In case you didn't know, Oprah recently opened a $40 million girls school forty miles outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. It is supposedly set on 22 "lush" acres and includes over 28 buildings. "The complex features oversize rooms done in tasteful beiges and browns with splashes of color, 200-thread-count sheets, a yoga studio, a beauty salon, indoor and outdoor theaters, hundreds of pieces of original tribal art and sidewalks speckled with colorful tiles" (Oprah Goes to School). There has been wide spread criticism of this decision by many who call for Oprah to make those kinds of investments in a US public school, or maybe give out scholarships instead of Pontiacs. In defense of her decision, Oprah oppinned the cultural priorities of inner-city youth:
"I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn’t there," she says. "If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school" (Oprah Goes to School).
I'm not here to criticize Oprah's decision to fund a school in South Africa, I could. I don't know where I would begin though, perhaps with the insinuation that all students value things over knowledge. I don't buy that. I teach high school in the "inner city" (actually it's more like the outer city, Chicago's hella big), but I know that Oprah could have found a couple hundred kids in my school alone that might have been "worthy". Or, maybe I could start with the hypocrisy of criticizing kids for caring about material possessions...has she ever watched her own show? Givin' away cars and shit like that, it's not like Oprah contributes to the embrace of conspicious consumption or mass marketed lies. No, not Oprah, those make-over shows are about self-esteem, not wardrobe enlargement or retail therapy or advertisment based notions of the 'good life'. Or, how 'bout the fact that if you google "Oprah" and "Ipod" you are directed to Oprah.com and a page entitled "Oprah's favorite things"? Who is she to criticize poor kids for fetishizing material goods when it is something every American does. It's just that when a rich white kid fetishizes a pair of kicks, he just buys 'em and takes 'em for granted, part of that great American tradition of entitlement. Her statement insinuates that this is some kind of abnormal "mentality" found among urban youth, and we all know what "urban youth" is code for. Worst of all it reinforces a racist perspective that white people love to use to justify continued inequality, namely that it's a matter of behavior, culture, and upbringing that results in the American "underclass".
I could say all that, but that's not what I'm here to do. First, I think it's great that Oprah is using her money in a way that could help some young women in South Africa (she could build like 15 of those schools and not notice it, but let's leave that alone). Second, while she is demonstrating charity and not solidarity I think that charity shouldn't be criticized, I think it should be the start of a long conversation about how for charity to exist there must be continued and substantial economic, social, and political injustice, and what is more helpful is a deeper analysis of the roots of that injustice, a richer and fuller expansion of one's own consciousness. And finally, Oprah is a victim of the all-to-common fundamental attribution fallacy.
You may be asking yourself, if he's not going to criticize Oprah what is he writing about? Well, the truth is, while I don't agree with Oprah, I think her statement is the beginning of understanding part of the truth behind the "crisis in black education".
I was talking to a friend and he pointed out that he felt that Brown v. Board may have actually damaged black education and black entrepreneurialism. This is not a new argument. Brown "integrated" black students into schools that stripped them of the cultural capital that allowed black people to survive in the face of oppression and violence for hundreds of years. In the face of such hatred the black community turned to itself for sustenance. Sure, poverty and violence ravaged that community, but that community took care of itself and it survived. The fact a black culture even exists in America is a testament to the tenacious will and passion that this community possesses. And, integration began to rob that community of the capital that segregation created. The white dominator culture had institutions that did not transmit that cultural capital, and it was and is an inheritance lost. This is not to say that my friend or I blame Brown for anything at all, it is only to say that a cost of integration may have been the loss of a central pillar of the black community and the black culture, namely the black school. And that cultural pillar was replaced by one that, he believed (as do I), robbed black folks of a certain amount of their cultural capital. A similar argument is made about Latinos in the amazing book, Substractive Schooling by Angela Valenzuela.
However, while I think that narrative is true, it only goes so far. The schools are not truly to blame. I think that the material-obsessed, consumer culture of late American capitalism holds most of the blame. Marx proposed a base/superstructure analysis of culture and ideology. The 'superstructure' that constructs ideology, culture, and consciousness is built upon the 'base' of capitalism. This capitalist superstructure creates a 'false consciousness' of commodity fetishizing, or in other words, it leads to the 'thingification' of everything. Blacks were denied full access to this superstructure, the white dominator culture, so they constructed folk cultures, sub-cultures, and counter-cultures to survive (they also internalized much of the dominator culture, which will be the subject of a later post). So, when the 1960s came these various black cultural traditions came under attack not only by the integration of black folks into schools, but by their integration into the newly created mass marketing bonanza coupled with a period of economic prosperity, the result of technological innovation, militaristic Keyensianism, and an empire-like control of global politics and economics. This prosperity created the a black middle class and some say the civil rights movement, but it was still unavailable to most blacks. The great American boom also created the great American unquenchable thirst for stuff, a thirst that influenced the black community as much as it did the white community, the only difference is that the white community belonged and the black did not, economically, socially, politically, and culturally. The cultural and psychological impact of the American thirst for material possessions on an entire group of people denied access to the means to pursue that thirst is unknowable.
