Coondogging Indentured Servitude

I began this blog to write about teaching writing. I stopped teaching two years ago and have increasingly (and perhaps unavoidably) swerved both in my activities and writing toward the political maelstrom in which we now find ourselves.

In addition to the Trump phenomenon, we have in Virginia been caught up in the blackface controversy. I have written about the bandwagon effect and my own early blackfacing below. I have risked entering into some heated conversations with many of my friends over this issue. Many progressives and more centrist democrats too quickly, I thought, called on Northrop to resign (including my two favorite candidates for president). The news pundits, such as those on CNN, jumped all over this.

I am a bit disappointed--uncertain why I should be disappointed that my friends and political bedpeople should not see the world as I see it--to see some of these knee-jerk reactions, not that I don't engage in similar responses to issues that trigger me, short-circuiting my thought processes. Trump supporters, several of whom are my friends, simply can't be in this blackface game: their support of Trump's more recent race-tinged and misogynist behavior puts them out of the blackface conversation. But the rest of us . . .

This morning I turned on the TV, which is, in a large part responsible for the ubercirculation of misinformation (Ok, Trump, we agreed on something), to find Poppy Harlow and Jim Sciutto ventriloquizing some holier-than-thou critiques of Northram's phrasing in a recent interview in which he 1. noted how he has been recently schooled on white privilege and 2. used the phrase of "indentured servants" to refer to the Africans who were first brought to America. People, including Harlow and Sciutto, are now jumping on another doesn't-he-get-it? bandwagon.

I respect that many pundits and reporters on CNN and some on Fox News are trying to keep their fingers on truth. But the nature of the media, privileging fast news, perhaps necessarily distorts; once a story (like Warren's DNA), gains traction, the pundit continue to circulate the tropes that seem like truth. And over and over again until someone asks them to pull up and think again--by which time, we have generally gone to another story.

When Northram explained in a subsequent statement that he had first called the early indentured servitude of blacks "slavery," one of his historian friends had corrected him by saying that the first African's brought to America were "indentured servants." Having some interest in history, I thought the historian might have been right and so took the trouble to do a little checking. Yes, Northram's friend and Northram seemed to have it right. I have found no source that supports the claim that blacks were immediately treated as slaves. The move from indentured servitude to slavery was gradual from 1611 to 1705, when slavery was codified in Virginia. This is history. We are in danger when newscasters and their public so quickly rewrite history. Poor Governor Northrop was simply trying to be right. But he was not in tune with the more popular narrative and so once again was put in stocks for a public shaming.

I am not an enthusiastic Northram supporter. I'm a new Virginian and catching up on local politics. But I want to protest any disinformation program that shifts the conversation from real to imagined problems. If any reader has gotten this far, he or she might also check the varied meanings of "coondogging." The pundits were nailing Northam for being a racist in the 1980s because he was called "coondog." Rather than jump on another bandwagon, they should have checked how the label has been used. I didn't find one meaning that suggested a white racist. One of the meanings referred to the act of slapping an unsuspecting male (duh) in the balls.

The Ralph Northam Controversy.

Compared to my last post, this one should be brief. It follows from the heterodox/orthodox discussion below. By heterodox, the people in the discussion below meant multiple ways of seeing an issue; by orthodox, they meant seeing only from one’s own point of view.

After two days of hurried conversation, it seems as if the orthodox lies in denouncing Ralph Northam. Protesting the denunciation of Northram seems outside the orthodox (in the heterodox). I’m going to take a chance and go there.

I have been listening to the TV panel discussions and reading the tweeted denunciations. I also watched Northam’s press conference. I should say, I am a newly arrived Virginian, so I don’t have much invested in the discussion.

I have a difficult time imagining that Northam was lying when he said neither character in the now-notorious yearbook photo was him. Surely, he would have to consider that one of the people in the photo might call him out on this lie (unless he knew that the other person in the photo was dead). As well, whoever was putting together that yearbook (there would have been several people) and probably the advisor might call him out. 

So let me try a mind experiment. Let’s say neither character was him and he didn’t know about the photo (I never bought or looked at my university’s yearbook) until he saw it last night. Supposing whoever discovered this photo was engaging in oppositional research and thought this would be an effective way to nail Northam to the wall. Suppose, for instance, Northan has been opposing environmental destruction and the affected corporation, Dominion Utility, might have in some way encouraged oppositional research. I said: this is a mind experiment. Check out Trump’s “logic” in his tweet on the issue.

