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"From a Basketball Player to a Grand Educator"
Ambreena Aziz & Mashhood Rizvi

Personal Essay from Fugitive Cultures
"The Kids Aren't Alright "

Personal Essay from Channel Surfing
"Racialized Memories and Class Identities"

Personal Essay from Fugitive Cultures:
         

"THE KIDS AREN'T ALRIGHT: YOUTH, PEDAGOGY, AND CULTURAL STUDIES"


            As a concept, youth represents an inescapable intersection of the personal, social, political, and pedagogical. Beneath the abstract codifying of youth around the discourses of law, medicine, psychology, employment, education, and marketing statistics, there is the lived experience of being young. For me, youth invokes a repository of memories fueled by my own journey through an adult world that was in the way, a world held together by a web of regulations and restrictions that were more oppressive than liberating. Lacking the security of a middle-class childhood, my friends and I seemed suspended in a working-class culture that neither accorded us a voice nor guaranteed economic independence. Identity didn’t come easy in my neighborhood. It was painfully clear to all of us that our identities were constructed out of daily battles waged around masculinity, the ability to mediate a terrain fraught with violence, and the need to find an anchor through which to negotiate a culture in which life was fast and short-lived. I grew up amid the motion and force of mostly working-class male bodies–bodies asserting their physical strength as one of the few resources we had control over.
    Dreams for the youth of my Smith Hill neighborhood were contained within a limited number of sites, all of which occupied an outlaw status in the adult world: the inner-city basketball court, located in a housing project, which promised danger and fierce competition; the streets on which adults and youth collided as the police and parole officers harassed us endlessly; the New York System hole-in-the-wall restaurant operated by a guy who always had ten “hot dogs” and buns in various stages of preparation on his arm on a Saturday night, waiting for us to do business after a night of hanging out, drinking, and dancing.
    For many of the working-class youth in my neighborhood, the basketball court was one of the few public spheres in which the cultural capital we took seriously could be exchanged for respect and admiration. If you weren’t good enough you didn’t play, and if you were good you performed with a kind of humility arbitrated by a code that suggested you didn’t loose easily. Nobody was born with innate talent. Nor was anybody given instant recognition. The basketball court became for me a site of passage and referent for developing a sense of possibility. We played day and night and we played in any space that was available. Even when we got caught breaking into St. Patrick’s Elementary School one Friday night around 1:00 A.M.., the cops who found us knew we were there to play basketball rather than to steal money from the teachers’ rooms or Coke machines. Basketball was taken very seriously because it was a neighborhood sport, a terrain where respect was earned. It offered us a way out that seemed to fly in the face of the need for high status, school credentials, or the security of a boring job.
    With the exception of a talented few, the promise of the basketball court evaporated when high school ended and the young men in the neighborhood moved from school to any one of a number of dead-end jobs. The best opportunities came from taking a civil service test, and if one were lucky one got a job as a policeman or fireman. Job or no job, one forever feels the primacy of the body: the body flying through the rarefied air of the neighborhood gym in a kind of sleek and stylized performance; the body furtive and cool existing on the margins of society filled with the possibility of instant pleasure and relief, or tense and anticipating the danger and risk; the body bent by the weight of grueling labor.
    The body, with its fugitive status within working-class culture, allowed us to cross racial borders and rewrite the endemic racism of our white, working-class neighborhoods. We were white boys, and race and class positioned our bodies in turf wars marked by street codes that were both feared and respected. At the age of eight, I became a shoeshine boy and staked out a route inhabited by black and white nightclubs in Providence, Rhode Island. On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights I started my route about 7:00 P.M. and got home around 12:00 A.M. I loved going into the bars watching adults dance, drink, steal furtive glances from each other. Most of all I loved the music. Billie Holiday played in the background against the sound of glasses clinking, men and women talking and talking as if their only chance to come alive was compressed into the time they spent in the club. Whenever I finished my route, I had to navigate a dangerous set of strees to get back home. I learned how to talk, negotiate, and defend myself along that route. I was too skinny as a kid to be a tough guy; I had to learn a street code that was funny but smart, fast but not insulting. That’s when my body and head started working together.
