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Introduction

Most good teachers of adolescents in schools of poverty feel trapped. We feel unable to meet all the needs of our students, nor can we satisfy the demands of authorities. Most students in these schools feel trapped, too. They spend much of each day doing things they have not freely chosen to do, and endure constant judgment and humiliation as a matter of course.

This book offers a way past those feelings. It describes a long-term, radical solution to the problem of education in America, one that many teachers, students, and organizers are already working toward, though in ways that have not yet merged into a movement. But it also presents an immediate way to understand, picture, and talk about what we human beings are doing in these strange places, so that we can feel less trapped and work more positively and hopefully.

Although I use some abstract, theoretical, and often literary ideas to develop this understanding and picture, the descriptions below are in one way just a case study, highlighting the actual practices of a student-led organization called the Baltimore Algebra Project. We have found, using this way of understanding our work, that other feelings and actions have emerged to fight toe to toe with the feelings of being trapped: sometimes joy or comfort, sometimes political or organizing work, sometimes the thrill of intellectual exploration and discovery, sometimes the sense of being connected to the whole river of the freedom struggle, to its legacy of courage, endurance, and hope.

A how-to guide would be nice. But this book should be read more like program notes at a play. It gives some background and context, hints at the life stories of some of the actors, focuses the viewer’s attention on potentially important themes or images, and generally aims to make the experience of the play’s performance more intimate, significant, and enjoyable. The play is the students’ lives and our work in schools. The reader’s role, as audience or actor, is left for you to decide.

In the middle of the last century, public secondary schools were conceived to operate as factories, churning out workers adapted to the demands of assembly lines and industrial bureaucracies and to the consumption of products made in factories. Today, the dominant analogy is that schools should be like the laboratories of scientists, experimenting with initial conditions and inputs, controlling for specified variables, to induce brain-states adapted to the demands of an economy structured by scientists and the consumption of digitized products. In the public schools of relatively comfortable adolescents, these ways of thinking have worked well enough to produce the necessary workers and consumers for the bourgeoisie to go about their business.

But in schools for adolescents in poverty, and particularly for the descendants of slaves, both the factory and laboratory analogies are inadequate. Neither the young people themselves, nor their parents, nor their teachers have been able to look through these frames and make much sense of what they see. The factory schools couldn’t prepare students for factory jobs that no longer existed. And today’s “experimental design,” “data-driven,” “evidence-based” schools leave the great majority of African American and poor students unable to take math or science courses for credit in college, and so qualify them only for service jobs that robots will probably be doing a few years from now.

We need a way of describing and thinking about public schools of poverty that addresses what actually happens as opposed to what the dominant ideology says should happen. In general terms we are looking for a frame that accomplishes two related tasks: First, our mode of description and analysis must help us understand the bewildering experience of being a student, teacher, or parent trying to do something human in schools of poverty. These schools literally make many of us ill. We become so infuriated, depressed, impatient, confused, revolted, thwarted, humiliated, as we try to act on our own behalf or on behalf of others that both young people and adults often develop physical symptoms of disease. And while we are experiencing the physical and emotional symptoms of striving for life in a place that doesn’t fit our humanity, we hear the constant drumbeat of propaganda that there is something wrong with us, not with the place. The terms of the propaganda—“data,” “objectives,” “mandates,” “test scores,” “protocols,” “requirements,” “deadlines,” “evaluations”—flood our consciousness until it is hard to hear our own voices or to use our own names for things. It becomes difficult to make ourselves understood, as if we were babbling, because the distance between our experience and the official “reality” grows greater and greater. At this point, one of three things happens: we are labeled by the authorities as “defiant” or “insubordinate” and forced to leave; we decide on our own to leave to preserve our health and sanity; or we compromise and accept the ideology of schooling whenever we must, shutting off our humanity into smaller and smaller boxes alienated from any concept of the common good.

So one task that a better frame will accomplish is to give us words, images, and ways of thinking that are sturdy and agile enough to do battle with the propaganda of the dominant ideology as manifested in schools. It will let us survive in schools of poverty without being forced out or forced to compromise or made ill.

The second task is to prepare for an insurgency of young people. That is, we are looking for a description and analysis that is pragmatically constructive. If our frame doesn’t help us decide how to transform the world, in Paolo Freire’s terms, it is too weak.3 We postulate that the principal agents of the transformation will be the students and define our ultimate goal as an insurgency led by young people in poverty.

