In 1967, Jerry Farber published his manifesto, "The Student As

Nigger," in the Los Angeles Free Press. Farber sought to describe and

document the "master-slave" relationship which was structured into

contemporary education and to suggest the ways that schools disempower both

students and teachers, deadening their minds, trampling their rights, and

constraining their bodies.

Esquire labeled the essay "the underground's first classic." It was

reprinted in underground newspapers across the country and was later

published, along with some of Farber's other occasional papers, in a thin

but much read Pocket Book edition. When I went to consult my copy of the

book today, its prematurely yellowed pages literally fell apart between my

fingers. I had cherished this book and read it many times as a high school

student.

When I reread this essay today, some passages make me wince with the

same embarrassment with which one confronts high school yearbook photos. The

essay is very much a product of its times -- a mixture of precocious

cynicism and naive idealism, a hodgepodge of counterculture slang and

obscene phrases which

aftermath. Yet, rereading the essay today, I vividly remember the passions

it stirred when I first encountered it -- the shock of recognition, the fire of

indignation, and the spark of empowerment. The essay gave shape to my

rage over things I was seeing at my own school and helped me to

link my experiences to what students were encountering elsewhere.

I was a somewhat scrawny intellectual male in a southern suburban

school where masculinity got defined around football and deer hunting. I had

greasy hair, wore glasses and more distinctively, I was never seen without

my trench coat. I wasn't techie enough to be a geek but I was definitely a

nerd! From the moment I entered that school, I knew that I didn't belong

there. I was the subject of pretty constant verbal harassment and

occasional physical abuse. Total strangers would stop me in the hall and

insult me to my face. My name, for reasons I never quite got, had preceded

me to the school and upperclassmen had already pegged me as a victim. They

would snatch books out of my hands on the bus and rip them up in front of my

eyes. I'd find my locker smeared with lipstick. I'd be tripped when I walked

down the steps. If I went to

camp, I'd awaken to find my hair smeared with shaving cream. And, most of

the teachers and the administrators would do nothing, even though they knew

perfectly well the torment I and other students like me went through, and

some of them couldn't contain their laughter when the students let fly a

particularly choice insult at my expense.

I've thought a lot about those days in the past year, old ghosts

coming back to haunt you and old wounds that hurt you when you wake up in

the wee hours of the morning and can't go back to sleep.

One day in particular comes back to me again and again. There

were a few sympathetic teachers who let me use their classrooms as a refuge during lunch

my bolt-hole and had to wander the halls looking for another safe place until

class started again. I walked down the hall and got stopped by one student

who called me a "fag." I walked a little faster trying to get away from him

and ran into another, equally abusive. I walked a little faster still only

to be met with another shower of insults as I turned the corner. I spent the

entire lunch period, like a rat in a maze, walking the square of halls

within the school, trying to move fast enough to escape their words, only to

be pushed forward into the next crowd of punks and bullies. I didn't know

what words to use to make it stop and I didn't know where to run to get away

from it. I knew that while some adults would give me a temporary place to

hide, none of them were going to do what it would take to change the school

culture and make it stop.

Writers like Farber helped me to find a political language for those

feelings. I needed a way to think about their narrow-minded conception of

masculinity and so I discovered feminism. I was angry about the ways words

like "fag" and "queer" were being used to deny my humanity and as a result,

I came to embrace the discourse of the gay rights movement, even if I was

far from certain at that point what my sexual preference was. I needed a

way to imagine a world where differences were not only tolerated but

celebrated and so I discovered science fiction. But, most importantly, I

came to see that there was something fundamentally wrong with a school

system that would legally require me to submit to such abusive conditions

and then gave me no space to speak back to my abusers. I began to link my

experiences with other things I was seeing at the school -- a Jewish kid had

had the courage to protest against the singing of carols at school

assemblies and the display of Christmas Trees in the classroom, a

gay student had to take his "licks" from the P.E. Coach in front of the

entire class because he returned his progress report late, a student was

suspended for passing out an underground newspaper he had paid to print

himself, a girl was punished for wearing inappropriate clothing and another

because she wrote herself a library pass because she wanted to study during

her lunch hour. This was just your typical all American high school!