What if something like this were the case, and the most racially offensive act of Northam was to blackface and do the Michael Jackson moonwalk. I can see how a young Virginian at a military institute might have done this admittedly insensitive act in the mid-eighties. I might have known better, but I won’t swear I wouldn’t have done it. I can’t begin to tell you the insensitive, stupid things I did in my twenties. 

I’m going to end with this thought: should we give criminals the right to vote after they have served their terms? Not calling Northam a criminal, but . . . 

Heterodox/Orthodox Education

The following post to a writing teachers listserv (WPA-l) was a consequence of an over-spirited conversation among college writing (usually referred to as rhet/comp) teachers discussing the limits of free-speech in college and university environments. I'm reposting mostly because I like to keep track of conversations like this.

Lurking behind the Heterodox/Orthodox (hx/ox) controversy in this listserv discussion lay the general tilt of higher education toward a liberal social philosophy.  

Rather than liberal, I would describe the academic environment as more tolerant of diversity than the public sphere, a consequence of the multiplicity of cultures from which students mix in the new university culture. 

In saying this, I am not imagining the public sphere as singular. The public sphere is constructed of varied spheres as well. But they are more insulated from each other than are the microspheres that form the university culture. The university culture, consequently, tends to be more tolerant (a telling adjective) of diversity than the surrounding general culture. This characteristic gets loosely translated as more liberal. 

My comment on the heterodox/orthodox controversy: 
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Although there have been moments of irritation, the conversation has been thoughtful (I particularly appreciated Eric's last post), reflecting in many ways the political conversation to which we have been subjected for the last three years. For those of us who assume that the educational industry is only one of many social reproductive mechanisms, this reflection is no surprise. As rhet/comp professors and graduate students, we may fondly imagine ourselves as thinking, in a self-damming phrase, "outside the box," when we are basically just in a slightly different box than, say, engineers, airplane pilots, or farmers. 

Conversations like these are interesting but essentially not about teaching. My own particular box, constructed largely by 60's educator-radicals, John Dewey, and Paulo Freire, was framed by my love of writing and the pure pleasure that came from passing that passion on to students in my classes (it would take a long essay, maybe a book, to explain Dewey, Kozol, Britton, and Moffett as the sides and perhaps Berlin and Freire as the top and bottom of the box with me and some of my friends rattling around inside.)

The discussion of heterodoxy and orthodoxy in education (and society, which we mirror) might shift a bit if historicized, beginning perhaps with the free speech movement in the 60s (Mario Savio) as a response to capitalism, the civil rights movement, and the US intervention in Viet Nam and Latin America. As time passed, hx and ox faded into and away from each other, like colliding galaxies, dragging with them parts of the galaxy through which they had passed. 

There was a time the 90's and early 2000's when the orthodoxy in our field was that we were the center of the universe (Berlin made this mistake, dragging a host of us with him ). In that frame, the ox was that teachers who imagined teaching as a non-political act were naive. Inside the box (the orthodoxy), all teaching was political.

It is worth remembering the discussion surrounding what was known as the Texas debacle (late 80s, I think) and George Will's coining of the phrase, "political correctness," which to many of us has since been coded as a liberal attack on what is ironically framed in this thread as the conservatives' free speech. With all due respect to Dayna's posting of links to data supporting the existence of the Heterodox Academy, the first link points to a survey conducted by the CATO institute; many of the items in the CATO survey hinged on the code of "political correctness." 

For people who have regretted the sometime volatile nature of the discussion: This list is clearly not a safe place. Why should it be? The list is a kind of training ground for publication in the academy, which is also not a safe place. The academy itself is not a safe place (read Jeff Schmitd's Disciplined Minds); as I noted above, one of our primary (but hidden) functions is to reproduce culture-- with some gestures toward what we uncritically imagine as critical thinking, detached from identity politics and experience.

In my career, I argued (as I did in Going North, Thinking West) for teaching writing, not politics. And I really mean the love of writing so that my students would have writing as a passion for the rest of their lives. Like singing. Like dancing. Like breathing.