.
Or not.
Maybe so.
No, probably not.
That’s a lie, there’s hope.
Very little.
But some.

This is the conversation I sometimes have with myself when thinking about the future of my students. It’s not their lack of interest in education—many kids hate school. It’s more their attitude that they are owed something, that the have the right to be disrespectful, that they are above certain rules. We city teachers think of this as intentional defiance. We see it as a bunch of asshole kids and we become cynical. We forget we’re dealing with kids, desperate kids. Kids who have grown up in a culture radically different from our own. Kids who can see the immensity of the world in the values we bring, the cruelty, the pressures, the horrifying responsibility of reality, and they are scared. They are too far behind. They think there is no hope of catching up. That’s why it’s important for teachers to have hope for them. We have to show them that there’s beauty in the world, too. That it is not cool to have to wear a bullet proof vest (over their clothes, no less). If we can’t get through to them, they will be doomed to the infinite jest of sitting on their stoops on Friday, Next Friday, The Friday After Next, The Following Friday, Every Friday, sitting there watching their the neighbor’s house get robbed.