Feeling painfully alone, I desperately wanted to belong to something,

a cause, a movement, something that stood in opposition both to the thugs in

the hallways and to the administration that organized pep rallies

where we were invited to come together and cheer for those thugs. What I

didn't want was to be alone. I was too young to have marched on Washington

in support of Civil Rights, too young to have been at Woodstock or Kent

State or in the

streets of Chicago in 1968. But, the battle for freedom and dignity in our

schools was a fight I could join. The American Civil Liberties Union had

published a student's rights handbook, which I carried around with me in the

pocket of my trench coat. I remember the quote on the back cover from the

Supreme Court's decision in Tinker vs. Des Moines Board of Education saying that

students did not shed their constitutional rights when they entered the

school house gates and that they enjoyed the same liberties as any other

citizen of the American democracy. I read John Stuart Mill who explained

that such liberties existed for unpopular ideas, for outcasts, for those who

heard the jeers of the mob and not pep rally cheers when they spoke.

I thought I had boxed up all those old demons and escaped those

jeering voices. I had moved on to become a successful MIT Professor, had

come to accept myself, had gained respect from others. I had raised a son

and gotten him through the school system and into college. But, we never

escape our pasts. I still owed something to the high school student I once was.

When I first heard about the Littleton shooting, my immediate

reaction was to expect another wave of backlash against popular culture. We

are in the midst of a period of profound change as new media technologies

are having an impact on every aspect of our life and asking us to reassess

and re-shape our core institutions. Such dramatic changes are not without

precedent -- one can

point to the Gutenberg revolution and to the rise of modern mass media in the

late 19th and early 20th century as more or less comparable turning points

-- but such moments of transition have only occurred a few times in human history. Rather

than confront those shifts and use technological change to open a larger

conversation about our values, our practices, our institutions, and our hopes

for the future, the news media and our political leaders play upon our fears

of change.

Anyone who had read the papers over the past several months

could see the storm clouds gathering even before the Littleton shootings and

so I was not surprised, though I was deeply disappointed, to see the Washington

Post report that 82 percent of the American public felt that the Internet

was somewhat responsible for the Columbine shootings (compared to only 60

percent who felt the availability of guns had been a significant factor in

the killings.)Never mind that many of these same people had cheered a few

years before when Bill Clinton had proposed wiring America's schools as part

of his bridge to the 21st century!

During a period of dramatic change, our fears are easily mobilized;

we are prey to misinformation and exaggerated claims, utopian rhetoric and

apocalyptic visions. Of course, our children are more at home in the

digital age than we are. Some days, that gives us hope that they will be able

to ride the new e-commerce economy into better jobs and new educational

opportunities, that they may be able to fulfill the utopian dreams of global

communication and democratic decision-making. On other days, that fills us

with dread, as we

envision our children exposed to the pornographers, the hate groups, the con

artists who lurk in hidden spaces on the web.

The cultural warriors -- the William Bennetts, the Orrin

Hatches, the Joseph Liebermans -- were ready to tap that dark side once the

Columbine shootings occurred and that propelled them, and the media effects

scholars who are the academic apologists for their rather narrow vision of

media change, onto the late-night and Sunday morning talk shows and into the

congressional hearing rooms.

David Grossman, the earnest but clueless former military officer who

was the point-person for the latest round of anti-popular culture hysteria,

said to me that when he first saw the reports of the Littleton shootings, he

knew that they were going to discover that Harris and Klebold were video

game players. I responded that I knew they were going to find this too,

since 90 percent of American boys play video games, and I knew the culture

warriors would exploit this for all it was worth.

