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
reflected the heady freedom of the "Berkeley Free Speech" movement and its
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
This particular day, for reasons I forget, I got locked out of
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.