BAR Book Forum: Keisha Lindsay’s “In a Classroom of Their Own”and Dixa Ramirez’s “Colonial Phantoms”
Our authors address global anti-Blackness and the particular Dominican Republic variety, and examine the pros and cons of all black male schooling.
“Establishing all-black male schools is not necessarily a panacea for what ails black school children.”
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured authors are Keisha Lindsayand Dixa Ramirez.Lindsay is an associate professor of gender and women's studies and political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her book is In a Classroom of Their Own: The Intersection of Race and Feminist Politics in All-Black Male Schools.
Ramirez is Assistant Professor of transnational African American literatures in the American Studies and English departments at Brown University. Her book is Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present.
Keisha Lindsay’s In a Classroom of Their Own
“Despite their best intentions, many supporters of black male schools minimize black girls’ own oppression in the classroom.”
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Keisha Lindsay: In a Classroom of Their Own: The Intersection of Race and Feminist Politics in All-Black Male Schools uses the push to open separate schools for black boys to illuminate the relationship between several contemporary political realities -- the fight against racism, the persistence of anti-feminism, and the rise of neoliberal educational reform.
First, the move to establish all-black male schools (ABMSs) is part of black people’s well-established recognition that the classroom is an important site for resisting racism. To this end, many black male supporters of the forty ABMSs proposed or opened to date rightly emphasize that such schools help to counter under-resourced classrooms, biased teachers, black boys’ high suspension rates, and other manifestations of structural racism in the educational system.
Second, the same anti-feminist ethos that is sometimes present in #BlackLivesMatter and other expressions of contemporary black politics is also evident among some black male supporters of ABMSs. Put more explicitly, despite their best intentions, many of these supporters minimize black girls’ own oppression in the classroom. These supporters also mistakenly presume that hyper-feminine women teachers, including black women teachers, and hypersexual black girls are to blame for black boys’ academic underachievement.
“The neoliberal-inspired privileging of ‘choice’ is a racist move that legitimizes reduced government spending.”
Finally, pro-ABMS discourse emerges and is resonant within the contemporary context of neoliberal educational reform. Such reform presumes that participating in an educational marketplace facilitated by vouchers, open enrollment, and the privatized management of public schools is key to students’ success. Many black men who advocate for ABMSs argue, in this vein, that such schools enable black boys to select educational institutions that address their supposedly gender-specific learning needs. Other proponents of ABMSs argue, in contrast, that the neoliberal-inspired privileging of “choice” – be it in the classroom or elsewhere – is a racist move that legitimizes reduced government spending on the very social services that blacks most need.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
I hope that activists and community organizers will glean several things from my book. To begin with, supporters of ABMSs are right when they emphasize that gender shapes black boys’ experience of racism in school. For instance, there is ample evidence that white women teachers discriminate against black boysnot only on the assumption that they are racially inferior but also on the assumption that their inferiority is manifest as deviant masculinity or through violent, hyper-aggressive, and otherwise inappropriate classroom behavior.
At the same time, establishing ABMSs is not necessarily a panacea for what ails black school children. I say this because doing so perpetuates the misguided belief that black girls are already succeeding in school. Equally disturbing is that pro-ABMS discourse legitimizes the racist notion that black people are racially inferior because we do not fulfill established norms of what it means to be a “real” man or woman and that we, consequently, need special instruction in order to overcome this deficit.
“There is ample evidence that white women teachers discriminate against black boys.”
Lastly, certain conditions need to be in place to make public classrooms spaces where all black children can achieve. These conditions include activists’ embrace of a particular kind of educational advocacy -- one which emphasizes that taxpayer-funded schools are key to ameliorating oppression and that blacks are most often burdened with having to live with inferior public goods, inncluding subpar public schools. Such advocacy is successful when it is beholden to two norms -- that public schools should foster black people’s capacity for self-determination as well as our willingness and ability to perpetually (re)define what life in a democratic polity looks like.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
My book encourages readers to challenge established understandings of intersectionality. Intersectionality is the analytical framework, pioneered by black feminists, that illuminates how multiple kinds of disadvantage reinforce each other. I demonstrate that intersectionality is not necessarily a black feminist construct but is, instead, a politically fluid framework that can be used to advance many agendas including gender-biased ones.
For instance, many advocates of ABMSs embrace the logic of intersectionality when they presume that black boys underachieve not because they are black or because they are males but because they are black males who experience masculinized racism. Masculinized-racism involves, among other things, white women teachers’ failure to acknowledge black male students’ supposedly testosterone-driven, “naturally” aggressive learning style. The difficulty with this use of intersectionality is that it presumes that black children have biologically based learning styles or that all black boys are aggressive learners and all black girls are passive learners. The result is that black children who do not fit into these stereotypical roles – including black boys who thrive in classrooms that emphasize verbal and collective learning -- are often ignored by supporters of ABMS.
“Intersectionality can be used for gender-biased ends.”
