English 531: Literacy Seminar

Delpit offers contradictory “success stories” as a response to many of Gee’s assumptions, and examines some of the problems “sensitive and well-meaning literacy educators” have teaching “poor students and students of color.” In simple terms, the issue is teachers interpreting the teaching of “mainstream literacy” as oppressive, rather than something that can be ultimately liberating. Off and on, I have taken issue with the belief held by certain circles of both black and white communities that to learn grammar, punctuation and “Standard English” is to learn to “talk white.” E. Franklin Frazier’s story from 1920 demonstrates the same folly. “Mr. Frazier…seems to me to be quite gentlemanly and mentally white.”

I believe this is rooted in another problem: BLACKS DON’T SEE THEMSELVES IN WHAT THEY ARE LEARNING. It is hard for many to take ownership over a “foreign history” that they are divorced from every month but February. Delpit offers examples of this problem: “…to be fully hip meant to repudiate a school system in which African-American consciousness was undervalued or ignored.” AND “Not-learning seems to take place when someone has to deal with unavoidable challenges to her or his personal and family loyalties, integrity, and identity.”

Carter G. Woodson nailed it, and I’m not sure why we haven’t listened to him yet, 75 years later. “He extolled teachers in his 1933 ‘Mis-Education of the Negro’ to teach African-American students not only the language and canon of the European ‘mainstream,’ but to teach as well the life, history, language, philosophy, and literature of their own people. Only this kind of education, he argued, would prepare an educated class which would serve the needs of the African-American community.”

To me, the only thing that will ever generate true equality among blacks and whites is changing the youth’s perception of “Standard English.” We need to get power into the hands of honorable black men and women who can serve as role models that these youths see themselves in. We need more black teachers to educate black and white inner-city youth in the art of a universally beneficial and agreed upon “Standard English.”

Delpit continues, “bel hooks speaks of her black women teachers in the segregated South as being the model from which she acquired both access to dominant discourses and a sense of the validity of the primary discourse of working-class American people.” Its all about “changing the joke and slipping the yoke…using European philosophical and critical standards to challenge the tenets of European belief systems,”–”the ability to transform dominant discourses for liberatory purposes.”

The enemies of change still have plenty of fire hoses. But the greats of the civil rights movement whose words live on today knew all too well that you fight fire with fire.

Vote Barack Obama ‘08, guys