Sandy Alexandre
Literature
Almost a year ago, in a now-infamous interview with 60-minutes’s Mike Wallace, the famed and award-winning black actor, Morgan Freeman proffered silence as the best and (by extension) the most progressive solution to the problem of racism in America. Only if we “stop talking about it (racism)” can we actually ever rid ourselves of it, Freeman rationalized. Controversial though that solution may be, the logic, which undergirds it, is at least based on sensible—if ultimately wishful—thinking. For if to speak an evil is to make it real, then the converse must also be true—to speak no evil is to abolish, disclaim, and preempt it outright. But quiet as it’s proposed to be kept, racism still exists in America. So I wonder—as a black professor who teaches American Literature and who still thinks that race matters even now in the 21st century—what do I do in the face of this celebrity-sanctioned and seemingly forward-thinking gag rule? With my lesson plans already prepared, fully intending to treat issues of race in the classroom, I, inevitably, end up looking a tad old-fashioned and hardcore with respect to these new-fangled decrees to speak no (racism) evil. What does it mean for me to be always already a pedagogical incarnation of too much race talk or too much politics in a 21st-century Literature classroom setting in which students, rightly, expect to get a fair balance of both aesthetics and politics and in which students, for the most part, think we’ve long since exhausted that issue—that we’ve “been there and done that” with debates concerning race relations in America, that silence is golden? How does my mere presence (but admittedly in the front and center of the classroom) tip the scales? Does my presence somehow preclude the necessity to talk about race? Or does my presence encourage only certain ways of talking about race? In other words, do I bully or “lead the witness” just by standing there? How do I or (indeed) why should I override what it means to look like me?
These questions are neither new nor are they race-specific, because all good teachers recognize that they enter into pedagogical situations with their own set of biases. To be sure, our teacherly selves are not created in a vacuum, but foregrounded in the struggles, mundane contingencies, and politics of our individual life experiences. But awareness, it seems to me, is half the battle. It is the very practice of restraining or manipulating the involuntary eruptions of these biases, in the classroom, that strikes me as a particularly helpful pedagogical skill to have or, at least, pursue. Biases, after all, are off-putting and can seem aggressive, whether they intend to be or not.
As far as I see it, however, the reading practices involved in the study of Literature already tend to buffer students from whatever aggressive politics or essentialisms my racial identity may imply. Literature already requires from students what I desire and expect personally from people outside of the classroom—that we look beyond surface appearances to discover meanings far more profound or sophisticated than our prima facie observations. I deflect attention away from whatever politics I may exude by assuming the role of Literature’s emissary, who has come bearing the message that the texts in the classroom offer more than meets the eye. The hope is that such a strategy, which requests that students distinguish the message from the messenger, can preempt ad hominem attacks (the hominem, in this case, being the teacher and all of her attendant biases). But is this strategy—to fortify students against the potential offense of our human biases with books, with fictional characters from books, with the lessons of textual interpretation—a good one? In pedagogical terms, do I turn myself into an ostensibly innocuous text or do I remain the political embodiment that I am?
As I’ve already mentioned, a Literature classroom is typically conducive to this kind of figurative shape shifting. It is not impossible, for example, to refigure a racialized literary character as a complicated or recalcitrant text that is either incapable of or unwilling to yield up its ever-elusive meaning to the reader. Herman Melville’s brilliant short story, “Benito Cereno,” most readily comes to mind in this instance. Briefly, the story tells of an American sea captain, Amasa Delano, who has come into contact with a Spanish slave ship in which (unbeknownst to him and his shipmates) the slaves on board (led by the mastermind of the operation, Babo) have rebelled and killed all of their captors save for a few sailors and the eponymous captain, Benito Cereno. Some critics have expediently (if not judiciously) chosen to sidestep the glaring fact of the slaves’ racial identity in order to focus on the bumbling Delano’s benighted vision and his misguided a priori approach as a reader to the text of these black characters and of the current situation at hand. I dare say that such readings by omission deprive us of the humanitarian benefits of confronting racial issues head on. To bypass a discussion of race while studying “Benito Cereno” is to make Babo and his slave peers a conglomerate pink elephant in the classroom; such dodging strikes me as completely irresponsible. Indeed, it is to become like an Amasa Delano: a poor reader certainly, but also blind, racist, and utterly exasperating to boot. Substituting pink elephants for black people will not make the problem of racism go away; if anything, it only creates an ever-imminent and ever-growing stampede in which the victims bound to be trampled on are we.