FOR WEDNESDAY

1) Those of you who weren't in class today should (re-) read my attendance policy. It's on the very first post on this blog--the one titled "Syllabus."

2) Please generate a rough draft of your first 5-6 page paper, and bring 4 hard copies so that you can workshop it with your peers.

Your rough draft should use the opening paragraph(s) that I've provided below, in the post titled "First Paper Draft Generation."

In order to work with those paragraphs, your draft should include at least three quotes in which Coates is either

A) talking about the body in the context of institutional racism,

or

B) translating the language of the "host"--a language in which the body is obscured/buried/erased into something more visceral (and, Coates would probably say, more true).

Again, refer to previous post if you're confused.

Also in that post: I've included sample quotes and sample commentary on the quotes--things that, if I were writing this paper, I'd probably expand into full paragraphs.

(This should go without saying, but: please do not use my exact phrasing, if you choose to borrow any of these quotes/ideas.)

First Paper draft generation

For this paper, I want you guys to practice selecting quotes that work with an already defined thesis. So:

Let’s look at the very first sentence of “Letter to My Son,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates: “Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body." (My italics.) Later on in the same paragraph, Coates writes that when the host “turned to the subject of [his] body [...] she did not mention it specifically.” We can therefore assume (even before Coates informs us that her question is about “why [he] [feels] that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence”) that when the host asks Coates “what it mean[s] to lose [his] body,” she’s not using those specific words. “What does it mean to lose your body?” should, instead, be read as Coates’s translation of her question. The implication, here, is that her question is meaningful only when it is translated into the language of personal and specific physical violence, directed at the individual body.

In other words, what Coates is very deliberately saying, at the very beginning of this essay, is that, for him, American progress is predicated on the plundering of his body--not a generic body, not even an abstract black body--but his. He’s saying that he feels the injustices of American history as a personal violence directed every day at him—his specific flesh; his specific blood. If “Letter to My Son” is Coates’s answer to the question of “what it [means] to lose [his] body,” we can only understand that answer by unpacking what it means for Coates to be a body, to be living in his specific body in America.

Why does Coates position himself, within the larger American debate about history and race, as a specific body? How does this clarify or change the terms of that debate?
In this essay, we’ll endeavor to answer these questions, through a close reading of Coates’s use of “body”--his insistence on the individuality of the bodies (and the specific physicality of the violence) involved in institutional racism.

So how do we go about doing this?


We could look at every single place Coates talks about the body / specific physical acts / specific bodies. But that would take a lot of looking.

If our claim is that Coates is saying that institutional racism can only be meaningfully analysed when we consider the specific acts of violence (physical and mental/spiritual/cultural) done to specific bodies, then we need to find places in the text where Coates is translating from the language of the host in the first paragraph--the language that avoids talking about bodies.

Find at least 3-4 quotes that do this.

Sample quotes/ sample notes/commentary:

Quotes in which the language of the “host”—the language that leaves out specific bodies, that elides actual real violence—is translated into the language of the question “what does it mean [to me] to lose my body”:

Coates is basically saying this exact same thing here:

“But all our phrasing—race relations,racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling,white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.”

What he’s saying is that the words disguise the violence. There's a difference between saying that there is racial profiling and that it is likely to lead to violence, and saying that the effects are felt as broken bones, as broken teeth. The italicized terms he lists makes real violence sterile, manageable. Hides it. Sweeps it under the rug. Easy to think about in a superficial way; easy therefore to dismiss--to say "oh, I know about that" because you're familiar with the terms/phrases. You don't have to be familiar with the actuality of it, the real effects. You don't need personal experience or listen to personal experience, in other words--you just have to have thought about the words.

          Another really obvious example here is the extended meditation on what it might have meant to be a specific black enslaved female body:

 Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. 

“Slavery”—the word—translated into individual physical experience. ("Why is he doing this? What does Coates gain by having the reader think about this?"--these are good questions to ask.)

