"Race @ The UofC" by Kevin Coval

We shouldn’t be surprised that white, suburban University of Chicago undergrads threw a “straight thuggin” party without thinking it would be a commentary on race. This and other more degrading parties, including recent ones at Penn State, Harvard, University of Mississippi, and Texas A&M, exemplify the nature of privilege. White people do not think about race. In dominant culture, whiteness is all encompassing, pervasive, and therefore silent. Our assumption: white is right and normal, anything outside the Barbie dream house is Other.

The white kids in Hyde Park are only participating in the long legacy of American minstrelsy. From Al Jolson to Jamie Kennedy in Malibu’s Most Wanted, the historic joke in white entertainment has always been to mock and act out our ideas of Blackness. Lisa Kudrow as Marci X, Vanilla Ice as MC Hammer, Justin Timberlake as Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton as a bluesman. Our history of appropriation and whiteface imitation is an enormous list.

Part of the issue is our radical and continued segregation. Whites and Blacks (though this conversation is not limited to these two groups) do not live together. Therefore Black folks “live” in the imagination of whites. And for an MTV generation, Blackness is equated with Thug Life: hyper-sexuality, outlaw status, and capitalist decadence dangling from the neck or mouthpiece of our favorite rappers. For white suburbanites, Blackness exists only as performance. 50 cent, for white people, is less a real person than he is an embodiment of our collective, historic hopes and fears about what Black men, in particular, are. Marketing executives, record company A&Rs, and radio/video programmers know this better than anyone, favoring limited representations of Black folks on big and small screens and at both ends of your FM dial. That white men own all six major record companies is a reminder of the current and chronic state of Black cultural production and white capitalization, labor exploitation and supremacist imagination.

It’s no surprise that this group of white kids would not consider the absurdity of throwing a “straight thuggin” party where the attire is supposed to be “ghetto,” in Hyde Park, on the University of Chicago campus, where 4% of the undergraduate student population is Black. Our unwillingness to discuss and dissect race and white supremacy as a whole culture, and especially at prestigious educational institutions, is what’s troubling.

This issue is deeper than higher education’s inability to deal with race. It is a firm indicator of shortcomings in our Secondary and Elementary schools. Why aren’t our educators and pedagogical leaders addressing and confronting the remnants and procedures of white supremacy? Where is our national conversation, town hall meeting, congressional forum on the problem that W.E.B Dubois said would plague the twentieth century?

For many white people, the issue of race and racism is a history lesson: a civil rights victory Dr. King won; Rosa Parks sat down, and they can vote now, what else do they want? But for many Black folks, particularly youth of color in white institutions, the issues of racism and systemic deafness to their concerns are all too alive and contemporary.

I am a white man. I am talking to white people. We need to check ourselves: our practices, ideologies, assumptions, institutions. Unchecked, our children reek of the same simple-minded or high-minded bigotry, racist and exoticized fantasies about who people are and how they live. We need to wrestle with our painful, ugly histories and our current manifestations of colonialism and cultural imperialism. We are all culpable. Especially us good, white liberals.

The “straight thuggin” party at the University of Chicago is a solid reminder that the white imagination is caught in extreme ennui. We are not progressing. Again and again we recycle stereotypes of Black men and women. Our university systems have the capacity to show white kids that the world is more diverse than their islands of homogeneity. We must demand this of our colleges and universities and also of our Secondary and elementary schools. It appears we are satisfied with status quo, de facto segregation. White people remain too luxurious in our own myths. Our privilege to do nothing is gangster and criminal.

Queers and Associates - Diversity Center Recommendations

Queers and Associates submitted a report to the provost last winter on the proposed Diversity Center. You can read their recommendations at:

http://qa.uchicago.edu/diversityreport.html

This month's featured article

The University Libraries and the Public

Ben Dueholm, Graduate Research Assistant

Civic Knowledge Project

Two small cracks appeared in the fortresslike Regenstein Library on the University of Chicago campus this spring. The University libraries approved a plan to begin a pilot program granting neighborhood public schoolteachers access to the Regenstein. And in early April, the Regenstein turnstiles malfunctioned, compromising the security of the library.[1] While strictly coincidental, the two developments offer a fortuitous glimpse into the history of the complicated relationship between the libraries and the public.

Danielle Allen, Dean of Humanities and Executive Director of the Civic Knowledge Project, designed the teacher access program to build trust and exchange knowledge between the University and the wider community. While the program was intended to be a novel rethinking of the University’s place in the South Side, it recalls the early history of the University, when the public had much greater access to the shelves and collections of University-owned books traveled to readers all over the country.

The turnstiles, on the other hand, are the product of more recent history, when concerns about costs, book loss, and safety led to an almost total separation of the library’s sources from the local community. The teacher access program and other library outreach programs show how a changed understanding of the University’s role in the community and new technological capacities can make the library a public resource without jeopardizing its academic functions.

In the early decades of the University’s existence, the community had access to the library’s resources in the buildings themselves and through ‘traveling libraries’ associated with Extension courses. From the very beginning, the University libraries were open to the public for reference use. Full privileges were available for a fee.[2] Starting in 1894, the General Library housed a delivery station of the Chicago Public Library, issuing hundreds of library cards and allowing students to borrow thousands of books through the city system.[3] The station was also an important resource for local residents.[4] In 1910, the School of Education gave local schoolteachers full access to its library, in a move similar to the new program.