My book also urges readers to query the implications of recognizing that intersectionality can be used for gender-biased ends. I am especially concerned about whether this kind of rethinking limits black girls’ ability to challenge their own oppression at the crossroads of race and gender. I address the concern by explaining that intersectionality, as I redefine it, actually expands black girls’ opportunity to understand the link between the patriarchal, antiracist politics that pervades pro-ABMS discourse and their own intersectional oppression in the classroom. In sum, I guide readers to un-learn the idea that intersectional analysis is a zero-sum phenomenon in which examining the intersectional status of one group nullifies the intersectional oppression of another group.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
Black feminist historian E. Frances White’s scholarship is central to my work. White articulates an important message about the advantages as well as the disadvantages that arise when black people make claims about our collective experience of oppression. White’s point of departure is a core Afrocentric claim -- that blacks are oppressed because we fail to celebrate our African origins. On the one hand, White explains, this assertion challenges racist depictions of Africa and Africans as uncivilized and thus deserving of exploitation. On the other hand, Afrocentric approaches often use European norms to determine which dimensions of African history and culture are most worthy of celebrating. The result is a mode of Afrocentric thinking that often celebrates ancient Egypt as a “real” African civilization precisely because its social structures, rather than those of west African societies, more closely resemble those of Europe.
In other words, White reveals that experiencing white supremacy motivates Afrocentriststo resist racism and shapes, in often harmful ways, their very understanding of how best to resist racism. This insight -- that black people articulate our experience of oppression in ways that are both “hegemonic and oppositional” -- has been invaluable in helping me to understand the simultaneously anti-racist and anti-feminist politics at work in the push to establish ABMSs.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
My work encourages readers to imagine a new model for forging anti-racist and feminist coalitions among black people. I do so by highlighting an important reality -- that black male advocates of these schools are not alone in making both emancipatory and oppressive claims regarding why black children underachieve in schools. A similar phenomenon is in play when some black feminist commentators do two things -- rightly critique those Afrocentric ABMSs that celebrate black patriarchy and mistakenly ignore the possibility that Afrocentric curricula can facilitate all black children’s opportunity to learn and be self-empowered in antiracist classrooms. In other words, I use key conversations in favor of and against ABMSs to suggest that what unites many black men and black women is not a shared experience of oppression but a shared conundrum -- that their respective claims regarding why black children are oppressed in the classroom are both progressive and anti-progressive.
“Improving black boys’ well-being is not separate from but intrinsically linked to doing the same for black girls.”
My ultimate aim is not to push for a specific or “thick” model of coalition building. Nor is it to promote particular pedagogical, curricular, disciplinary, or other approaches. It is, rather, to illuminate why, how and by what criteria black male supporters and black feminist critics of ABMSs can collectively and successfully interrogate their progressive and less progressive assumptions regarding why black children are oppressed. The “why” is that improving black boys’ well-being is not separate from but intrinsically linked to doing the same for black girls. The “how” requires dialoging in accessible, community-based spaces such as barbershops and public libraries. The “what” involves in cooperatively engaging, as I alluded to earlier, in educational advocacy that emphasizes the importance of public schools while criticizing the quality of such schools available to all black children.
Dixa Ramirez’s Colonial Phantoms
“The African American experience of blackness is not globally normative.”
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Dixa Ramirez:Colonial Phantoms provides a long and global view of both anti-black and anti-immigrant sentiments throughout the Western world. By focusing on Dominican literature and culture, my book shows how white patriarchal ideals undergird who can embody normative citizenship in the “postcolonial” Dominican Republic, U.S., and Spain. We all know who can legally and profitably (economically and even spiritually) cross national borders. Consider, for instance, the free movement of so-called U.S. and European expats escaping the daily grind of their home countries to tropical climes. Compare them to those that are not allowed to seek refuge from political danger or economic destitution.
“The exclusions and violence of the Trump presidency resemble those that non-U.S. subjects have faced around the world under U.S. imperialism.”