Note the particularity of this description: the light falling in one particular spot in the woods, the specificity of the enjoyment of the place where the water eddies--lots of use of "the"; of the definite article, which implies that whatever the "the" applies to is singular, unique, real. "A favorite cousin, a favorite season" sounds like Coates is transposing his own specific likes on to this woman, fleshing her out; using details from his own life to make hers more real. In a very literal sense, he's identifying himself with her, this imagined woman. And implicitly, asking us to do the same. Imagine all of the specifics of your own life, your own body, whatever scars on your hands or feet, your own likes, dislikes, your own peculiarities, everything that belongs to you and your own unique inner life--and imagine this woman who has the same--who is just as real and just as unique. And imagine her in "endless dark." In "eternal damnation." Imagine yourself there. --is the move he's asking us to make.  

Experience at Howl’s Moving Castle—altercation with man who says “I could have you arrested!”—which for Coates, I think, is an admission of the power differential—the white man in this case finds it easy/natural to say “I could have you arrested!”: evidence (he would probably say) for the lingering structural effects of an American history in which it is "traditional to destroy the black body." 

I came home shook. It was a mix of shame for having gone back to the law of the streets, and rage—“I could have you arrested!” Which is to say: “I could take your body.”

Alternately, quotes in which Coates is pointing out places where individual bodies are—let’s call it buried under the words:

          The distinction between “black” and “white” might itself be such an instance, for Coates?

          For example: 
“There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all of history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been ‘black.’” 

Actual body irrelevant to category of race, in this instance; actual body ignored in the same way that the host’s question ignores bodies.

For Monday,

... there's no new reading.

HOWEVER, please come to class having re-read "Letter to My Son," by Ta-Nehisi Coates--we'll be doing a number of close reading exercises that will require you to have a good working knowledge of the whole of the essay.

(Close reading, as I emphasized yesterday, always involves looking at details within the larger context of the work as a whole.)

Likewise, there's no response paper this week--instead, please concentrate on handing in any work that you owe me. Share it on Google docs no later than noon on Sunday, which is your final deadline.

Any work handed in after noon--anything that has a timestamp after 12:00:59 PM--will not count toward your final grade. I'll still comment on it, because I think that's the right thing to do. But I will not give it a pass.

Your journals and weekly response papers are pass/fail. If you hand them in (and they adequately address the assignment), you pass. If you don't, you fail. Together, they account for 25% of your grade.

If you don't hand in these three papers (and three journals!), you'll be missing out on approximately 6-8% of your final grade. That may not sound like much, but if your attendance is also spotty, and you don't absolutely ace your graded papers, it'll mean the difference between being able to use this your grade in this class in order to satisfy your requirements--and having to take it again.

More importantly, these assignments give me a chance to know you, and your writing, and to help you with comments--all without the stress of letter grades.

Also, a final word of warning:

These papers also help you get to know me, and get a sense of what my expectations are like, for your writing.

If you want to go into your first letter-graded assignment without having some sense of what I will and won't like about your writing, that's your deal.

But it's a terrible, terrible idea.

For Monday

For Monday, please listen to this interview with Michelle Alexander:

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/16/145175694/legal-scholar-jim-crow-still-exists-in-america

As you listen, think about Baldwin on "innocence" and Coates on the "Dream" (and on what he calls the "tradition" of destroying the black body). Take notes while you listen.

Also, read this: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/03/new-jim-crow-war-on-drugs

Come to class having:

• shared with me on Google Drive/Docs all of the work you currently owe me. By Monday that will be: a total of three weekly response papers and three weekly journal entries.
• Three discussion questions (on the interview; on connections/correspondences/similarities between Alexander/Baldwin/Coates/Lorde, on differences/contrasts between A/B/C/L; anything else connected to our reading/listening for this class)
• prepared yourself to talk for two minutes on Michelle Alexander

For your weekly response, I want you to pick a pair of quotes (one from Coates and one from Baldwin) that appear to speak to each other, and compare/contrast.

Here's an example of such a pair of quotes:

“They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men.Many of them indeed know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shivering and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar, and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.” (Baldwin)

“And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below. [...] You and I, my son, are that “below.” That was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism.” (Coates)

While you're thinking about your pair of quotes, remember this rule of thumb: when you're writing, ALWAYS go for what’s going to surprise your reader. 

