Last week I wrote about teaching Obama’s Philadelphia speech in my college writing class. At the time, I was flush with the possibility that I might really be doing something to contribute to a conversation on race that moved us beyond what Obama called this 40-year stalemate.
Today, after two more classes, I feel like I’m in the weeds. As our current President might say, talking about race is hard.
On Tuesday, my students brought in their exercises on the speech and the U.S. Constitution. Here was their assignment:
Barack Obama’s speech argues that our government was “stained by the original sin of slavery” but that “the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution.” Read the U. S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. (You can find copies of it online all over the place, but the National Archives is a good, reliable site.) And write a one page response to Obama’s claim, using his speech and the Constitution itself as your primary sources.
We divided the seventy-five minute class in half: for the first half, I asked students to share their conclusions from the exercise. One admitted that she had found nothing about slavery in the Constitution at all so she hadn’t been able to do it. So, I pulled up the text on the computer/projector and asked everyone in the class to share what aspects of the Constitution they found relevant.
I was encouraged to see that the ten or so of my seventeen students who had really done the assignment thoroughly were split on their opinion of Obama’s claim: some, citing the possibility of amendments, restrictions on interstate human trafficking, or the opening inclusiveness of “we the people,” concurred that the Constitution contained within it the answer to the slavery question. Others, citing the racist census methods, asserted that the document itself was stained. Writing this down, it all sounds rather promising, but the feeling I had at the time was not of an inspiring class but of a painstaking conversation about a text that few had understood.
The second half of the class was meant to focus in on hopes for a better future in terms of racial understanding. I began by showing the video of the Bronx high school students talking about Obama’s speech. I teach in Manhattan, so my students felt connected and touched by those students. At the same time, it was discouraging to hear my students’ jadedness in their response. Again, the conversation ended up being more about the difference between 15 and 19 than about idealism and the political steps needed for social change.
It made me really uncomfortable that this was a campaign video: was that unfair? But I thought the energy of the students might get my students to really aim higher with their sense of hopes for the future than they had last time. It didn’t work. That was Tuesday.
Today was a little better, maybe.
Students had read The Declaration of Independence, Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” I began by asking them to identify the most moving part of the Letter. One student pointed to this passage on just and unjust laws:
Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law.
And we talked for about ten minutes about the rhetoric here: the simplicity, the teacherly voice, the clarity and focus, the absence of discussion of race, the appeal to a basic sense of fairness. I reminded them—this is a writing class after all—that as writers they need to frame their quotations with language worthy of what they write about.
Then we watched 2 chapters of Orlando Bagwell’s 2004 Citizen King, showing the historical context for both Birmingham and the March on Washington and I asked students to write for five minutes about what, if anything, changed in their understanding of what they had read by seeing the video.
Several of the students pointed out that they’ve known this stuff all their lives, that it seems old hat, familiar, old, but that the footage made them realize, in some cases, the courage and greatness of King, in others, the massive size of the movement. They were deeply moved by the video and, once prodded, noted some details in it—the black and white marchers drinking from the same fountain in Washington, the dignity of the high school students marching into jail in Birmingham.
Finally, and running out of time, we compared the opening of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, with its metaphor of the promissory note, to Obama’s metaphor of original sin. This kind of rhetorical comparison, something that asks them to look at Obama’s speech in a larger civil rights context, is where I’m hoping they get to for their papers and it’s part of their homework for Tuesday.
We looked, too, at Obama’s comparison between Wright and his grandmother and talked about that as a comparison. A white student said that, as a white person, the comparison helped her relate more to him. I polled the class. Of the fifteen students present (of 17), a big majority admitted to having heard a relative utter a cringe-worthy slur.
On deck for Tuesday:
Part One: Read Lani Guinier, “The Tyranny of the Majority” and write a one page summary of her argument. Be specific, making sure to articulate not only the major point of Guinier’s piece but also some of the key supporting points.
Part Two: find a specific moment of comparison between Obama’s speech and another text for this unit so far and write a paragraph in which you quote both moments and compare them. Again, be as clear, forthright, and specific as you can. Don’t waste time: make your writing pointed and direct.
And Friday they’ll read Patricia Williams…
So, that’s the update for this week. I believe deeply that this is the right thing to do but in every moment of my teaching I feel inadequate to the task, so I write these diaries to make some kind of record, to share them with other better teachers in this community, and to just help me sort out what it might mean to do a good job of this.