    I saw too much in that neighborhood and I couldn’t seem to learn enough to make sense of it or escape its pull. Peer groups formed early and kids ruptured all but the most necessary forms of dependence on their parents at a very young age. I saw my parents when I went home to eat or sleep. We all left home too early to notice the loss until later in life when we became adults or parents ourselves.
    Leaving home for me was made all the more complicated because my mother had severe epilepsy and had repeated seizures. My sister and I were not distant observers to my mother’s suffering—we often had to hold her down in bed when the seizures erupted. Shuffled between hospitals and institutions, my mother wasn’t home much. As a result of my mother’s absence, my sister was taken away by the social services and placed in a Catholic residence for girls. Losing my sister to an orphanage, I experienced for the first time what it meant to be homeless in my own home. As with many working-class youth, home was neither a source of comfort nor a respite from the outside world. The neighborhood was home, and my friends provided the sanctuary for talk and security along with a cool indifference to the fact that none of us looked forward to the future. When I was in high school, I remember visiting my mother in state hospitals and being alarmed at the fact that many of the attendants were guys from my neighborhood, guys who seemed dangerous and utterly indifferent to human life, guys that I  both knew and avoided. Everybody was warehoused in that neighborhood irrespective of age.
    I eventually left my neighborhood, but it was nothing less than a historical accident. I never took the requisite tests to apply to a four-year college. When high school graduation came around, I was offered a basketball scholarship to a junior college in Worcester, Massachusetts. It seemed better to me than working in a factory, so I went off to school with few expectations and no plans except to play ball. I was placed in a business program but had not interest in what the program offered. The culture of the college seemed terribly alien to me, and I missed my old neighborhood. After violating too many rules and drinking more than I should have, I saw clearly that my life had reached an impasse. I left school and went back to my old neighborhood hangouts.
    My friends’ lives had already changed. Their youth had left them and they now had families and lousy jobs and spent a lot of time in the neighborhood bar waiting for a quick hit at the racetrack or the promise of a good disability scheme. After working for two years at odd jobs, I managed to play in the widely publicized Fall River basketball tournament and did well enough to attract the attention of a few coaches who tried to recruit me. Following their advice, I took the SATs and scored high enough to qualify for entrance into a small college in Maine that offered me a basketball scholarship. But nothing came easy for me when it came to school. Although I made the starting lineup on the varsity and managed to be the team high-scorer my freshman year, the coach resented me because I was an urban kid—too flashy, too hip, and maybe too dangerous for the rural town of Gorham, Maine. I left the team my sophomore year, took on a couple of jobs to finance my education, and eventually graduated with a degree in secondary education.
    After getting my teaching certificate, I became a community organizer and a high school teacher. Worn thin after six years of teaching high school social studies, I applied for and received another scholarship, this one to attend Carnegie-Mellon University. I finished my course work early and spent a year unemployed while writing my dissertation. I finally got a job at Boston University. Again politics and culture worked their strange magic as I taught, published, and prepared for tenure. My tenure experience changed my perception of liberalism forever. Thinking that is I worked hard at teaching and publishing I would easily get tenure, I did my best to follow the rules. I was dead wrong about the rules and the alleged integrity of the tenure process.