By “insurgency” we mean to emphasize the insufficiency of parliamentary, electoral, or technical procedures, and to describe instead a rising up of young people that massively interrupts the functioning of the country’s educational system and forces a rearrangement of roles, authority, and power well beyond the boundaries of “school.” The degree of disruption will need to be greater than during the insurgency that forced changes to the country’s electoral system, because the right to education is a more fundamental cultural function than the right to vote. As explained below, white middle-class parents (followed by middle-class parents of color) reacted to the changes brought on in the 1950s and 1960s by finding new ways to separate their children from children growing up in different castes. Jim Crow lost its grip on public accommodations and voting rights, but keeps education firmly segregated by race and caste; much more disruption, therefore, will be needed before this final breakthrough occurs.

The educational insurgency will certainly use parliamentary, electoral, or technical demands and procedures as organizing tools, but those demands and procedures are not the aims of the insurgency. For example, this book describes a demand for math literacy—but as an organizing tool, not as an end in itself. Often tactics such as this are confused for ends, but the possibility of confusion is one of the reasons math literacy, for example, was chosen as a demand. There is a consensus among nearly all elements of society that math literacy is good in itself; therefore organizing for math literacy among poor students of color is permitted by institutional authorities. We argue that the cover given by this consensus and the authority earned by doing math create opportunities for students in poverty to organize massive interruptions of the educational and social system. Similarly, voter registration was not radical in 1960; there was a wide consensus that voter registration was a good thing. But voter registration among sharecroppers in Mississippi was radical, and resulted in massive interruptions of the Southern, and eventually of the national, political and social systems.

The Marxist frame—that schools reproduce class structures—is certainly helpful to an extent. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis give a detailed explication of how educational reproduction works in America.4 The limitation of the Marxist frame, however, is that we will need to wait until the revolution for schooling’s role in the reproduction of class dynamics to change. There is an important body of work that understands working-class young people as resistant to the reproduction of class in schools. Part I of this book centers on a particular interpretation of this resistance in the context of the black freedom struggle in America. But understanding the students as resistant is not quite enough to help us understand how they will become educated in a pre-revolutionary era.

The problem is chicken and egg. To the extent that schooling simply reproduces existing class dynamics, no changes in how schooling works will matter till class dynamics change. But class dynamics are unlikely to change until a revolutionary or insurrectionary consciousness develops among the young—and their consciousness develops largely through schooling.

The obvious solution to this problem is to reduce the scale of the task. Subversive parents try to raise subversive children. African nationalists try to raise African nationalist children at the scale of the family or on the somewhat larger scale of a cultural organization or church, for example. The approach to creating a mini-society that will reproduce specific human dynamics can sometimes be extended to the size of a private or charter school. Such schools try to insulate children from the oppressive forces that determine the shape of schooling as an unhelpful or degrading institution. Some small schools of this kind have been relatively successful in giving children and adolescents an experience of human interaction that is very different from the norm. Some have been less successful.

The example of positive mini-societies nevertheless demonstrates that the Marxist view of cultural reproduction is not the last word on how children grow up. Though schools do reproduce oppressive relations, there are potential paths through which small trickles of something different may leak out, until a larger revolution or insurgency takes root.

The question this book explores is how to understand the actual dynamics of public schools of poverty in such a way that potent mini-societies can be created right inside them. The charter or private school is one route. But the great mass of oppressed young people are in normative public high schools. That mass possesses almost unfathomable energy. We want to develop a frame through which their energy could become foregrounded not only as unorganized resistance, but as actually constructing an insurgency.

To understand the terms and ways of thinking presented here, it is important to reflect on two particular inadequacies of the dominant ideology as it relates to education. (1) Schooling tends to treat persons as things, subjects as objects; (2) discussions of the roles of young people generally suffer from a pervasive literalism.

Treating persons as things is an ethical error analyzed over millennia in many different cultures. Capitalism or the West or Whiteness are particularly egregious violators in this mode: we have regularly bought and sold human beings and continue to monetize everything we can name. Another way to understand the ethical error of treating persons as things is to consider certain traditional forms of thinking that refuse to treat even animals, plants, mountains, or rivers as mere things. Thanking the buffalo or the bear for their meat, cherishing the returning rain or sun, are “superstitions” to “scientific” minds, but in other ways of thinking these are acts that establish our own humanity: it is an ethical requirement to be conscious and aware of our relations to the world, to be “in relation” to the world as opposed to merely using it. Though this traditional awareness may go too far for many of us brought up differently, it highlights the distinction between parts of the world toward which we hold ethical obligations and parts of the world toward which we don’t. In western terms, this distinction is between “persons” and “things.”

