Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High

By Signithia Fordham

This innovative portrait of student life in an urban high school focuses on the academic success of African-American students, exploring the symbolic role of academic achievement within the Black community and investigating the price students pay for attaining it. Signithia Fordham's richly detailed ethnography reveals a deeply rooted cultural system that favors egalitarianism and group cohesion over the individualistic, competitive demands of academic success and sheds new light on the sources of academic performance. She also details the ways in which the achievements of sucessful African-Americans are "blacked out" of the public imagination and negative images are reflected onto black adolescents. A self-proclaimed "native" anthropologist, she chronicles the struggle of African-American students to construct an identity suitable to themselves, their peers, and their families within an arena of colliding ideals. This long-overdue contribution is of crucial importance to educators, policymakers, and ethnographers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Mar 13, 1996
• ISBN: 9780226229980

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The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1996 by Signithia Fordham

All rights reserved. Published 1996

Printed in the United States of America

15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06      3 4 5 6 7

ISBN 978-0-226-22998-0 (e-book)

ISBN: 0-226-25713-4 (cloth)

       0-226-25714-2 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fordham, Signithia.

Blacked out : dilemmas of race, identity, and success at Capital High / Signithia Fordham.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Afro-Americans—Education (Secondary)-—Case studies.   2. Academic achievement—United States—Case studies.   3. Afro-Americans—Race identity—Case studies.   4. Afro-American students—Psychology—Case studies.   5. Educational anthropology—United States—Case studies.   I. Title.

LC2779.F67   1996

373'.08996'073—dc20

95-33036

CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Signithia Fordham

BLACKED OUT

Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO & LONDON

This book is dedicated to the memory of my

wombmate, confidante, friend, and chief mudpie

assistant, whose untimely death compels me to

sing both alto and soprano and to fly this

uncharted journey with only one wing.

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise. . . .

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I’ll rise. . . .

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Maya Angelou

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Introduction: Stalking Culture and Meaning and Looking in a Refracted Mirror

1. Schooling and Imagining the American Dream: Success Alloyed with Failure

2. Becoming a Person: Fictive Kinship as a Theoretical Frame

3. Parenthood, Childrearing, and Female Academic Success

4. Parenthood, Childrearing, and Male Academic Success

5. Teachers and School Officials as Foreign Sages

6. School Success and the Construction of Otherness

7. Retaining Humanness: Underachievement and the Struggle to Affirm the Black Self

8. Reclaiming and Expanding Humanness: Overcoming the Integration Ideology

Afterword

Policy Implications

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Exile and sequestration are the two words that best describe the configuration of my institutional life during the remaking of what was my dissertation. Exile is rarely self-selected; sequestration can be either self-selected or imposed. As I write these lines, I am sitting in the tiny windowless office where I was both exiled and sequestered. This stigmatized space became my primary residence—my prison and sanctuary, the site where I spent the greater part of virtually every working day. Fortunately, the spatial restrictions of this evolved primary residence were repeatedly erased by the love and support of so many wonderful people, people who repeatedly peeled my bruised and battered psyche from the floor, pushing and kicking me toward the achievement of my goal. While I have enjoyed many forms and sources of support during the long and often difficult process of writing this book, the most crucial has been the love and counsel of kith and kin, friends and family. These individuals became my hidden collaborators and fellow conspirators, compelling my visions and insights to transcend the spatial limitations I was forced to endure. Thus, in the tradition idealized in the African-American community, I became we, with the completion of my manuscript the presumed commodity of exchange. Through the medium of giving, I adopted the eyes, ears, insights, and fortitude of the people who supported me. They contacted me on my lifelines—the telephone and e-mail—to advise me that the sun was shining, night had become day, and day had become night. They urged me to go home in inclement weather; escorted me to my car; got food to me through the chunnels; unlocked my office door when I repeatedly locked myself out; gave me keys to their homes so I could eat my way down the East Coast, thus nourishing not only my physical being but my battered self-esteem as well. They continually consoled me, providing big shoulders for me to cry on when my wombmate died and waterless tears bruised my face; repeatedly moved me with my rapidly shrinking worldly possessions; located obscure research sources and materials; read virtually incomprehensible drafts of various chapters; beat off the sharks who sought to consume my professional body; assured me that the mountains I saw before me were really only molehills; taught me computer skills beyond the rudimentary level; connected me to their powerful and influential professional networks; helped me to keep abreast of the inquiries regarding my research findings; typed drafts from my virtually incomprehensible handwriting; transcribed interview data, fieldnotes, and so forth; and generally served as mediators and involuntary research assistants. These were the voices, hands, eyes, and ears that quelled my fears and bolstered my sense of what I could do, compelling me to revisit the powerful dictum from the significant others in my childhood: You can do it, Black girl, you can do it. I have been so fortunate. So blessed. The support of my kith and kin has been so powerful that I have begun to think of it as hands across Signithia. Indeed, the power of my kith and kin has erased and nullified the negative forces in my life. It is therefore with the greatest pleasure associated with this book that I acknowledge them here; that I publicly thank them for being there for me when I stumbled (which was often), helping and even demanding that I straighten up and fly right. I want these people to know that I am getting credit beyond what I deserve and I want to assure them that I know they are the wind beneath my sail.

