Reading “A Talk to Teachers”

I have been thinking about Donald Trump’s executive order targeting the Smithsonian and, particularly, the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It is part of a broader assault on how Americans might understand the past and how we might frame our current troubles. My thoughts joined with the outrage I felt with the kidnapping of Rumeysa Ozturk, the PhD student at Tufts University. She was arrested by ICE agents in street clothes, ostensibly, for writing an op-ed for the student newspaper at the University. There she invoked the words of James Baldwin in his essay, “A Talk to Teachers,” as she urged Tufts to take seriously resolutions about the horrors in Gaza.

The great author and civil rights champion James Baldwin once wrote: “The paradox of education is precisely this: that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which [they are] being educated.” As an educator, President Kumar should embrace efforts by students to evaluate “diverse and sometimes contradictory ideas and opinions.”

These are the words, according to Marco Rubio, of someone who poses a threat to U.S. foreign policy and who apparently embraces the ideals of Hamas. Utter nonsense. But Ozturk’s invocation of Baldwin (alongside my rage about the executive order) got me thinking and sent me back to the essay, “A Talk to Teachers.”

In October of 1963, James Baldwin published in The Saturday Review, “The Negro Child—His Self-Image.” The essay would be retitled “A Talk to Teachers” in the edited volume of Baldwin’s nonfiction writings, The Price of the Ticket. Baldwin engaged in a kind of preliminary exploration of the tension between the aim of education to socialize our children in the ways of our society and the need to equip them with the tools to critically assess it. Baldwin writes:

The purpose of education is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then to learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it—at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.

Our children, Baldwin suggests, experience a certain kind of dissonance in this regard. They grow up in a society that denies them dignity and standing – where a generalized disregard characterizes the society’s view of them. To develop a critical stance towards this society and its views of Black and Brown people is to risk death.

What is asked, demanded really, is consent to a host of assumptions about who you are and to the structures that give those assumptions life. As Baldwin put it,

[I]t becomes thoroughly clear, at least to me, that any Negro who is born in this country and undergoes the American educational system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. On the one hand, he is born in the shadow of the stars and stripes, and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war…. He is part of a country in which anyone can become president, and so forth. But on the other hand, he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization—that his past is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured.

It is against this reality, in the full light of forces aimed at reproducing hierarchies for exploitation, that the Black and Brown child must forge a self.

---

---

She must find the means to say no to a society that, at every turn, seeks to condemn her to a certain station in life. And for Baldwin, through his own autobiographical example, to refuse this sentence amounts to an extraordinary act of the will. One decides, and he doesn’t give us much by way of how this happens, to say “no” to it all. To refuse the categorization. And, it is at that point of refusal that one enters into battle against one’s society. As he wrote, “So where we are now is that a whole country of people believe I’m a nigger, and I don’t, and the battle’s on!”

One of the paradoxes of American education, as Ozturk notes, is that precisely at the point “when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society.” Baldwin goes on to say that “it is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis of the evidence – moral and political evidence – one is compelled to say this is a backward society.”

With this insight, Baldwin commends a form of education aimed at undermining the legends that secure this country’s innocence.

I would teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are worth a man’s respect. That it is up to him to begin to change these standards for the sake of the life and health of the country I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger—and that it belongs to him.

Baldwin goes on to say, “I would teach him that he doesn’t have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything.” This applies not only to the students in the classroom, but to all of us. Conformity stifles the soul. We too must break loose from the assumptions and histories that reconcile us to the world as it is. In the end, we must have an idea of education for all children that will rid us of this paradox.

In his essay, “The Uses of the Blues,” Baldwin clearly states what he takes to be the “Negro Problem.”

I’m talking about what happens to you if, having barely escaped suicide, or death, or madness, or yourself, you watch your children growing up and no matter what you do, not matter what you do, you are powerless, you are really powerless, against the force of the world that is out to tell your child that he has no right to be alive. And no amount of liberal jargon, and no amount of talk about how well and how far we have progressed, does anything to soften or to point out any solution to this dilemma. In every generation, ever since Negroes have been here, every Negro mother and father has had to face that child and try to create in that child some way of surviving this particular world, some way to make the child who will be despised not despise himself. I don’t know what ‘the Negro Problem’ means to white people, but this is what it means to Negroes.

Here Baldwin foregrounds the fact of growing up, of coming of age, in a place that denies you standing, that distorts your sense of self and arrests your capacities. And it is with great effort and risk that one takes up the task of self-creation in such a world.

The daunting challenge of seeking a higher self in a world that denies one standing gives new meaning to W.E.B. Du Bois’s cry of “two unreconciled strivings.” For African Americans, as Langston Hughes said, life ain’t been no crystal stair. To reach for this higher self across the proverbial tracks, to do so amid the clamoring calls to cast away America’s history and while dark forces literally snatch people from our sight, requires something more fundamental; it requires a confrontation with the reality of this place.

In these dark and trying times we must muster the democratic hope and courage to challenge this nation and insist that we educate our children, ourselves really, into the habits of democracy so that we all can be born again. If this is to happen, as Ozturk urged us to do, we must remember Baldwin’s words in his talk to teachers: that “America is not the world and if America is going to become a nation, she must find a way—and this child must help her to find a way to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy.”