The factory or laboratory analogies and the everyday practice in schools of poverty encourage this ethical error. Young people are often objectified, and young people whose ancestors were slaves, legal property that a person could own, may be especially sensitive, at least emotionally, to such a category mistake. In general, however, the disregard for young people’s full personhood is taken for granted. This is explored in detail below. For now, we simply point out that in the official, normative view, young people are of doubtful personhood. Unlike adults, their will and identity are not thought to be fully autonomous. Having committed no crime, having made no positive choice to participate in any organization or institution, adolescents are compelled wholesale to attend schools and to follow school rules, or they are humiliated and punished. This is a condition generally not suffered by persons officially categorized as autonomous.

We have no consensus as a society about when a small child, maturing into an adult, attains a fully autonomous will and identity. It is clear, however, to most people today, far more than in, say, 1787, that treating Africans as things rather than as persons is an egregious trespass. The case of adolescence is less clear, but young people challenge older adults to think about the consequences of making a mistake in evaluating their autonomy. If it is an error to treat a person as a thing, then it is an error to treat someone who possesses full autonomy as if they do not. For many years women, of course, had trouble convincing men of the strength of this argument, and in much of the world still do. With regard to young people, the case is still far from obvious, especially in schools of poverty, and pushing the point is one of the aims of this book.

The second major inadequacy in most discussions of education is an unfortunate literalism. Literalism is the idea that words refer directly or transparently to things in the world, and that confusion in communication can be eliminated by simply finding the right words to represent any intended meaning.5 Language, however, is less straightforward than literal-minded people would wish. Words are full of overtones and undertones, shadings and associations, and they carry immensely complicated histories with them wherever they go. We call speakers “tone-deaf” who seem oblivious to how context might modify, limit, or expand the significations of the words they use. Consider, for example, the Columbia Law School trustee who recently asked a black applicant interviewing for admission: “If you say ‘people of color,’ what’s wrong with my saying ‘colored people’?” The literalist is baffled by the distinction, while anyone with a sense of how history intertwines with language will understand that the stylistic choice between “people of color” and “colored people” today, in 2013, communicates something about the speaker’s stance and values.

Much of the language used by schools of poverty—or by bureaucracies or researchers about schools—suffers from the stylistic defect of literalism. I argue in accordance with a long rhetorical tradition that the stylistic defect is actually an ethical defect. Tone-deafness in speech often goes hand in hand with cruelty in action. The trustee who has trouble distinguishing between “people of color” and “colored people” is likely to reinforce the institutionalized cruelties of racism.

But the argument goes far beyond the political correctness of specific terms. The rhetorical tradition we are invoking advances a strategic approach toward language as symbolic action. The bad style of school bulletins on truancy or test protocols, or the bad style of most official “standards” describing curriculum or behavior, abet and enforce reactionary attitudes toward the struggle of young people in poverty. This point is discussed explicitly in Part II on teaching Brown vs. Board in a segregated school, and is relevant throughout. Actual or pretended ignorance about how our official language clatters against reality is in itself a kind of wrong-doing and contributes to making schools of poverty unlivable for human beings.

But even more important is the converse: sophisticated and even “literary” appreciation for good style is potentially helpful in directing us toward good and humane action inside of schools, and can help us dig in and survive there. What we find as we explore this topic is that human beings are naturally graceful and sensitive to the complexity of the symbols and language they use. We find that young people are almost obsessed with stylistic nuance and shading—in language, dress, gesture, or stance. And we find that any elaborate series of stylistic choices can add up to a strategy for action, to a way of taking on the world as it presents itself to us, and possibly of transforming it.

