Culture Riot

This is also titled: “To all my brothers and sisters who sat in class and found that the readings were not enough.”

Anxious Black Woman writes:

“It had become painfully clear over the last couple of months that my students can read the literal text (e.g. James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time or a political cartoon about the presidential race or a print ad depicting women’s bodies in sexualized ways) but ask them to dig deeper for the subtext, and they get lost. In a course on racism, this is particularly brutal for students because much of our language and messages about racism are all in the subtext.

There is a group on facebook called “You say some ign’ant shit in class: I would cut you, but I want to graduate” where students list the, uh igna’nt shit said in class, on the way to class, after class, basically anywhere on our pseudo liberal campuses. There is a small portion of students – at least on four UC campuses I know – who sit in classes where the majority of students are constantly missing the subtext. While we are all in these classrooms to learn about the complexities of the prison system or the education system or the process of decolonizing our minds, it seems that there are two extremes of learning going on at the same time. On the one end, you have folks who are encountering these ideas for the first time, and on the other hand are people who have come across these ideas because they’ve had to deconstruct it in their personal experiences and are finding the class gives them a vocabulary to talk about them.

And while you might think that most of the former are privileged, higher-class or white students, a large amount of students of color also miss the subtext. In our speech, in the way our communities come together, decolonizing our minds is often not at the forefront of the battle to survive college. And on our campus, students who have the ability to “connect the dots of our domestic and foreign, political, social, and cultural contexts” find that the classes the university offers do not suffice at all and have started their own courses to address those needs.

I personally am angry at the education system for not teaching us these critical thinking skills. I think I discovered I needed them much too late to actually put them to use in the context of the university where there is nearly unlimited access to books and journals that challenge critical thinkers. So where do we go from here? We should read. Everything. We are given this gift of literacy, we should use it to the fullest. We are the critical thinkers who are going to reform our education system in the United States. It’s not some unknown presence or random election. It’s the process of thinking and reading and thinking and reading and doing and doing and doing – rinse repeat – that will make those changes come about.