What I hadn't realized, until I read Jon Katz's "Hellmouth"

columns, was how much the impact of this new culture war was going to be

felt in our schools, how much it would terrorize high school students who

already saw themselves as outcasts and outsiders, who already felt they had

little place within the system, and who already felt at risk when they

walked the hallways. When I read the "Hellmouth" columns for the first

time, I wept. I saw myself in some of these kids and I owed something to

them on behalf of Henry Jenkins, age 15, crouched in terror in the hallway

of Henderson High School, still smarting from the latest round of insults

and trying to work up the courage to run the gauntlet again.

I had long admired Katz as a journalist who thought deeply about

the social, cultural, and political implications of this current moment of

media transition. I quote him often when I am speaking about issues

surrounding public response to media change and the place of popular culture

in our everyday life. He had led the fight for children's cyber-rights; he

had reminded us that teens were on the front lines of the digital

revolution. Katz had written numerous "cyber-rants" about democracy and new

media, about the ways that the web could become a forum for citizens to

report on issues that mattered to them. Katz cares passionately about these

kids and from speaking to him, it is clear he spent many sleepless nights

during this period trying to decide what his journalistic responsibilities were.

Yet, with the "Hellmouth" columns, he, for the most part, got out

of the way and let the students speak. He opened up his space on Slashdot

for high school students across the country to share what was happening in

their schools: violations of their civil liberties; the unthinking

application of "zero tolerance" policies; the use of "profiles" which

decided whether or not kids needed therapy on the basis of their taste in

music, movies,

television shows and computer games; the verbal abuse directed at goths and

other subcultures from bullies who felt empowered by the "moral panic" heard

nightly on the evening news. Katz saw Slashdot as mediating between the high

school kids who were being silenced at their schools and the larger

community which desperately needed to know what was happening to these

students. The Slashdot columns helped to draw more media attention to the

issue of student rights and to the question of whether our schools were

reacting blindly and stupidly to the Littleton shootings.

When I received a phone call asking me to fly to Washington

on very little notice and speak to the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee about

youth and violent entertainment and youth culture, I accepted, knowing full well

that I was going to be offering a minority perspective that was unlikely to

be heard by any politician in the room. I accepted because I had read what

Jon Katz had brought to our attention. I accepted because I owed it to

teachers like Betty Leslein who used to let me hide out in their classrooms

during lunch and who had the courage to let us hold a student rights meeting

in her house. And I accepted because of "The Student as Nigger" and the ACLU

Student Rights Handbook.

I've had journalists describe me as defending the media industry

before Congress. I wasn't defending the media industry, though I thought

they were getting a bum rap. I was defending American teenagers, the

Slashdot writers first and foremost, who were being punished unjustly

because their tastes in popular culture differed from those of their parents

or their teachers, who were suffering because they refused to conform to the

norms of their high school's powerful cliques, who were hurt because they

were on the wrong side of the digital revolution. For me, the most important

part of my testimony was that I was able to introduce the "Voices from the

Hellmouth" columns into the Congressional Record.

Many, many adults spoke about teens during those hearings. Senators

were discussing with shock and outrage films they hadn't seen, television

shows they'd never watched, games they'd never played, and music they'd never

listened to, based on precise scribbles on little index cards provided to them by

congressional staffers. Yet, there were no young people allowed to speak,

none asked what these controversial materials meant in the context of their

lives. And, apart from the kids at Columbine who were directly involved in

the incident, I didn't see many young people speaking on CNN or MS-NBC or in

the op-ed section of the New York Times. I couldn't do much to change the

hearings , but I knew that introducing the "Hellmouth" columns into the

Congressional Record would insure their availability for future historians.