The more literal-minded we are, the more we will despair of getting out from under the bureaucratic mass. But using and appreciating language that is multi-layered and alive can give us a different perspective. If we understand the roles of young people in schools of poverty as part of an enormously rich and heroic drama rather than simply despairing at their mistakes or at our mistakes or at the administrations’ mistakes, we will be much more hopeful. We can take a bit of the action and language and interpret it; and then we can apply or try out our interpretation on another bit and see if it helps us make sense of something that was troubling us. This sort of functional interpretation then becomes a pragmatic tool that actually helps move the action along in a desired direction. Through public speech and action attached in an aesthetically sophisticated way to radical traditions of speaking and acting, we may find ourselves “stepping into history,” making things happen.

By resolutely treating persons as persons, not as things, and by celebrating and putting to use the historical and aesthetic complexities of public speech and action, we counter the ersatz “science” of the education world. Bad “science” tries to expunge ethical categories from its descriptions and procedures. “Scientists” claim that they have no horse in the race, and only want to know the facts. This is ignorant or disingenuous. Science, like all human inventions, contributes to human purposes, but those purposes are not determined scientifically. How we act toward each other, the field of ethics and the beginning of politics, results from our attitudes, habits, and decisions, not exclusively from observable data. We all know this, of course, but the pose of determining action “scientifically” from data alone is often authoritative in twenty-first-century America. The authority of “science” will pass, but in the meantime we who believe in freedom should heap up barricades from whatever materials we can find to create protected regions that operate under a different authority.

In designing our barricades, I look to two deeply thought out and long-practiced traditions. They may not seem on their face to be traditions of education, but they are rooted in education nonetheless.

The first is the organizing tradition of Ella Baker, Bob Moses, and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This tradition is exceedingly old and is beautifully described by Bernice Johnson Reagon, another disciple of Ella Baker, in a chapter called “The African American Congregational Song Tradition” from If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me:

In congregational singing, there is no soloist, there are only songleaders. The difference between a soloist and a songleader is that with a soloist, they have a part by themselves and, if there are other voices, they are in a part of the background. With a songleader, you can start a song, but you cannot give it life without the participation of other voices. You may have verses, or you may have a call with others responding, but there is no sense that you could stand by yourself. Songleaders get nowhere unless the congregation takes the song over as its own—then the songleader has something to do, a song to lead, a song to move to another level. Songleaders can start the song, but they cannot finish it.6

Robert Parris Moses, born and raised in Harlem, a young math teacher and student of philosophy, went south in 1960 with a letter of introduction from Bayard Rustin to Ella Baker to get started on some civil rights work. At the time, Miss Baker was the Executive Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Martin Luther King, Jr.’s organization, a coalition of black ministers. Ella Baker had already been active in radical circles for thirty years, creating worker cooperatives, developing grassroots leadership for the NAACP, and connecting activists across the country. When Bob Moses met her at the SCLC, however, she was frustrated for a number of reasons. In his book, Radical Equations, Moses writes that “her style strained an already uncomfortable political relationship and finally made it impossible for Miss Baker to continue with SCLC. ‘She wasn’t church,’ one SCLC minister said. She wasn’t deferential. She wasn’t a man in an organization that was patriarchal as well as hierarchical. And what I think was probably the most critical tension: her concept of leadership, that it should emerge from the community and be helped in its growth by grassroots organizers, clashed with SCLC’s idea of projecting and protecting a single charismatic leader.”7

In 1960, Miss Baker convened young people of the sit-in movement at the founding of the Student Non-­violent Coordinating Committee and urged them to let their new organization take root independently of the older adults running the SCLC and the NAACP. The young people had to figure things out on their own. They had to believe in their own ability to lead. They had to find motivation for action through their own experiences, discussions, and decisions, without requiring sanction from anyone else, if they were to bear up under the onslaught white America had in store for them. Their discipline was not to be the discipline of an army that follows a chain of command from generals down. Their discipline conformed to a different tradition: the discipline of communal responsibilities among peers who consciously agree to share a common purpose and way of living.

Organizers are crucial to the tradition represented by Miss Baker and Bob Moses. The organizers know it is hard to excavate a common purpose out of all the different tendencies, needs, and views any collection of people has, especially when the pressure merely to survive is very great. The organizers also know that it is hard for people to remember their own power, since most of us are only too happy to surrender our power to charismatic leaders who will just tell us what to do. But effective organizers like Bob Moses and Ella Baker succeed in helping people define a consensus about what they are working on, what they are trying to do, and also succeed in establishing structures whereby a group with a consensus about what their work is can organize themselves to get it done.