My heartfelt thanks are extended to the District of Columbia Public School System and, more specifically, the students and adults of the small community I fictitiously label Capital High. This book would not have been possible without the cooperation and support of school officials and the parents and children of that community. I survived and thrived because of their goodwill, their willingness to allow me not only to peep into the crevices of their lives but also to gawk and stare. Their belief in the potentially transformative power of the findings that were likely to emerge from this study propelled them to share with me intimate aspects of their lives and, in so doing, reveal the way they construct cultural meaning. Meanwhile, the cultural information they voluntarily and involuntarily shared transformed me as a person, altering and even transforming my anthropological perceptions. My agreement with the District of Columbia Board of Education does not allow me to identify the individual participants either here or elsewhere in this book. I lament and respect this limitation. In order to protect the study participants’ privacy, throughout the book the images presented are composites, combined portraits of the actual participants, and all names are fictitious. Despite these limitations, I want to thank each of them publicly and let them know that in this ethnography they were my hidden collaborators, the anonymous voices in the pages that follow, the people who taught me what I needed to know about how African-Americans achieve success—academic and otherwise—in contemporary Washington, D.C., and perhaps in the United States in general.

There was also financial support, which freed me from the usual intense workload of the academy. The American University awarded me a dissertation research grant during the spring semester of 1982. I also received a research grant from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement’s Unsolicited Grants Program (formerly the National Institute of Education, Grant No. NIE-G-82-0037). This grant enabled me to collect the data during the first year of my fieldwork. The Spencer Foundation supported my research by awarding me a regular Spencer Foundation grant in 1984–85. Without this grant I would not have been able to complete the research on which this book is based. The year after I defended my dissertation, the Spencer Foundation also awarded me the Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. With the help of Professor Edmund Gordon, I spent the year of that fellowship at Yale University in the African-American Studies Department. I thank him for his support. At Yale, I was able to write and think and interact on a daily basis with such intellectual giants as Professors John W. Blassingame and the late Sylvia Boone. In 1992–93 I was also the beneficiary of a Minority Research Initiation and Career Advancement Awards Planning Grant (SRB-9154501) from the National Science Foundation. This NSF grant enabled me to look more critically at the gender issues that emerged in both the ethnographic and quantitative data. Richard McCormick, the erstwhile dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University, awarded me a Henry Rutgers Research Fellowship, for which I thank him. I was also the recipient of a one-semester minority research grant that allowed me to devote more time to the crucial task of deciphering meaning. I am especially grateful to the faculty of the prestigious African-American Studies Program at Princeton University: Professors Kevin Gaines, Wahneema Lubiano, Toni Morrison, Nell Irvin Painter, Arnold Rampersad, Carol Swain, Howard Taylor, Walter Wallace, and Cornel West. As the recipient of the program’s first Presidential Fellowship in 1991–92, I spent an entire academic year working with these supportive and intellectually unmatched academicians, all of whom were willing to read and critique my inchoate thoughts and ideas. They read my drafts and suggested I rewrite. They reread the revisions and suggested I rewrite. They shared their powerful professional networks and intellectual knowledge—unconditionally. They invited me into their homes; took me to lunch; and insisted that I attend their classes, lectures, and seminars. For similar kinds of support I am also grateful to Professors Hildred Geertz and Kay Warren in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton, and to Professor Deborah Tannen, who was visiting in the department that year. To all of these people, I extend my sincere appreciation.

At each of the institutions identified above, I relied upon the goodwill, professional skills, and personal warmth of the support and secretarial staff. These individuals corrected my mistakes, ignored my frustrations, and forgave me when my unreasonable expectations made it difficult for them to perform their job successfully. It is a real pleasure to thank them: Janet Bascom, Hattie Black, Carolyn Boston, Shirley Frederick, Janet Giarratano, Shirley Mero, Gayle Pemberton, Dorothy Randolph, Edwina Segledi, Evelyn Snipes, Rosa Urena, and Gwendolyn Williams.

At these same institutions, I also relied upon a group of people who are often ignored: those who prepare the meals, scrub the floors, and guard the doors. Some of them I know by name; most I do not. Nevertheless, they know me and they know what they did for me. They were the people who removed the discarded papers from my cluttered office; tried—often unsuccessfully—to find floor space in order to clean; replaced light bulbs; checked the areas where I was working late at night to be assured that I was unharmed; turned on the heat to keep me from freezing, the air conditioning to keep me from liquefying; escorted me to my car and gave me rides home when my old car died and I had stayed too late to walk home alone; warmed cold bagels; heated tepid soup; and gently and sometimes not so gently reminded me that sleep is essential to good health. They talked and talked and talked. They told me stories about the difficulties associated with their jobs. They shared their hopes and dreams, not only for themselves but for their children as well. I remember and appreciate their many acts of kindness and support. I hope, therefore, despite the lack of specificity here, that each of them will be able to see him- or herself depicted in this brief description and conclude: She is describing me!

Institutions of another category—libraries—were essential to the completion of this book. I benefited immensely both from the collections and from the vast skills and knowledge of reference librarians and media specialists. I am indebted to the late Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland for making a reference desk at the Library of Congress available to me. I also made use of the libraries at the American University, the University of the District of Columbia, and Yale University; Princeton University’s Firestone Library; and all branches of the library and information system at Rutgers. While I thank all of the people who helped me obtain the desired resources and information, there are a few individuals who unwittingly became unpaid research assistants and therefore deserve special recognition. Here I must single out Melba Broom, Bruce Martin, Catherine Geddis, Marie Maman, Nancy Putnam, Elizabeth Scherff, and Thelma Tate. Among this elite group, Marie Maman, Nancy Putnam and Thelma Tate deserve gold stars for convincing me that the library system could be truly user friendly.