    Having published fifty articles, two books, and given numerous talks, I went through the tenure process unanimously at every level of the university. I was finally denied tenure by John Silber, President of Boston University, who not only ignored the various unanimous tenure committee recommendations but solicited letters supporting denial of my tenure from notable conservatives such as Nathan Glazer and Chester Finn. Glazer’s review was embarrassing in that it began with the comment, “I have read all of the work of Robert Giroux.” The Dean of Education had threatened to resign if I did not receive tenure. Of course, he didn’t. Silber’s actions had a chilling effect on many faculty who had initially rallied to my support. Slowly, realizing that the tenure process was a rigged affair and that anyone who complained about it might compromise their own academic career. One faculty member apologized to me for his refusal to meet with Silber to protest my tenure decision. Arguing that he owned two condos in the city, he explained that he couldn’t afford to act on his conscience since he would be risking his investments. Of course, his conscience took a back seat in his list of assets.
    By the time I met Silber to discuss my case, I was convinced that my fate had already been decided. Silber met me in his office, asked me why I wrote such “shit,” and made me an offer. He suggested that if I studied the philosophy of sience and logic with him as my personal tutor, I could maintain my current salary and would be reconsidered for tenure in two years. The only other catch was that I had to agree not to write or publish anything during that time. I was taken aback, and responded with a joke by asking him if he wanted to turn me into George Will. He missed the humor, and I left. I declined the offer, was denied tenure, and after sending off numerous job applications finally landed a job at Miami University. Working-class intellectuals do not fare well in the culture of higher education, especially when they are on the left. I have been asked many times since this incident whether I would have continued the critical writing that has marked my career if I had known that I was going to be fired because of the ideological orientation of my work.  Needless to say, for me, it is better to live standing up than on one’s knees. Maybe the lesson here is that the success that many working-class kids achieve in this culture may be more accidental than the result of an unswerving commitment to the ethic of hard work and individual responsibility.
    My kids can’t quite understand the stories I tell them about my youth, with its working-class traditions—its sexism, racism, and violence, along with its emotional intensity, sense of community, solidarity, and most of all loyalty. My kids go to public schools inhabited by mostly white, middle-class children and teachers. My history seems strange and alien to them, with its references to fugitive knowledge, cultures, and relationships. All of the institutions they inhabit offer a measure of comfort and affirmation; but for the youth of my neighborhood, schools and other mainstream public spaces both positioned and excluded us. As an outlaw culture, we were labeled as alien, other, and deviant because we were form the wrong culture class. Class marked us as poor, inferior, linguistically inadequate, and dangerous. We were feared and denigrated more than we were affirmed, and the testimony of being part of a fugitive culture penetrated us with a trauma that we could hardly navigate critically or theoretically but felt in every fiber of our being.
    The term, fugitive culture, designates less a rigid cultural formation than it does a conflicting and dynamic set of experiences rooted in a working-class youth culture marked by flows and uncertain interventions into daily life. Such experiences were often both oppressive and resisting, scorned and feared, constrained by the dictates of poverty but unafraid of risk-taking inventiveness. The working-class culture in which I grew up wore its fugitive status like a badge, but all too often it was unaware of the contradictions that gave it meaning. We weren’t smart enough to see the contradiction between the brutal racism, violence, and sexism that marked our lives and our constant attempts to push against the grain by investing in the pleasures of body, the warmth of solidarity, and the appropriation of neighborhood spaces as outlaw publics. As kids, we were border crosses and had to learn to negotiate the power, violence, and cruelty of the dominant culture through our own lived histories, restricted languages, and narrow cultural experiences. Recognizing our fugitive status in all of the dominant institutions in which we found ourselves–including schools, the workplace, and social services–we were suspicious and sometimes vengeful of what we didn’t have or how we were left out of the representations that seemed to name American youth in the 1950s.  We hated Pat Boone, golf, tennis, and prep schools, and lost ourselves in the grittiness of working-class neighborhood gyms, abandoned cars, and street corners that offered a haven for escape but also invited police surveillance and brutality. Being part of a fugitive culture meant that we lived almost exclusively on the margins of a life that was not of our choosing. And as for the present, it was all we had since it made no sense to invest in a future that for many of my friends either ended too early or pointed to the dreaded possibility of becoming an adult, which usually meant working in a boring job by day and hanging out in the local bar by night. We bore witness to the future only to escape into the present, and the present never stopped pulsating. Like all fugitive cultures embraced by youth, we were time-bound. The memory work would have to come later.