When Bob Moses found himself in Mississippi, the consensus turned out to be around voting rights, and the structure turned out to be voter registration drives, the Freedom Summer campaign and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Many histories have been written about this work because it affected the lives of millions, and still affects us today. The right to vote is not a radical enough goal, but it was the issue a consensus developed around and therefore became a powerful organizing tool. Organizers and theoreticians might think they know more than the people, but it takes time for the people to learn to trust themselves, paths may be winding, and unexpected, powerful things may happen on the way. Trying to short-circuit the winding path to communal learning usually backfires, because the “experts,” charismatic leaders, or vanguards take up the space that the people must learn to structure for themselves. Voting rights was an organizing tool, not an end goal. Thousands of sharecroppers, day laborers, and domestic workers in Mississippi were willing to risk their lives for the right to vote, and that willingness created the opportunity for a mass movement that had previously been impossible to grow in the Deep South. Others who prefer to focus on different goals must not only articulate why their preference makes sense, but must also find a way to get people to risk their lives for it.

For Ella Baker and Bob Moses what is more radical than voting rights is education. The Civil War had the effect of freeing the slaves and making them citizens, but “education,” Moses says, “is the subtext of the right to vote.” Citizenship, due process, protection under the law, and the right to vote hold little meaning without full access to the benefits of education. More importantly, the viability of an oppressed population as a culture and people is inextricably linked to the way its children are raised, to their control of how young people are brought up and for what purposes. And this question is not one to be answered top-down. It is a question whose answers must emerge from the oppressed community, helped by organizers to develop consensus and structures that will get the work of education done. In the process of this struggle, the members of more powerful castes will fight viciously to preserve their own children’s status, even more viciously than they fight to preserve other privileges. The more powerful castes understand that pressure on the nation’s educational arrangements is pressure on their way of life.

Obviously, teachers will play a crucial role in giving birth to the required consensus and structures for a liberated system of education. In fact, it is becoming harder and harder to distinguish the role of teacher in a school of poverty from the role of organizer. We start each year in the standardized school with no consensus at all among our students about what we are there for. No common purpose; no sense of a shared task freely undertaken; no agreement on how our work should be structured beyond the idiotic routines of drills, course requirements, tests, and grades. In these circumstances, if we see our students as persons not as things, our first responsibility in the Baker/Moses tradition is to start to develop a consensus with our students and their families about what our work is. This is easier said than done. What follows throughout this book is an approach to understanding the organizing task of developing such a consensus and then putting it to work. Guided by this tradition, we were actually somewhat surprised to notice ourselves accomplishing what we set out to do, and are still trying to understand exactly how we did it. This book is a part of that effort.

Bob Moses points out that, through an “accident of history,” math teachers in particular find themselves having to accept the role of organizer today. No consensus about education can avoid the significance of abstract symbolic languages in controlling power in the twenty­-first century. Put another way, no community will voluntarily accept a system of education that leaves its young people without access to sophisticated quantitative reasoning, because that lack of access so obviously corresponds today to a lower caste status. The point of mathematical literacy is not that everyone must be a mathematician, just as the point of verbal literacy does not entail that everyone must be a poet or professional writer. The point is that as a practical fact of organizing around education for equality, the ability to understand and evaluate quantitative arguments represented in abstract symbolic forms cannot be left out: no community will allow it.

Appreciating this “accident of history” and his own fortuitous position as both a Harvard-trained philosopher of mathematics and accomplished organizer on a national scale, Bob Moses began the Algebra Project in 1982. The Algebra Project works explicitly in the tradition of Ella Baker, helping teachers, parents, and students develop a consensus about how young people in poverty should be brought up, and working to create structures through which young people and their families can organize themselves to get what they need. We formulate this goal as helping young people fashion their own insurgency, an insurgency that will be even more disruptive than SNCC’s, insofar as ending Jim Crow education is more radical than voting.

In the Baltimore Algebra Project, we have spent fifteen years building a student organization that uses math literacy as an organizing tool. High school students and recent graduates run their own non-profit business from an off-campus office, using SNCC as a model for collective decision-making. Public schools and after-school agencies contract with the students for peer-to-peer math literacy services based at the schools, and other non-profits are increasingly hiring Baltimore Algebra Project youth to teach their organizations to be more youth-governed. Over ten years, Baltimore high school students and recent graduates, nearly all black, have earned millions of dollars through their producer ­co-op. And doing math—tutoring, running summer math programs and after-school study groups, organizing peer teaching in classrooms—creates an economic base for the young people to do political work, too. The relatively lucrative and marketable business of math subsidizes student committees that advance organizing goals.