It is far more difficult adequately to thank the numerous colleagues whose mentoring, interest in my work, concrete suggestions, and stimulating conversations have shaped the construction of this book. While I have tried to acknowledge how they have influenced my thinking in the pages that follow, some people deserve special mention here, most notably the members of my dissertation committee: William L. Leap, Brett Williams, and John U. Ogbu. I would not have been able to complete the dissertation or write this book without their sharing their expertise in support of my professional advancement. Their willingness always to be there for me professionally has been their most consistent and significant contribution to my professional life. I thank each of them—unconditionally.

I am also indebted to a wide range of people whose support blurs the distinction between the intellectual and the personal. They include Brenda Allen, Herman Blake, John Blassingame, Liz DeBold, Lisa Delpit, Marta Bermudez-Gallegos, Wesley Brown, Margaret Eisenhart, Catherine Emihovich, Vivian Gadsden, Bernice Howard, Herman Howard, Michelle Fine, Michele Foster, Lynn Isbell, Brenda Jones, Donald Gibson, Kay Hunter, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Joyce King, Peter McLaren, Ceasar McDowell, Prathiba Joshi, Adel Patton, Yolanda Moses, Lauckland Nicholas, Mildred Lockhart, Howard McGary, Elmer Redfern Moore, George Pieczenik, Sara Rhoden, Robin Roberts, Mohamed Sessay, Christine Sleeter, Laura Smith, Ian Straker, Rick Turner, Vanessa Siddle Walker, Antoinette Washington, Wendy Weis, Deborah Gray White, and Jane White. I am especially grateful to Iris Carter Ford, whose anthropological knowledge and expertise combined with her willingness to listen to my subaltern ideas are apparently unending. I am grateful to John Johnson, who continually buttressed my willingness to take risks by challenging my thinking and encouraging me never to blow an opportunity to make a difference. I thank Renee Larrier for enduring my endless ramblings and tactfully helping to clarify my thinking. I am also grateful to Carmel Schrire, a senior colleague, who was braver than the people with whom she worked. I thank Ken Carlson, Francine Essien, Tom Figueira, Karla Jackson-Brewer, Walton Johnson, Cheryl Wall, and Cornel West for taking on my fight and in the process earning my deepest respect and admiration. I thank the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter at Rutgers for trying to stigmatize injustice. Special thanks are extended to Linda Chalfant, who worked with me during the data-gathering stage of this ethnography, transcribing reams of interview data and typing numerous drafts. Her varied research skills and professionalism strengthened the manuscript immeasurably. Lynissa Stokes deserves my thanks because she kept me from drowning in my snail mail, performing many clerical tasks that I found difficult or impossible to do. I am grateful to Michael Barney for unconditional support, including a willingness to teach me cyberspace skills—gratis. I thank him for being prepared to do whatever tasks needed to be done to get my manuscript to the publisher. I am also grateful to Joan Phalen and Chuck Cowderey for modeling the best of what it means to be liberal: practicing what they preach.

And then there is my dear friend Sylvia Weathers, whose friendship, love, and support were constants in an otherwise largely chaotic life. I hope Sylvia knows how much I value her friendship and how critical her support was to the completion of this book. I also appreciate the understanding of her husband Frank and their children, Nathan and Alexis.

I also want to express my gratitude to David Brent of the University of Chicago Press. His unwavering belief that my manuscript should and could become a book was extremely gratifying. And I am grateful for the excellent copyediting of Wilma Ebbitt.

Finally, I wish to thank my parents—my mother and my late father—and my sisters and brothers as well as my numerous nieces and nephews, aunts, uncles, and cousins on both sides of my parentage. I thank my father for sharing the stories of how individual members from different generations of our family resisted enslavement. I thank my mother for modeling Black womanhood and the life she knew awaited me. I thank my big sisters for teaching me to read before I went to school and forever encouraging me to Go, little sister, go! I thank my niece and her daughter for being the Fordham family heirlooms. I thank my entire family of orientation because over the years they have repeatedly forgiven me for not being present at certain critical family gatherings and ceremonies. In addition, I seek their forgiveness because often when I was at these gatherings I was really absent, engrossed in thinking about the book. It is to my family of orientation that I owe the biggest debt of gratitude, for it was in their bosom that I learned the centrality of respect in African-American womanhood.

PROLOGUE

This book is about the dreaded R-word and its impact on the academic performance of African-American adolescents. No, the word is not race or racism; it is representation. Representation is the word because it compels us to see those who differ from us as Other, as very different in some important ways. Even more significant, this representation—this imaging—is based primarily on written or visual portraits, on watching as a kind of violence imposed on the watched. I am, therefore, selfconsciously using the word watch rather than observe in talking about ethnographic observations, because watch is a stronger verb, suggesting scrutiny or surveillance rather than merely noticing.

Undoubtedly, how and by whom people are watched are major issues in contemporary anthropological analyses. Watching is so central to anthropology that the discipline requires anthropologists-in-training to engage in participant watching as the major prerequisite to full professional status. One might argue then that participant observation, or participant watching, is really about rape, rage, and rapaciousness, the issues often underlying and fueling ethnographers’ representations or misrepresentations of those they watch. Unfortunately, real anthropologists frequently misrepresent by both focusing on and indulging in rape, rage, and rapaciousness. As I use it here, rape obviously carries a much broader meaning than the physical violation of a woman’s body, although that is certainly a central component of it. Rape might also be seen, however, as an important element in the way anthropologists have (mis)represented the Other, as the act of (re)presenting people in such a way that their humanness is both violated and brought into question. For example, Malinowski’s watching or observing of the Trobrianders in the book The Sexual Life of Savages: An Ethnographic Account of Courtship, Marriage, and Family Life among the Natives of the Trobriand Islands (1929) compels us to see them as not quite equal to the people who share the knowledge, culture, and sexual behavior of the ethnographer. Indeed, in this approach the ethnographer’s civilized status is confirmed by his or her ability to situate the population being studied as his or her opposite. One of the cardinal factors fueling Malinowski’s (re)presentation of the Trobrianders is their difference, their Otherness.

