Of Teachable Moments and Specters of Race

Obama's victory was a triumph of the black freedom movement, particularly the vision of community organizing employed by Robert Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, and John Lewis, and inspired by their fundi (Swahili for "teacher") Ella Baker.2 And yet the surge in racist and seditious rhetoric...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American quarterly 2010-06, Vol.62 (2), p.195-213
Main Author: Gaines, Kevin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
African American culture
African Americans
ASA Presidential Address and Responses
Business
Citizenship
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Colleges & universities
Conservatism
Democracy
Education policy
Franklin, John Hope
Higher education
Libraries
Literacy
Prisons
Racism
Reduction (Phonological or Phonetic)
Rhetoric
Swahili language
Teachers
United States history
White people
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Summary:Obama's victory was a triumph of the black freedom movement, particularly the vision of community organizing employed by Robert Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, and John Lewis, and inspired by their fundi (Swahili for "teacher") Ella Baker.2 And yet the surge in racist and seditious rhetoric after Obama's election affirms how fragile and contested the reforms of the civil rights movement are.3 In a time of crisis, those most committed to denying the past, it seems, end up being possessed by its hatreds. Newfield argues that the contraction of higher education as a public good threatens to reverse the social progress the nation has made over the last sixty years.\n As Megan Sweeney has written, the sharp decline in educational opportunities and libraries in penal institutions since the 1980s recalls the denial of literacy that was endemic to enslavement.53 For incarcerated black and brown people ensnared by discriminatory drug sentencing, the contemporary phenomenon of low-wage prison labor and private prisons seems barely removed from the systems of convict labor and the chain gangs that imprisoned countless black men and supplied cheap labor to corporations in the South from the 1860s to the mid-twentieth century.54 Swayed by venal politicians and their corporate masters, the American electorate tolerates the violence of mass incarceration as social policy and a profitable industry, while its support for public education languishes.
ISSN:0003-0678
1080-6490
1080-6490
DOI:10.1353/aq.0.0138