The political work is of three kinds. First, there is the students’ work in running their own organization. They have developed a culture and mechanisms of self-­governance that fit their needs and that are sound enough to earn the respect of customers and investors outside the organization. Second, the same students have led or joined concrete campaigns around their material conditions—transportation, youth incarceration, school funding—and have won major victories. Third, they are learning about building coalitions with other organizations at both the local and national levels, gradually developing an awareness of the larger world and larger strategic issues, and learning how to pass that larger awareness on to new generations of youth coming up.

The purpose of this book is not, however, to tell that story in detail. It is rather to lay out an understanding of young people’s roles and of the teacher/organizer role that makes the story of youth organizing possible. It is about a way of seeing and talking about our experiences in schools of poverty that lets us do our work without being demoralized or forced out.

People who see Baltimore Algebra Project youth operating in public contexts are often startled. Depending on the observer’s perspective, they can be either pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised. But in either case, the surprise comes from the young people’s clear and conscious refusal of the role of “prop.” They step into history as persons, and observers find themselves required to re-act to their humanity, to figure out what relation they are going to have with these forceful young people. At the root of the Baker/Moses organizing tradition is the conviction that every human being is a person who can decide to step into history, which is an act that puts you into dynamic relation with other persons, and that makes human arrangements different from what they would have been without you. Things, props, mere objects, play no such role in history.

The second major tradition I use in this book is a tradition of verbal study that goes under the heading “rhetoric,” and for which my principal authorities are Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison. The word “rhetoric” has unfortunately narrowed in common use to describe verbal tricks deployed to bias or twist public opinion in ways that distract attention from “logic” and “facts.” But in the tradition represented by Burke and Ellison, “rhetoric” refers to any use of speech designed “to induce action in beings that by nature respond to symbols.” Logic, by this tradition, is not opposed to rhetoric, but is a part of rhetoric. Sometimes the arguments we make to induce action in others are strictly logical arguments. More often our appeals are directed at least in part toward the emotions of a listener, or are intended to help an audience identify our argument with someone they admire or with the type of person they would like to become. This rhetorical tradition treats our susceptibility to various forms of persuasion as one of the key facts about human beings: we are a species that responds not only to logic, but to emotion and to both conscious and unconscious identifications as well. There are traditions in many cultures that treasure thinking and teaching about how to use these various means to induce action in others through the use of verbal or other symbols, and especially about how to induce right action, action that tends toward the common good.

The field of rhetoric interpreted in this way is vast. But I am interested in it for a relatively specific purpose: in what ways do people in schools—young and old—seek to induce action in others through the use of symbols (that is both through language and through nonverbal symbolic action)? We are looking at this, following Burke and Ellison, from many points of view: not only how teachers or administrators speak and act so that the students will be persuaded to act in certain ways; but also how the students speak and act to induce actions in each other and in the teachers and administrators as well.

An approach through this rhetorical tradition is intended to systematically undo the bad effects of literalism in thinking about schools. To the literal-minded, a lesson on writing an essay or on DNA is simply about writing an essay or DNA. The state assigns certain “content” to be “taught” and the teacher then “delivers” the content. But to a student of rhetoric, these lessons are complex symbolic acts in contexts rich with meaning, saturated with the purposes of both the teachers and the students and with the purposes of people far from the classroom who have induced the students and teachers to participate in the lesson in the first place.

Any page of Ellison’s great novel, Invisible Man, is an exercise in this kind of rhetorical study. To Ellison, surviving as black people in America requires cleverness about how things are not what they seem, about how the contexts of language and history complicate any ­literal-minded interpretations of things, and make us vulnerable to real dangers if we ignore their complexities. The narrator of Invisible Man is constantly discovering that there is no meaning independent of context, that the world, as he puts it, is less “solid” than he thought, though he nevertheless holds onto the search for right interpretations because he will die without them.

In a traumatic scene, his college president, Dr. Bledsoe, expels him from the school, saying:

“You’re nobody, son. You don’t exist—can’t you see that? The white folk tell everybody what to think—except men like me. I tell them; that’s my life telling white folk how to think about the things I know about. Shocks you, doesn’t it? Well that’s the way it is. It’s a nasty deal and I don’t always like it myself. But you listen to me: I didn’t make it and I know I can’t change it. But I’ve made my place in it and I’ll have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am.”