Similarly, in conveying inter- or intragroup rage, ethnographers have often neglected to juxtapose this human sentiment—rage—with the other emotions visible among the populations they study. This omission breaches the humanness of the people being studied. For example, ethnographies about headhunting among the Ilongot of the northern Philippines highlight expiatory rituals and the attendant grief and rage. Ethnographers’ depictions of the centrality of rage among these people in the wake of the death of a member of the community are so compelling that a western reader will likely see the Ilongot solely as headhunters. Clearly, the Ilongot are more than the rage fueling their response to grief. Indeed, I would speculate that they—like most human groups—experience a full range of human emotions—love, anger, hate, depression, anxiety, and so forth.¹ Nevertheless, the way they are (re)presented textually and ethnographically precludes the possibility of their having other emotions and sentiments.

Rapaciousness is a third element underlying real anthropologists’ application of the R-word. Both in the subjects and issues ethnographers choose to write about and in the constructions and representations of the groups they study, rapaciousness is a concern. While the world globalization process has had and continues to have a profound effect on anthropology as a discipline, the primary way anthropologists have historically represented their subjects remains virtually unchanged: watching as a kind of violence imposed on the watched. The subjects become objects.

Like most other academic disciplines, anthropology does not exist without writing. Written texts and anthropology are inseparable. Erase writing as a form of representation, and anthropology is immediately extinct, erased. Historically, anthropologists’ heavy reliance upon detailed, written cultural descriptions based on the ethnographer’s observation of primarily nonliterate peoples in Africa, Asia, and other non-Western contexts, positioned the discipline in such a privileged manner that anthropologists were, in many instances, the sole authorities on certain nonliterate peoples. Thus, anthropologists were free to represent the Other as they chose.² The partial truths of such analyses were never seriously debated, primarily because the anthropologists’ claims were based on long-term watching, and the consumers of this knowledge were totally dependent upon the ethnographer’s interpretations and subsequent representations.

The anthropological pen, as well as the anthropological gaze, has been influential in transforming the world in many socially important ways. It has maintained and transformed our images of the world’s populations and the existing world order. It has made us aware of existing global poverty, including the huge chasm between the haves and the have-nots. It has made us sensitive to the concept of culture and its powerful impact in shaping the lives we live. More specifically, it has made us extremely conscious of divergent worldviews. Nevertheless, as Torgovnick notes in her book Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (1990), contemporary ethnographers have managed to maintain the notion of the primitive and primitivism in their analyses. Thus, among ethnographers the globalization process has come to mean substituting one form of colonialism for another. Although writing up one’s observations of nonliterate, formerly nonliterate, and/or non-Western peoples is no longer the province of a single anthropologist, the written word remains the civilized weapon that maintains the status quo in a postmodern form of colonialism.

Not surprisingly, then, writing ethnography is suddenly³ and irrefutably a source of heated debate within the discipline, with an entire legion of practitioners joining the debate. Some anthropologists have fueled and exaggerated this debate by asserting that ethnographic representations are invariably partial truths. Thus, how anthropologists construct and/or make texts is a much discussed issue, with symbolic violence one of the major subtexts of the debate. Still further, the stickiness of the concept of culture as well as the growing literariness of ethnography generates a real need for understanding how ethnographies are created. This is necessary, in part at least, because, as one scholar argues so convincingly, "An ethnography is written representation of a culture (or selected aspects of a culture) . . . [that] carries quite serious intellectual and moral responsibilities, for the images of others inscribed in writing are most assuredly not neutral" (Van Maanan 1988:1).

I take this claim seriously. How I write about the people I studied in the Capital community is a form of representation, and the resulting images are not impartial. In this ethnography, I focus on both selected aspects of a culture and the multilayered problems attendant on those aspects, when constructed by halfies—anthropologists who are blocked [in their] ability to comfortably assume the self of anthropology (Abu-Lughod 1991). The self of anthropology is rigidly scripted, and a member of the profession who does not fit neatly into this constructed identity—that is, is neither a pristine self nor an Other—is inevitably suspect, questioned, or questionable. The resulting split selfhood marks one as perpetually marginalized.

I am an anthropologist. I am also racially identified as African-American. I am involuntarily diasporic—a wanderer. Therefore, I embody and reflect this halfie status, both in terms of the anthropological self and the Black Self. In constructing this ethnography, I became keenly aware of the duality of my split selfhood, of the imperative to use data based on watching, and of the violence attendant on trying to make a way out of no way in my chosen profession.

The scholarly literature, including anthropology, has not been kind in its representations of African-Americans—an involuntarily diasporic people. Some of the most violent representations of them are riddled with images of lack: difference, intellectual inadequacy, hostility, aggressiveness, and so on. Frequently, these images have been scientifically documented; that is, scientists and the principles of the scientific method are highlighted in these representations, compelling us to silence, to remain uncritical of the authors’ claims. The cumulative effects of this kind of negative imaging are displayed in the academic performance and responses of African-American adolescents, as is plainly evident in the narratives recorded in this book.