    Bearing witness always implicates one in the past and gives rise to conditions that govern how youth act and are acted upon within a myriad of public sites, cultures, and institutions. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub have suggested that the practices of witnessing and testimony lie at the heart of what it means to teach and to learn. Witnessing and testimony, translated here, mean listening to the stories of others as part of a broader responsibility to engage the present as an ethical response to the narratives of the past. I have often wondered how my own formation as a  young person and border crosser, moving often without an “official passport” between cultures, ideologies, jobs, and fugitive knowledge, might be invoked as a form of bearing witness. How might the testimony I give help me to interrogate my own shifting location as a critical educator, but also provide for my children the pedagogical conditions in which they can understand the complexity and significance of the different conditions that have shaped my history, theirs, and those of other youth in this society? Through bits and pieces of exchange with my children, they have slowly heard the testimony of how my youth was constructed in sharp counter-distinction to how theirs is being shaped. The pedagogical challenge that emerges out of this interaction proposes that “if teaching does not hit upon some sort of crisis, if it does not encounter either the vulnerability or the explosiveness of a (explicit or implicit) critical and unpredictable dimension, it has perhaps not truly taught.”1 The crisis in this instance is about youth as a social and political category in an age of increasing symbolic, material, and institutional violence, and the crisis of youth is represented through the imagery and discourse of popular culture. I don’t believe that George Lipsitz overstates the nature and uniqueness of such a crisis in his comment: “Our time is a time of crisis for youth, a time of unprecedented damage and danger to young people. Since 1070s, deindustrialization, economic reconstructing and a resurgence of racism have created fundamentally new realities for young people.”2

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Personal Essay from Channel Surfing

 
"RACIALIZED MEMORIES AND CLASS IDENTITIES"

    As a young kid growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, I was always conscious of what it meant to be a white male. Whiteness was a defining principle shaping how I both named and negotiated the boundaries that my friends and I traveled when we went to school, played basketball in gyms throughout the city, and crossed into alien neighborhoods. Whiteness and maleness were crucial markers of our individual and collective identities; yet we were also working-class, and it was largely the interface of race and class that governed how we experienced and perceived the world around us. Of course, we hadn’t thought deeply about race and class in a critical way; we simply bore the burdens, terrors, and advantages such terms provided as they simultaneously named the world and produced it.
    In my working-class neighborhood, race and class were performative categories defined in terms of the events, actions, and outcomes of our struggles as we engaged with kids whose histories, languages, and racial identities appeared foreign and hostile to us. Race and class were not merely nouns we used to narrate ourselves; they were verbs that governed how we interacted and performed in the midst of  “others,” whether they were white middle-class or black youths. Most of the interactions we had with “others” were violent, fraught with anger and hatred. We viewed kids who were black or privileged from within the spaces and enclaves of a neighborhood ethos that was nourished by a legacy of racism, a dominant culture that condoned class and racial hatred, and a popular culture that rarely allowed blacks and whites to view each other as equals. Everywhere we looked segregation was the order of the day. Community was defined within racial and class differences and functioned largely as spaces of exclusion–spaces that more often than not pitted racial and ethnic groups against one another. Solidarity was mostly based on the principles of exclusion, and race and class identities closed down the promise of difference as central to any notion of democratic community.