Read in this context, the "Hellmouth" columns are an important

political document, one that tells us an enormous amount about our own

times. They tell us that the news media and politicians were preoccupied with

bashing Marilyn Manson and Quake while high school students were insisting

that the problem lay within the American education system and with the ways

that our schools are dealing, or rather not dealing, with cultural

diversity. Every teacher, principal, guidance counselor and parent should

be required to read these columns and reflect on what they reveal about

the state of American education and the life of American teenagers. They

slice through all the tired pieties and self-justifications about educational

reform. They remind us that our schools are failing our students and that we

have an obligation to do something about it. After generations of

self-proclaimed "education presidents," our schools are no more democratic,

no more respectful of cultural difference today than they were when I was a

student in the 1970s.

We could read the "Voices from the Hellmouth" as accounts of

victimization, yet I choose to read them as statements of empowerment. It

impresses me that these students saw themselves as empowered by the web to

share what was happening to them to a larger public, that they understood

their personal experience as part of a much larger political debate, and

that they felt the importance of forming an alliance, even if only

temporarily, both with other students and with adults, like Katz, who seemed

ready to lend support to their battles. For every student who wrote, there

were many, many more who read these accounts with recognition. When I go into

schools to speak, I find many, many students who have read and reread these

accounts and have shared them with others via e-mail.

I was bemused when I reread Faber's "The Student as Nigger" to

discover that the computer was singled out as one of the shackles we must

shed if we are to liberate our schools: "Students...could learn to dance by

dancing on the IBM cards. They could make coloring books out of the catalogs

and they could put the grading system in a museum...." In the 1960s, the

computer was understood as a tool for regimentation and social control, for

reducing real people into anonymous data and for denying the reality and

validity of their individual experiences. To free ourselves, Farber argues,

we needed to fold, spindle and mutilate all those punch cards. Today, these

students understand the computer as a powerful resource for social change,

for speaking to each other across great distances through channels not

controlled by their teachers and their parents. Sociologists have labeled

our contemporary teens "generation.com" because they are the first

generation to come of age with a computer in their home and this new

technology is fundamentally altering how they socialize, how they create,

how they learn, how they work and consume, and most importantly, how they

vote. Yet, the "Hellmouth" columns suggest that we have stuck them with the

wrong domain name. "Generation.com" implies that they are first and foremost

workers and consumers. The "Hellmouth" columns demonstrate that they are

really "Generation.org," able to understand perhaps more fully than anyone

else how networked communication offers an infrastructure for political

resistance.

I respond with rather mixed feelings to the idea of publishing these

columns as a book. The "Hellmouth" materials demonstrated the distinctive

properties of the web as a medium for political debate. These columns had

the impact they did because people kept forwarding them on e-mail or linking

their websites to them. What does it mean to take these columns off the

web and put them on our bookshelves? And, then, I think about school

librarians who will be forced to chose whether or not to put this

book on their shelves, and teachers who will have to chose whether or not to

pass it on to their students, and parents who may only respect these words once

they have been sanctified through being printed and bound, and perhaps most

ironically, I think about all of those kids who were cut off from the

on-line world in the midst of the Littleton panic and who may now be able to

access these powerful statements.

Will the "Hellmouth" columns become a political "classic" or will

they simply become another paperback book like Farber's "The Student as

Nigger," yellowed with age, its pages falling out as its glue dries up, the

stuff of remainder tables and garage sales? I don't know. I suppose it

depends on the outcome, on what kind of society we create for ourselves out

of this current moment which seems so ripe with the potential for change and

yet so torn by "moral panic" and reactionary fear. Yet, the point of my

introduction is that it doesn't really matter whether this book lasts or not

as a material object. In empowering young people to recognize their

experiences as part of a larger political debate, "Voices from the

Hellmouth" will have an impact on the future political choices they make,

much as reading Farber led me, unexpectedly, to testify before Congress and,

for that matter, to write this introduction. Does reading this book leave

you with a political obligation, which someday, when it matters, you will be

expected to repay? Will its truths, if not its words, leave an imprint,

shape who you think you are, and what you feel committed to do? If the

answer is yes, then you can shred your copy. And if the answer is no, then

it won't matter how many copies of this book remain on the library shelf two

decades from now.