While this ethnography grows out of a widespread concern regarding the images of others inscribed in writing, it is also evoked by a growing preoccupation with the nature of ethnographic texts and with how what is written censures Blackness. Thus, a central feature of this ethnography is African-Americans’ multiple responses to the primary ways they are represented in anthropological (and other) texts. I document my concern by focusing on the current resistance of African-American adolescents to much of what is taught in school.

As a people⁴ whose culture and background are repeatedly represented in ways that validate the claim that images are not neutral, African-American adolescents’ self-consciously contrived response, to school is a prime example of how memories shape the present, how the students seek to both retain and reclaim a Black Self while concurrently embracing a world ordered by (an)Other. Indeed, as many African-Americans envision it, the pen is a double-edged sword. Their school performance is impaled on this sword in at least two significant ways: first, because the students align themselves with a social group whose history and representation were conceived and constructed by an Other; and second, because they seek to take control of the imaging of Black people by creating from this fraudulent representation an acceptable Black Self. They seem to know that these factors are likely to sandbag them at any given moment. I am struck, for example, by how often African-American adolescents cite the claims of such notorious researchers as Herrnstein and Murray, Shockley, Jencks, and Jensen as typical of the way African-Americans are constructed as Other in texts. I am equally surprised at how often the personal fears of these students are unconscious, unacknowledged, unarticulated, or—even when conscious—denied. Thus, the historical practice of using written words based on watching to both construct and dehumanize (an)Other enhances the power of certain segments of a multiethnic, multiracial society. Academicians and other researchers are able to engage continuously in this symbolic warfare because of their access to the pen. This compels other segments of the society—African-American adolescents, for example—to avoid constructing themselves in a similar manner. The following account, drawn from my classroom experience, illustrates how the academic effort of one group of African-American students—and by extension my role and performance as a professor—was negatively affected by their perceptions and fear of anthropological representations.

In an interdisciplinary undergraduate class comprising third- and fourth-year African-American students, I assigned a fifteen-page ethnographic paper as the major course requirement. I provided copious guidelines and additional text sources (including examples of both professional and student-generated ethnographic work) because I was asking each student to engage in a kind of research—based on watching—with which he or she might not have been familiar. I also wanted to give students no excuse for objecting to the assignment. But resistance surfaced immediately, even before I was able to complete the instructions. Ironically, the more written assistance I gave the students and the more I urged them to visit my office, the more anxious they appeared to become.

Our struggles centered around the legitimacy of the writing assignment. Was it appropriate to ask them to reproduce their lives and experiences by watching and then writing about the Black Self as it is represented in major academic texts? The students’ reactions could be characterized in the following ways: (1) they did not know what I wanted them to watch (this they asserted even though I gave them oral and written directions); (2) they had never before heard of, or at least completed, such a task (suggesting that if an experience was not a part of their existing repertoire, it was not legitimate); (3) they had very little to no experience in writing academic papers—especially ethnographic ones; (4) they did not want to become anthropologists; and, most important, (5) they thought I was being grossly unfair in asking them to (re)present themselves in text form.

As the instructor of the class, I tried unsuccessfully to convince them that they were capable of completing the assignment. When, at the beginning of one class session, I asked, in utter frustration, How many of you came to class today without a weapon? silence ensued. Finally, one female student reluctantly admitted that she was uncertain about the meaning of the term weapon. She asked, What do you mean by weapon? Again, a pregnant silence. Eventually, a male student took a knife from his pocket and, with the appropriate amount of bravado, assured us that he always had a weapon.

This response was what I had anticipated: students thought of weapons as embracing only the cultural category identified with guns, knives, machetes, and so forth. I pointed out that there is such a thing as psychic, or symbolic, violence, a kind of violence in which this category of weapons—guns, knives, machetes—is not applicable. I went on to point out that in the academy the weapon of choice is the pen. Further, I insisted, the pen has both negative and positive capabilities. On the one hand, it will inevitably freeze the images of their subjects, including even images that distort or misrepresent; on the other hand, it is capable of compelling the reader to edit and revise his or her prior knowledge and belief system in such a way as to realign existing social relations and worldviews. I implored them to think of the pen as this potentially transformative or liberating weapon. I then asked if there was anyone in the class who did not have on his or her person such a weapon—a pen. There was no one who did not possess a pen. Nevertheless, the students’ responses to the required written assignment suggested a kind of uneasiness, a discomfort with this weapon, and, beyond that, fear of the consequences of watching and talking back (perhaps even a learned inability to talk back); their responses suggested, too, a latent fear that their academic writing was likely to misrepresent their subjects, reinscribing them as Other, thereby denying the existence of a humanness outside the western gaze.

The day I outlined the details of this writing assignment, I was impaled on the fulcrum of my students’ anxieties and hostilities. My relationship with them was permanently altered, frozen in a struggle for the right to determine the course agenda as well as the trajectory of their evolving collegiate, academic identities. More to the point, when I would not renegotiate my expectations vis-à-vis that assignment, several students dropped the course. Those who remained continued to challenge the legitimacy of my requiring a fifteen-page ethnographic study for the final assignment. They continued to suggest, by their questions and responses, that writing such a research paper was potentially implosive, likely to misrepresent their subjects, reinscribing themselves and the people they represented as Other. The students argued incessantly that I was biased in a basal sense, in that I was insisting upon a written text based on the violence of watching. Curiously, their initial, pre-class rage and indignation, which was directed at the residual colonial structures in America, was redirected, now aimed at my public persona rather than at a critique of the assigned readings.