    When college students walked through my Smith Hill neighborhood from Providence College to reach the downtown section of the city, we taunted them, mugged them on occasion, and made it clear to them that their presence violated our territorial and class boundaries. We viewed these kids as rich, spoiled, and privileged. We hated their arrogance and despised their music. Generally, we had no contact with middle-class and ruling-class kids until we went to high school. Hope High School (ironically named) in the 1960s was a mix of mostly poor black and white kids, on the one hand, and a small group of wealthy kids on the other. The school did everything to make sure that the only space we shared was the cafeteria during lunch hour. Generally black and working-class white kids were warehoused and segregated in that school. Because we were tracked into dead-end courses, school became a form of dead-time for most of us–a place in which our bodies, thoughts, and emotions were regulated and subjected to either ridicule or swift disciplinary action if we broke any of the rules. We moved within these spaces of hierarchy and segregation deeply resentful of how we were treated, but with little understanding, and no vocabulary to connect our rage to viable forms of political resistance. We were trapped in a legacy of commonsensical understandings that made us complicitous with our own oppression. In the face of injustice, we learned to be aggressive and destructive, but we learned little about what it might mean to unlearn our prejudices and join in alliances with those diverse others who were oppressed.
    Rather, the everyday practices that shaped our lives were often organized around rituals of regulation and humiliation. For instance, the working-class black and white kids from my section of town entered Hope though the back door of the building while the rich white kids entered through the main door in the front of the school. We didn’t miss the point, and we did everything we could to let the teachers know how we felt about it. We were loud and unruly in classes, we shook the rich kids down and took their money after school, we cheated whenever possible, but more than anything, we stayed away from school until we were threatened with being expelled. While race was a more problematic register of difference, class registered its difference through a range of segregated spaces. Along with the black kids in the school, our bodies rather than our minds were taken up as a privileged form of cultural capital. With few exceptions, the teachers and school administrators let us know that we were not bright enough to be in college credit courses, but were talented enough to be star athletes or do well in classes that stressed manual labor. Both working-class whites and blacks resented those students who studied, used elaborate, middle-class language, and appeared to live outside of their physicality. We fought, desired, moved, and pushed our bodies to extremes, especially in those public spheres open to us. For me, as a white guy, that meant the race track, the basketball court, and the baseball diamond.
    As a working-class white kid, I found myself in classes with black kids, played basketball with them, and loved black music. But we rarely socialized outside of school. Whiteness in my neighborhood was a signifier of pride, a marker of racial identity experienced through a dislike of blacks. Unlike the current generation of many working-class kids, we defined ourselves in opposition to blacks, and while we listened to their music, we did not appropriate their styles. Racism ran deep in that neighborhood, and no one was left untouched by it. But identities are always in transit: they mutate, change, and often become more complicated as a result of chance encounters, traumatic events, or unexpected collisions. The foundation of my white racist identity was shaken while I was in the ninth grade in the last year of junior high school.
    I was on the junior high basketball team along with a number of other white and black kids. The coach had received some tickets to a Providence College game. Providence College’s basketball team had begun to receive extensive public attention because it had won a National Invitation Basketball tournament; moreover, the team roster included a number of famous players such as Lenny Wilkens and Johnny Eagen. We loved the way in which these guys played, and we tried to incorporate their every move into our own playing styles. Getting tickets to see them play was like a dream come true for us. Having only two tickets to give away, the coach held a contest after school in the gym to decide who would go to the game. He decided to give the tickets to the two players who made the most consecutive foul shots. The air was tense as we started to compete for the tickets. I ended up with two other players in a three-way tie and we had one chance to break it. As I approached the foul line, Brother Hardy, a large black kid, started taunting me as I began to shoot. We exchanged some insults and suddenly we were on each other, fists flying. Suddenly I was on the floor, blood gushing out of my nose; the fight was over as quickly as it started. The coach made us continue the contest, and ironically, Brother Hardy and I won the tickets, shook hands, and went to the game together. The fight bridged us together in a kind of mutual esteem we didn’t quite understand but respected. Soon afterward, we started hanging out together and became friends. After graduating form junior high school, we parted and I didn’t see him again until the following September when I discovered he also was attending Hope High School.