Anyone can look at the Baldwin and the Coates and see the similarities: both letters to loved ones, both talking about institutional racism, et cetera. 

Saying that they’re different--and pointing out how they're different--is the more surprising, and better--and more impressive, because it takes more work, and more likely to get a better grade, because more impressive--claim.

In the pair of quotes above, for example, Baldwin and Coates are saying very similar things, but their emphases, I think, are subtly different. Coates chooses to emphasize the physical violence done to the black body, for instance, where Baldwin might focus a bit more on cultural or mental or spiritual violence--harm done to black identity.

For Monday,

Please read:

1. "My Dungeon Shook," by James Baldwin, from The Fire Next Time, originally published as "A Letter to My Nephew," here:

http://progressive.org/news/2014/12/5047/letter-my-nephew

Here's a video of Chris Rock reading it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ZC7XpnVEE

Also, a couple of videos of Baldwin himself talking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnIjXmfTSYg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_hYraYI2J8

2. While you read/listen, think about how to relate Baldwin's "A Letter to My Nephew" to "Letter to My Son," by Ta-Nehisi Coates.


As an aid to your thought, here are the questions I gave you in class yesterday:

In “Letter to My Son,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates:         

• What is the “Dream”? Find a specific place where he defines it, and paraphrase/explain what he says, in your own words. (It may help if you re-read the essay and try to highlight all of the places where he either mentions the Dream, or is talking about something related to it.)  
• How does the “Dream” relate to the facts of history, as Coates sees it?        
• Coates says that American history has been understood according to a “comfortable narrative.”  What is that narrative? (According to him.) 
• How does the “Dream” relate to the “new and different history, myth really,” that Coates shows up to Howard University with? (What does the Dream ignore? What does the "new and different history" ignore?) 
• What does Ralph Wiley mean when he says, as cited in Coates, that “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus […] unless you find a profit in fencing off the universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership”? 
• What do you think Audre Lorde would say about the relationship between the “new and different history” and the “Dream”? What do you think she would say about “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” as opposed to “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus”? 
• What does Coates mean when he says that he realized that “black blood wasn’t black; black skin wasn’t even black”? What does he mean when he says that “without [the power of domination and exclusion] […] ‘white people’ would cease to exist”? Why are there quotation marks around “white people”?

(^^A full answer to any of these questions would make a good weekly response paper.)

It might also help you to read some of these--they're all articles that are responding in some way to Between the World and Me, the book that "Letter to My Son" is excerpted from:

http://www.theatlantic.com/special-report/the-brutality-of-a-country/

Reading Assignment; suggestions for Weekly Paper #1

For Monday, please read: 

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/tanehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me/397619/


As you read, please think about possible connections (connections between ideas, rather than connections between events) between Coates and Lorde (and Broderick).

For instance, in Lorde's "The Master's Tools [...]," the examples of the "tools of the master" that she gives include: the "either/or model of nurturing," and the equation of marriage with prostitution without regard for the experience of women who have been forced into (actual, non-metaphorical) prostitution. 

If you had to identify the tools of the master in Coates's essay, what would they be? 

Are they the same "master"? If not, what are the differences?

Also think about connections to your personal experience. Try to think of specific events in your life that inform your understanding of the essay.


For your first weekly response paper--I've thought about our class yesterday, and I think that maybe I was a little too hasty trying to get you to make text-to-text connections on the fly. Probably it's easier to start out with trying to apply ideas that you encounter in a text to your own experience, rather than to your interpretation of another text.

So:

Re-read Audre Lorde's "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." As you read, think about times in your life when you might have felt disadvantaged, dealt with unfairly.  (Or times when you've seen somebody else treated unfairly.) Pick a specific quote from Lorde to talk about, and while you're explaining it, work in your story into your explanation.

(^This is more of a strong suggestion than an actual assignment--please feel free to write about other things. No matter what you write about, though, please make sure that you are responding to something specific in the text. And quote what you're responding to!)

Reading for Wednesday: Audre Lorde

http://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Lorde_The_Masters_Tools.pdf

3 Steps Eng 111

Believe I left my books and notes behind in class.... if anyone picked them up please let me know...

anyone write down the 3 step method, would like to send?

Thanks