I tried not to take their attacks personally. Nevertheless, in accusing me of being prejudiced and unfair, they used code words that I (and they) fully understood. To be both racially identifiable as a person of African ancestry and accused of imposing on others the kind of psychic violence that has consistently dogged Black existence in this country ripped the core of my being.

The students understood the power of the words they chose—how they both represented and misrepresented me. They also knew they were accusing me of a kind of rape (violence) in that (as they perceived it) I was bringing into question their humanness as well as the humanness of their potential subjects. The words the students chose—prejudiced, unfair—were carefully selected for their likely emotional effect. They also knew (and so did I) that they were accusing me of having become an Other—a transformation which their college attendance suggested they aspired to but which they also feared. Indeed, their accusations were so painful that I felt as if my soul were murdered, bludgeoned by the demonizing effects of their words. Fortunately, my dark skin camouflaged most of my embarrassment and semester-long humiliation. The blood continually draining from my face went unnoticed.

The language the students used indicated their rage: they felt betrayed, dissed by a woman who they assumed—based on phenotypic features—shared their racialized identity. For this group of Black undergraduates, the quintessential issue appeared to be embodied in the notion that, like a real (as opposed to a symbolic) dominant Other, I was compelling them to assume the gaze of an Other, to appropriate (an)Other identity, in order to succeed. Thus, as the students constructed and would subsequently represent me, my refusal to alter the written course requirement symbolically transformed my gaze from victimized to perpetrator of violence, from Us to Them, from Black to book-black Black.⁵ Hence, as the professor, I became (an)Other.

I write about this painful experience because, as the narratives presented in this book demonstrate, similar issues resonated in the student-teacher relationships I had discovered years earlier among the students and teachers at Capital High. Also, as these narratives reveal, one of the biggest issues confronting the student-teacher relationship is student resistance to what is perceived as the violence attendant on identity appropriation and the other representations so central to Black adolescents’ academic success.

Indeed, cultural representations of the Other verify the dramatic ways in which writing—based on watching—is used to construct and appropriate normal and abnormal models for imaging social reality. Writing thus becomes the central instrument through which America’s social order and its gaze can be apprehended. The resulting representations are potentially more powerful and destructive than the egregious violence associated with the gun and other culturally sanctioned weapons. As a civilized weapon, the pen’s benign designation also means that it can engage in horrific social warfare under a cloak of innocence. African-American students’ sense of appropriation and/or (mis)representation of the Black Self in the academy has its origin in a deep distrust of what appears in print, of what is written as well as of those who write. Still further, there is some evidence that contemporary Black students’ distrust of the written word was initially evoked by the larger society’s practice of making laws and even constitutional protections (all written documents) inapplicable to African-Americans. Indeed, the mere act of assuming that African-Americans were entitled to such protections led to the fully documented lynching and raping of the Black Self, males and females. The legacy of such gross injustice is evident in what has been labeled the rage of the privileged class. It produced the desired distrust about which I speak. Further, I argue that these societal rapes generated the rage and the subsequent documented loss of desire to learn from what was printed and deemed official and true.

While what is written is almost always used as a weapon against the Black Other, it is not regarded as abhorrent or repulsive. For centuries, writing has been central to the commodification of the Black Self; it was—and still is—the fuel that drove social science research. What is written thus penetrates and impregnates the ideology of the larger society. Indeed, it is on negative images of Black people that representations of societal power are commonly focused. Time magazine, 6 April 1970, acknowledges this reality: Whites often assume that civil rights acts and court decisions made law the black man’s redeemer. In practice, many blacks see the law [that is, what is written] as something different: a white weapon that white policemen, white judges and white juries use against black people.

African-American students beyond the elementary level appear to understand the power of writing in the larger society. They seem to know—despite the draconian efforts of school officials to keep this knowledge from them—that African-Americans have been repeatedly misrepresented in the nation’s major public transcripts, their identities bludgeoned and blurred in ways that rape them of their humanity and fuel their rage as well as the rapaciousness of those who (mis)represent them in written documents. They also appear to know how these documents have been repeatedly used in connection with the practice of symbolic violence, at the center of which are allegations of genetic inequality. Hence, central to these students’ construction of a Black identity is the practice of distancing the Black Self as a sacred cultural space, that is, a place where one’s sense of identity is unassailable. The students’ response to the writing assignment in my college class as well as the documentation of a similar response pattern among the students at Capital High suggests that this space is a cultural imperative. These responses also indicate the existence of an unconscious or, at most, a partially conscious fear of becoming (an)Other, capable of committing atrocities on the Black Self similar to those that are taken for granted in the dominant community.

In many ways, then, writing in the school context compels African-American adolescents to confront the notion of being identified as contemporary griots, actively engaging the pen’s double-edged perception.⁶ Thus, the pen’s constructions and representations of the Black Self as Other are powerful deterrents to the academic success of African-American students.

The narratives presented in this ethnography are uncensored evidence of this dilemma. Engendered by my experience as an anthropologist, a halfie, a teacher, and someone who is represented in two contested ways—a body that is racialized and (mis)represented as Other juxtaposed with that of the dispassionate, carefully trained anthropologist—these narratives scrape against my skin, bleeding the anxieties, the pain, and the suffering attendant on my own experience. More important, they celebrate and make permanent the varied identities and emotions of the school and the entire community. This is significant because, as I indicated above, images inscribed in ethnographic texts are not neutral. Rather, ethnographic texts are stained with the violence, the biases, and the partialities that are inevitably (although perhaps unconsciously) frozen in the vision of the writer.

