Introduction to Jon
Katz book based on his
"Voices From the Hellmouth" columns
By Henry Jenkins
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 techy 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 proceeded 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 trenchcoat. 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 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.