Mass marketing makes all Americans feel like they are missing something, that they are not full without whatever it is that is being sold to them, but blacks cannot even have full access to the commodity market because of their inheritance of oppression. And blacks cannot simply buy their way into the American identity; even after the most conspicious consumption they are still told that they are missing something, the correct pigment. Something that the market has noticed.
In speaking about the reason for the growing despair and nihilism in the black community, Dr. Cornel West, wrote,
What has changed? What went wrong? The bitter irony of integration? The cumulative effects of a genocidal conspiracy? The virtual collapse of rising expectations after the optimistic sixties? None of this fully understands why teh cultural structures that once sustained black life in American are no longer able to fend off the nihilistic threat. I believe that two significant reasons why the threat is more powerful now than ever before are the saturation of market forces and market moralities in black life and the present crisis in black leadership. The recent market-driven sharttering of black civil societies--black families, neighborhoods, schools, churches, mosques--leaves more and more black people vulnerable to daily lives endured with little sense of self and fragile existential moorings.
Black people have always been in America's wilderness in search of a promised land. Yet many black folk now reside in a jungle ruled by a cutthroat market morality devoid of any faith in deliverance or hope for freedom. Contrary to the superficial claims of conservative behaviorists, these jungles are not primarily the result of pathological behavior. Rather, this behavior is the tragic response of a people bereft of resources in confronting the workings of U.S. capitalist society. Saying this is is not the same as asserting that individual black people are not responsible for their actions--black murderers and rapists should go to jail. But it must be recognized that the nihilistic threat contributes to criminal behavior. It is a threat that feeds on poverty and shattered cultural institutions and grows more powerful as the armors to ward against it are weakened.
But why is this shattering of black civil society occuring? What has led to the weakening of black cultural institutions in asphalt jungles? Corporate market insitutions have contributed greatly to their collapse. By corporate market institutions I mean that complex set of interlocking enterprises that have a disproportionate influence on how are society is run and how our culture is shaped. Needless to say, the primary motivation of these institutions is to make profits, and their basic strategy is to convince the public to consume. These institutions have helped create a seductive way of life, a culture of consumption that capitalizes on every opportunity to make money. Market calculations and cost-benefit analyses hold sway in almost every sphere of U.S. society.
The common denominator of these calculations and analyses is usually the provision, expansion, and intensification of pleasure. Pleasure is a multivalent term; it means different things to many people. In the American way of life pleasure involves comfort, convenience, and sexual stimulation. Pleasure, so defined, has little to do with the past and views the future as no more than repetition of a hedonistically driven present. This market morality stigmatizes others as objects for personal pleasure or bodily stimulation. Conservative behaviorists have alleged that traditional morality has been undermined by radical feminists and the cultural radicals of the sixties. But it is clear that corporate market institutions have greatly contributed to undermining traditional morality in order to stay in business and make a profit. The reduction of individuals to objects of pleasure is especially evident in teh culture industries--television, radio, video, music--in which gestures of sexual foreplay and orgiastic pleasure flood the marketplace.
Like all Americans, African-Americans are influenced greatly by the images of comfort, convenience, machismo, femininity, violence, and sexual stimulation that bombard consumers. These seductive images contribute to the predominance of the market-inspired way of life over all others and thereby edge out nonmarket values--love, care, service to others--handed down by preceding generations. The predominance of this way of life among those living in poverty-ridden conditions, with a limited capacity to ward off self-contempt and self-hatred, results in the possible triumph of the nihilistic threat in black America (Race Matters).
West suggests that the psychological damage of American-style material thirst and denial of access to material sustenance is self-contempt and self-hatred. The love of material success and hate of self within the black community is so pervasive. Look toward hip hop, a lifestyle built upon hundreds of years of black culture but obsessed with black-on-black violence and hyper-consumption. The anger endemic to hip hop seems to come from that all-too-obvious truth that "they have been betrayed by those who came before them. That they are at best tolerated in schools, feared on the streets, and almost inevitably destined for the hell holes of prison (Homeland and Hip Hop by Immortal Technique and Mumia Abu Jamal).
So, when Oprah speaks of I-pods and kicks crowding out chemistry and physics, I'm not all that sure she isn't absolutely correct. However, to lay the cause there and stop, to declare frustration at those who have been victimized, is at both times honest and dishonest. But, mostly it's just sad. She too is a victim of the dominator culture of consumption and market morality, I mean she just recently topped Forbes list of the world's richest female entertainers, and we all know that Oprah is more than an entertainer, she's a walking, talking transnational corporation. She's a brand more than a person. Talk about a victim of market morality, she is, in the eyes of the world, less person than thing.
While Oprah may be right and she may also be wrong, she is, at least, understood. And that, that is something.
Be Brave. Be Tenacious. Be Understanding.
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