For years I have struggled with this dilemma. I sought to develop a discourse that would not only capture and illuminate my findings at Capital High, but would also minimize the violence connected with the watching and writing process. Documenting how the students’ efforts to represent and reflect the sacredness of the Black Self are repeatedly suffocated in the context of school learning, I wanted to show how their efforts to alter existing representations of the Black Self unwittingly impale them on existing images. Further, I sought—some will conclude unsuccessfully—to find a way to write about how the members of the Capital community contested my (re)presentations of them. As I see it, then, the following ethnographic narratives are embedded in the improvisational nature of the life I and the non-elite people I studied are compelled to live. They are also evidence of the omnipresent issue of watching as violence, with the constant threat of the students’ identities imploding.

As a marginalized member of the academy, I am aware of my complicity in the development of a discourse of anthropology that emphasizes the instability and heterogeneity of racialized categories and meanings. I am also at least partially aware of how what I write is policed and challenged, especially out there in the real world. Understandably, I grapple endlessly with the development of a discourse that accurately captures the ways in which the students I studied and those I teach police their own racialized identities while concurrently seeking the prestige traditionally defined as the rightful prerogative of persons whose geographical place is regarded as European in origin. Consequently, this ethnography presents a discourse that captures the impact of the students’ self-(re)presentations scraping up against an image that constructs them as intruders; it also documents how their academic effort is affected by the constant surveillance of their peers and cohorts for signs of misrepresentation and appropriation of images of the Other. More important, it chronicles how the Capital community residents—students, parents, teachers, and everybody else—are compelled to make a way out of no way by forging a way of life in the school context that is both contrived and tentative, changing yet remaining unchanged. Among the students I have taught and observed, resistance as both conformity and avoidance is evident.

If the Capital High research findings and my personal experience as a teacher are typical, African-American students perceive the pen as the quintessential instrument of representation, appropriation, and oppression—the stealth bomber implicated in the construction of Black people as Other. This perception leads inevitably to a fear of imminent immolation or rape of Self. What provokes and sustains this widespread student perception and response, as well as how and why it persists, is still not widely understood. This ethnography is a first tentative step in the unraveling of that enigma.

In the ethnography, I document—in the words of parents, students, teachers, other school officials, and other adults not connected with the school—the effects, both intended and unintended, of attitude adjustment, that is, acquiescence to privileged-class social norms and a growing dependence on oral rather than written interpretations of what was in print about the academic performance of contemporary African-American adolescents. I reveal how African-American adolescents’ partial or unconscious understanding of how what is written and declared legally binding on all American citizens is, and was historically, repeatedly abrogated in the case of African-Americans, propelling them to a distrust of what is written as an accurate representation of what they can expect as citizens of this country.

These narratives show how the formal school curriculum and its omissions and deletions are implicated in the development of appropriate(d) identities and how the students resist this fraudulent construction. Admittedly, this genre of narratives—rape, rage, and rapaciousness—is never included in the formal curriculum, though surely embedded in the informal one. I disclose how African-American students read American history in hapless consternation as their ancestors, parents, and other Black adults fight for what is known as civil rights—rights that some Americans take for granted. In addition, I describe the childrearing practices of the parents, highlighting how they connect with and abrogate the dominant imaging and imagining of African-Americans. I argue that Black people’s linguistic practices are central instruments in this process. I also unravel the students’ gender-differentiated response patterns and perceptions.

The analysis presented in this book foregrounds narratives of how African-Americans at Capital High and in the Capital High community conceptualize and internalize the school experience. This analysis also shows how the students’ understandings of the ways they are represented and tortured by these so-called scientific analyses of the racialized Other affect their academic performance. Further, I reveal why it is appropriate to view the responses and reactions of the adults and students at Capital High and within the Capital community as in many ways deliberately and self-consciously contrived in order to protect and accurately represent the Black Self. Compromises and negotiations are endlessly evident. Masking is rampant, and individuals tend to know when it is expected, expedient, and necessary. They also seem to have a kind of intuitive sense of when it is not acceptable to breach conventions of school and society. Language usage and voice are, for example, hotly contested, with school officials and employment agencies uncompromising in their insistence on employing only those members of non-elite populations who are able and willing to speak the standard English dialect. This policy scrapes up against what many Black people think of as the sacred Black Self.

Understanding the narratives in this ethnography against a backdrop of corrective representation will go a long way toward disabusing the reader of two free-floating yet unfounded notions: (1) African-Americans, especially African-American adolescents who seek to maintain the Black Self as a safe cultural space, are weird, radical, and do not want to do well in school or achieve the good American life; and (2) success is an unproblematic social process fueled only by desire and ability. The Capital High data suggest that success is a more complicated process for African-Americans. Indeed, the data document that success—as defined by the larger society—is so complicated that it might be useful to read the following narratives as having at their core the mandate that the individuals involved accept the abnormal as normal, the unreal as real, and the strange as familiar. My desire to assist readers in understanding the representations included in this ethnography compels me to forewarn them that the psychological costs of academic suecess for African-American adolescents constitute the jugular vein of my entire analysis.