    I made the varsity team my sophomore year; I never knew why but Brother Hardy never bothered to try out. We talked once in a while in the school halls but the racial boundaries in the school did not allow us to socialize much with each other. But that soon changed. The second month into the school year I noticed that every day during lunch hour a number of black kids would cut in front of white kids in the food line, shake them down, and take their lunch money. I was waiting for it to happen to me, but it never did. In fact, the same black kids who did the shaking down would often greet me with a nod or “Hey, man, how you doin?” as they walked by me in the corridors as well as the cafeteria. I later learned that Brother Hardy was considered the toughest black kid in the school and he had put out the word to his friends to leave me alone.
    During the week, I played basketball at night at the Benefit Street Club, situated in the black section of the city. I was one of the few whites allowed to play in the gym. The games were fast and furious, and you had to be good to continue. I started hanging out with Brother Hardy and on the weekends went to the blues clubs with him and his friends. We drank, played basketball, and rarely talked to each other about race. Soon some of my friends and myself were crossing a racial boundary by attending parties with some of our black teammates. Few people in our old neighborhood knew that we had broken a racial taboo, and we refrained from telling them.
    I couldn’t articulate it in those formative years, but as I moved within and across a number of racially defined spheres it slowly became clear to me that I had to redefine my understanding of my own whiteness. I had no intention of becoming a black wannabe, even if such an option had existed in the neighborhood in which I grew up and, of course, it didn’t. But at the same time, I began to hate the racism that shaped the identities of my white friends. My crossing of the racial divide was met at best with disdain, and at worst with ridicule. Crossing this border was never an option for Brother Hardy and his friends; if they had crossed the racial border to come into my neighborhood they would have been met with racial epithets and violence. Even in the early sixties, it became clear to me that such border crossings were restricted and only took place with a passport stamped with the legacy of racial privilege. My body was relearning the lessons of race and identity because I was beginning to unlearn the racist ideologies that I took for granted for so long. But I had no language to question critically how I felt nor did I understand how to reject the notion that to be a working-class white kid meant one had to be a racist by default.
    The language I inherited as a kid came from my family, friends, school, and the larger popular culture. Rarely did I encounter a vocabulary in any of these spheres that ruptured or challenged the material relations of racism or the stereotypes and prejudices that reinforced race and class divisions. It was only later, as I entered the sixties, that I discovered in the midst of the civil rights and antiwar movement languages of dissent and possibility that helped me to rethink my own memories of youth, racism, and class discrimination.
    In many ways, this book is an attempt to engage in a form of memory-work—exploring how I was positioned and how I located myself within a range of discourse and institutional practice—in which it has become clear that racial and class differences fueled by bigotry, intolerance, and systemic inequality were the disruptive forces in my life. My own sense of what it meant to be a white male emerged performatively through my interactions with peers, the media, and the broader culture. The identifications I developed, the emotional investments I made, and the ideologies I used to negotiate my youth were the outcome of educational practices that appeared to either ignore or denigrate working-class people, women, and minority groups. Popular culture provided the medium through which we learned how to negotiate our everyday lives, especially when it brought together elements of resistance found in Hollywood youth films such as Blackboard Jungle (1955) or the rock n’ roll music of Bill Haley and the Comets, Elvis Presley, and other artists. Moreover working-class street culture provided its own set of unique events and tensions in which our bodies, identities, and desires were both mobilized and constrained. We were the first generation of working-class kids for whom popular media such as television played a central role in legitimating not only our social roles but also the limited range of possibilities through which we could imagine something beyond the world in which we lived. The trauma I associated with negotiating between the solidarity I felt with Brother Hardy and my white working-class friends suggested that education works best when those experiences that shape and penetrate one’s lived reality are jolted, unsettled, and made the object of critical analysis. In looking back on my experience of moving through the contested terrains of race, gender, and class, it is clear to me that power is never exerted only through economic control, but also through what might be called a form of cultural pedagogy. Racism and class hatred are learned activities, and as a kid I found myself in a society that was all too ready to teach them.

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