The University’s holdings had a much larger effect beyond the campus through the Division of Extension. Through this division, University lecturers traveled throughout the city, region, and eventually the whole country teaching courses on history, literature, sociology, and other subjects. The courses were intended to provide accredited University-level work and so required accompanying texts for home study by students. The books in the libraries were available for loan as long as the course was offered, after which students could purchase them at a discount.[5]

The traveling libraries and the extension courses they accompanied made a significant impact on the educational environment of the small towns and neighborhoods to which they were sent. Contemporary reports record extensive borrowing of books, requests for more volumes to be sent, eager participation by high school students, and a push in Englewood for shorter work hours to allow clerks to take courses.[6] The Extension Movement, as advocates called it, gave unprecedented access to higher educatin at a time when it was still enjoyed by relatively few. It also played a significant role in building public interest in and basic collections for municipal library systems.[7] An internal document calls the traveling libraries “one of the greatest agencies for good” undertaken by the University.[8]

The attitude of founding President William Raney Harper towards higher education, and University Extension in particular, is evident in these points of contact between the libraries and the wider public. For Harper, the goal of a true university was “[s]ervice for mankind wherever mankind is, whether within scholastic walls or without those walls and in the world at large.” This manifested itself in a commitment to making education as widely available as possible, despite social, economic, or geographic barriers. Harper had significant experience in extension education and made Extension one of only five Divisions when the University was founded. Harper’s democratic principles were clearly sincere. But they were not merely altruistic. He understood that a vigorous education outreach would give the University a more congenial cultural environment and would increase its power and scope.[9]

These programs eventually experienced problems of cost and even safety. By the early years of the 20^th century, the Board of Libraries was trying to move the public library station off campus or close it down.[10] The traveling libraries, along with the lecture courses they supported, did not become financially self-sufficient as the Extension Division had planned.

On campus, there were concerns about increasing book theft and loss. Access to borrowing privileges, even for a fee, was strictly curtailed in 1932.[11] In the 1960’s, the archives show an increasing concern with crime and safety in the libraries, as well as increased interest in security measures such as turnstiles.[12] It is not known when access became restricted to University community members and visiting scholars, but it is likely that by the time the Regenstein opened, the general public-spiritedness that characterized the early library had become a thing of the past.

The libraries withdrew from the public for fairly simple reasons. Circulating books and library facilities are what economists call “rival goods”: one person’s use of a book prohibits someone else’s use. The more people who have privileges, the less access to books each person has. The traveling libraries and other costs of the extension courses were meant to be carried by the local centers after a few years of subsidy. The costs, however, proved too high to be borne by the centers. The program’s persistent deficits became more than the University wished to carry. Extension education, without any library component, lives on in the Graham School of General Studies.

However, public access to the library’s resources has, in recent years, undergone a renaissance. Internet technology has allowed the University libraries to work with the Chicago Public Schools to give access to “non-rival” goods such as online reference resources. The eCUIP program offers content on math, science, fine arts, African-American studies, local history, and other areas, available for free online. The eCUIP site also hosts a “web docent” program, in which teachers can access online materials from Chicago’s major museums.

The teacher-access program likewise addresses library resources for educators. The pilot will involve up to five teachers from each Washington Park school and the University’s charter schools. It does not include borrowing privileges, but the educators will have access to the materials in the University libraries. That way, students and teachers will have minimal competition for the library’s holdings.

Library outreach in all its forms—open shelves, traveling libraries, and teacher access—was an integral part of a University that saw itself as public-minded and outwardly focused. New technologies and new resolve are helping the library, and with it the University as a whole, begin recovering the fullness of its role “within these scholastic walls or without.”

---

[1] Hana Yoo, “Malfunctioning turnstiles lead to a less secure Reg,” Chicago Maroon, April 8, 2005

[2] Library Reports, 1892-1899, p.7

[3] Ibid., 121.

[4] Ibid., 96

[5] Decennial Reports, 232

[6] “The Work and the Workers,” University Extension World, v. 4? 174, 175; archive correspondence, 2/2/98 and 3/19/00, UEW v.3, 148, v.4, 172, UEW v.1, 75

[7] Ibid., 51

[8] correspondence, 4/19/98

[9] (Fay, 63-68)

[10] minutes 10/26/01; 2/08/02

[11] correspondence, 10/12/40

[12] correspondence, 8/29/69; 9/30/68

Register for the Student Activists Conference!

We mean it, folks - this conference is going to be AMAZING. Register by e-mailing Leah at lendalka@uchicago.edu.

Leah even listed it as a 'wicked hot' party on the Facebook. This claim is justified in the following ways:
- Keynote speaker Heather Booth, who founded JANE, the underground abortion service, while she was an undergrad at the U of C. She went on to found the Midwest Academy and to work with organizations ranging from the NAACP to the Proteus Fund Blueprint Project.
- Workshops from Students for Human Rights, COPS, MeCha ... the list goes on ...
- Workshop co-led by Mary Powers, an amazing police accountability activist from the Chicago group Citizens Alert
- Workshop led by Affinity, the African-American lesbian and bisexual women's group, on how to organize around identity
- The postmodern punk rock band Xiangxang Delight, of whom both Heather Booth and Maureen Loughnane from the Human Rights Department are members
- Spoken word artist Kevin Coval, who has appeared on Russell Simmons' HBO Def Poetry Jam!
- Free food from Soul Veg. Vegan soul food. Come on, you know you want it.

The deadline to register is this WEDNESDAY! Don't miss out!

What is this?

The Social Justice Coordinators' journal, Critical Engagement, has become a blog! If you'd like to contribute, submit articles to alpert@uchicago.edu, and we'll post them here for the enjoyment of the whole Web.