But let me postpone further discussion of the response of African-American adolescents to the R-word and its effect on their academic performance until I have discussed the following: my ambivalent role as an ethnographer; the city of Washington as a research site; African-American parents’ gender-differentiated childrearing practices, including their most dominant linguistic codes; and the problems of Black teachers as people who are compelled to pass while remaining connected to divergent communities—Capital High, the larger Black community, and American society writ large. It is my hope that the multiple representations presented here mute the violence attendant on watching and writing. I also hope they accurately reflect the community I studied, the many voices—some positive and some negative—existing in the community, and the many valuable lessons I learned from a population that had so very much to teach me. I hope also that some of what I learned is accurately conveyed in this text and made accessible to the reader.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

In developing the Prologue, I have been influenced by the ideas and publications of the following ethnographers and other researchers (for details, see the Bibliography, pp. 373–96): Lila Abu-Lughod (1991); Michael H. Agar (1980); Arjun Appadurai (1990, 1991); Mary F. Berry and John N. Blassingame (1992); Pierre Bourdieu and J. C. Passeron (1977); Caroline B. Bretell (1993); Louis A. Castenell and William F. Pinar (1993); Napoleon A. Chagnon (1968); Chinweizu (1987); Rey Chow (1993); James Clifford (1983, 1988, 1994); James Clifford and George E. Marcus (1986); Celeste Condit (1993); Ellis Cose (1993); Michel de Certeau (1980); Russell Ferguson and others (1990); Richard G. Fox (1991); Morris Freilich (1978); Clifford Geertz (1973, 1988); Hildred Geertz (1959); Paul Gilroy (1991); Donna J. Haraway (1989); Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994); bell hooks (1989, 1994); Charlayne Hunter-Gault (1992); Fredric Jameson (1990); Christopher Jencks (1972); Arthur R. Jensen (1969); William L. Leap (1993); Catherine Lutz (1988); Catherine Lutz and Geoffrey A. White (1986); Bronislaw Malinowski (1987); George E. Marcus (1984); Margaret Mead (1961); Patricia Morton (1991); Sherry B. Ortner (1991); Nell Irvin Painter (1995); Paul Rabinow (1991); Michelle Rosaldo (1980); Renato Rosaldo (1980); Edward W. Said (1978, 1989); James C. Scott (1990); William Shockley (1970); Audrey M. Shuey (1966); Edward H. Spicer (1980); Paul Stoller (1994); Gregg Tate (1992); Michael Taussig (1987); Marianna Torgovnick (1990); Haunani-Kay Trask (1991); Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991); John Van Maanen (1988); Joan Vincent (1991); Cornel West (1990, 1993); and Brett Williams (1988).

INTRODUCTION

Stalking Culture and Meaning and Looking in a Refracted Mirror

William, my then 4-year-old son, announced while riding a department store escalator: I want to be white. Whites are good. If my family is white, then I would be white.

Being black . . . being an African-American isn’t good. That’s the reason why, he said as I explored what prompted this revelation.

In response to a question about what is wrong with being a black person, he pointed his finger and pretended to shoot.

Somewhere along the line, my son had received messages that being a black person in America was not something to be proud of, that his cultural heritage was not something to cherish, that his smooth caramel-colored skin made him one of the undesirables. Somewhere in his 4-year-old psyche he had come to the conclusion that to be happy, to achieve success, to reap life’s bounty he needed to be white.

My conscious efforts to imbue my son with a positive sense of himself and his race had failed. The books, the plays, the paintings, the historic sites that bespeak a proud past and a promising future seemed to have made no impact.—Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb, Washington Post, 9 September 1991.

EYEWITNESSING: BRAIDING PAST AND PRESENT

The small southern community in which I was reared and the large urban community where I did my anthropological fieldwork are hundreds of miles apart, both geographically and temporally. Culturally, however, they are virtually indistinguishable: externally constructed as lacking, they evoke appropriate(d) identities forged in the crucible of a race-specific humanity. In both communities, individuals are compelled to slip in and out of a culturally specific perception of Blackness. This continuous, forced identity migration, especially in institutions like my high school, is equated with survival, not only for the individual but for the larger imagined [Black] community as well (B. Anderson 1991:6). Consequently, when I walked into Capital High School¹ that first day, there was something both culturally familiar and strange about this unfamiliar place, something which indicated that much of what I saw and heard was self-consciously constructed and policed.

My familiarity with this pattern and its implication propelled me to a familiar cultural space. I was suddenly transfixed in time, awash in a sea of ambivalent cultural memories, convinced that I had been granted a second life as an adult to relive my childhood and schooling experiences. I felt as if I had been reincarnated but allowed to maintain my previous karma. It was as if I had been traveling for many years to get to this place, to bring an ethnographer’s eye—braided to my adult status—to what I had not been able to understand as a young Black girl.

These divergent feelings flooded my psyche as I drove my old car slowly down the street that would become as familiar to me as the darkness of my skin. Hunter Avenue, the street nearest the school, was crowded with adolescents even though they were not officially scheduled for school on this day. As I watched the students from my car window and listened to the sounds of their laughing voices, powerful memories of my own schooling experiences came alive in my mind. Remembering how constrained my early school days had been, suddenly I was a little girl again, giving the correct responses in classes; obeying every rule in elementary school; honoring my parents’ demand that regardless of what the other students did, it was imperative that my sister and I remain silent while in school;² enduring beatings by my classmates on the way home from school virtually every day of the week for answering my teachers’ school-related questions; most important, not learning soon enough that my willingness to obey school norms was seen by my classmates as representing the Other.³ I remembered how every activity was carefully choreographed to avoid angering the White community or endangering someone in the Black community. My parents’ First Commandment, Do not try to act like those White girls, evoked memories of emotional pain. I remembered the pervasive, rarely verbalized message of difference and exclusion—the erasure of my cultural, racial, and gendered Self from what I read, studied, and subsequently