Many folks consider the present Trumpian moment in the U.S. as a new epoch. Others see it as a culmination of a perfect neoliberal and capitalist logic. Either way, I offer my book as a contribution to work that helps contextualize the current moment. White nationalism is at the heart of U.S. nationalism, with anti-blackness, anti-indigeneity, and anti-certain-kinds-of immigration as its core tenets. Many of us have noticed how much the exclusions and violence of the Trump presidency resemble those that non-U.S. subjects have faced around the world under U.S. imperialism and under U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes. To pretend that a Hillary Clinton presidency would have signaled prosperity for everyone around the world is a beautiful example of U.S.-centrism and exceptionalism. I acknowledge that the current unveiled white nationalism has a level of urgency and forthright official support that we have not seen in a long time in the U.S. Nevertheless, my book refutes the logic of U.S.-centrism and U.S. as beacon of democracy.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
If I had to focus on one issue it would be in relation to the important work against anti-Haitianism in the Dominican Republic. Activist and policy work in this realm need to acknowledge anti-Haitianism in the history of the Americas and the Western world writ-large. By considering the global perspective on the issue, I do not mean to exculpate Dominicans’ anti-Haitianism. However, I do hope that efforts to eradicate anti-Haitianism become more holistic because it extends beyond the island. We don’t even have to focus on the nineteenth-century laws in places like the U.S. and Cuba that prohibited black and mixed-raced subjects from sailing to the island; the white classes feared that the desire for freedom among black subjects was a contagious disease. We need only to look back to the 1990s when the U.S. government refused to grant asylum to Haitian refugees, at the same time welcoming Cuban refugees. We can also look back just a few years ago when Pat Robertson blamed the devastating earthquake of 2010 on the Haitian legacy of black freedom. Two recent horror films, both U.S.-produced, hinge on the racist trope that so-called “Voodoo” is devil worship. Anti-Haitianism in the D.R. will not be resolved until activists acknowledge that global anti-blackness, especially in relation to migration and mobility, is the root of the problem.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
I will narrow it down to three issues. First, I’d like to help chip away at the idea that there is only one way to be black or to acceptably have African ancestry. A big hurdle I had to overcome in the process of researching and writing this book was seeing my evidence for what it was, and allowing it to speak to me directly. My evidence—Dominican poetry, prose, music, quotidian and stage performance, architecture, speech acts, and so on—was telling me that the stories we often tell in the U.S. academy about how subjects relate to their own blackness were nonsensical in a Dominican context. Similarly, many (though not all) Dominican narratives around blackness were illogical in a dominant U.S. perspective on blackness in which blackness is determined by a single black ancestor. Rather than uncritically agree that Dominicans, therefore, need to learn the correct way to be, embody, perform, celebrate their African ancestry, I paused to listen to the diversity of ways in which blackness is refracted in the diaspora. This is not to say that I celebrate Dominican ways of viewing blackness, but I also don’t condemn them. I am, however, weary of the idea that blackness has a teleology.
“The stories we often tell in the U.S. academy about how subjects relate to their own blackness were nonsensical in a Dominican context.”
The second issue stems from the previous one. Work about African America (in the U.S.) has been pioneering within the realm of African diaspora studies. Some of the scholars I am most excited about focus on blackness in the U.S. However, I would like there to be more willingness in broader Black Studies to consider non-U.S. and non-Anglophone subjects and cultural texts as equally worthy of our consideration as slices of the African diaspora. Even with an acknowledgement of blackness in other parts of the Americas with their own cultural lineages, there often remains a deep-seated belief that the African American experience of blackness is globally normative.
Finally, I had to also overcome the idea that the only objects, ideas, cultural texts worthy of study are those that are unequivocally resistant. Consider, for instance, the subject of my first chapter. In the 1870s, a group of white Dominican elites chose a non-white woman as the first national poet. They did not choose her as the first nonwhitepoet or the first womanpoet of the nation. They chose Salomé Ureña as the nation’s first poet laureate, full stop. Her blackness, however, remained entirely unremarked by her peers. To this day, she remains the face of Dominican literature and education when many male and white literary heroes are not. On the other hand, as I trace in my second chapter, her image has been whitewashed to such an extent that most Dominicans have no idea that she was unmistakably a woman of color, a fact that I only know because I tracked down her only extant photograph. What is this if not pure ambivalence? Colonial Phantoms is a paean to these moments of irresolution, as well as the attempts that Dominicans have made to make some sense out of them.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
There are honestly too many to name. The three works that most inspired the structure and method of Colonial Phantoms were Jean Franco’s Plotting Women, Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, and Sara Johnson’s The Fear of French Negroes.
Works that currently inspire my next project include Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, Anne Cheng’s Second Skin, and Robert Reid-Pharr’s Archives of Flesh.
In general, I am inspired by scholarship and art that explores or records irresolution, subterfuge, and elision. I think part of the reason for this is that signs of resistance, especially as created by African diasporic subjects, have so often been coopted for explicitly non-resistant purposes.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
Colonial Phantoms does not focus on futurity as much as it is a literary study and history of the present. However, I do focus on a territory that has a singular history: what is now the Dominican Republic hosted for centuries a majority free black and mixed-race population. This is an utter anomaly within the context of the Americas. Much of this “freedom” or whatever we want to call it was not the absence of white supremacy, per se, so much as the absence of surveillance and the armament (legal and military) to enforce colonial and then national laws. As far back as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, white subjects on this territory were in a tizzy, writing to Spanish authorities because local “mulatos” and black subjects looked them in the eye, as if they were equal just because they were both free. In the nineteenth century, a white U.S. traveler named Samuel Hazard comments on the non-white Dominican men he sees that they return his gaze in a way he had seen nowhere else, even in Cuba. Frederick Douglass and other African American leaders wrote about the freedom enjoyed by Dominican men of color on a majority-black island that had outlawed slavery for decades. These moments and details give us glimpses into a realm in which the surveillance of a white terroristic state did not completely take over for centuries. How can this fact not influence how subjects on this island and their descendants see themselves in relation to blackness?
Roberto Sirvent is Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, CA. He also serves as the Outreach and Mentoring Coordinator for the Political Theology Network. He’s currently writing a book with fellow BAR contributor Danny Haiphong called American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.
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