He was looking me in the eye now, his voice charged and sincere, as though uttering a confession, a fantastic revelation which I could neither believe nor deny. Cold drops of sweat moved at a glacier’s pace down my spine....

“A man gets old winning his place, son. So you go ahead, go tell your story; match your truth against my truth. The broader truth.”8

Ellison’s narrator stops paying attention. “I no longer listened, nor saw more than the play of light upon the metallic disks of his glasses, which now seemed to float within the disgusting sea of his words. Truth, truth, what was truth? Nobody I knew, not even my own mother, would believe me if I tried to tell them. Nor would I tomorrow, I thought, nor would I.”9

The meanings in Invisible Man are dizzying, but no more dizzying than those faced in America’s schools of poverty. The ironies, the unreliability of pronouncements, the mirrors within mirrors that confuse reality and appearance—these conditions are our normal state. In Ellison’s story, we have a school administrator punishing a student apparently to ensure his own standing with the white power brokers who lend him authority. Should the narrator believe that the exemplary president of the college is so self-hating, has so internalized hatred of his own people? Or is this only a stance the president assumes to advance his interests rationally in the racist context? Hard to believe the first interpretation; hard to believe the second. “I could neither believe nor deny,” the narrator concludes.

And how can we convey in any definite way the nightmarish intricacies of confusion and vertigo induced by dysfunctional schools. No one believes the young people when they try to tell the simple truth about their experience. They are doubted and distrusted from the moment they walk in the doors. And it is difficult for them even to believe themselves the next day.

Ellison’s protagonist is chastened again and again as his people and the country try to teach him that no words or symbols correspond in any simple way to “reality.” “I’ve come a long way from those days when, full of illusion, I lived a public life and attempted to function under the assumption that the world was solid and all the relationships therein. Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division is there true health.”

If we are going to have an effect on the world through our speech and action, we will have to learn to build health from confusing division. Health will not come from any literalist instructions or commands, but rather from complex, ambiguous terms in fluid and ever-­changing combinations.

This is actually what human beings do, and in particular what Africans in America have been doing from the start. The crucial black cultural forms that function as tools for survival are spectacularly allusive, multivalent, and elaborate as symbolic systems: music, folklore, folk art, dance, and verbal inventiveness are immense cultural achievements now permeating the whole world’s culture, and they are in no way literal-minded.

In struggling to create his novel from the ground of black culture, Ellison turned to the work of his friend and mentor, Kenneth Burke. Burke was developing a theory of “dramatism,” the understanding of human motivation through the elements of drama. The protagonist’s remark that “all life is divided and only in division is there true health” could have been lifted from Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives, which Ellison was reading as he composed Invisible Man.10 In a section titled “A metaphorical view of hierarchy,” Burke writes:

So the myth of society’s return to the child, or the child’s return to the womb, or the womb’s return to the sea, can all point towards a myth still farther back, the myth of a power prior to all parturition. Then divided things were not yet proud in the private property of their divisiveness. Division was still but “enlightenment”.…

Partition provides terms; thereby it allows the parts to comment on one another. But this “loving” relation allows also for the “fall” into terms antagonistic in their partiality, until dialectically resolved by reduction to “higher” terms.11

Burke and Ellison work the vein of rhetorical tradition that accepts the necessity of division—terms for and against, dizzy meanings heading off in all directions—but that seeks to harness division and fragments of meaning for common purposes and common ends. Burke’s guiding analogy for this approach to understanding human action is the genre of drama. A play necessarily divides competing principles between characters that battle and strive with each other. Within the play, one character or another may come out on top, but seen from a different vantage point, the roles of the opposing characters contribute together and collaborate in a common aesthetic purpose—the effect of the play as a whole.

Somehow or other, we must come to understand the roles of young people in this way. We must try to conceive of a unity of action where the young people, being themselves, contribute not to the state’s ends, but to an end worked out in the common good. The underlying difficulty is that schools of poverty necessarily bring together people of fundamentally different statuses in the social hierarchy: adults and youth; the educated and the uneducated; middle-class teachers and working-class youth; and increasingly, white teachers and students of color. Fortunately, the Burke/Ellison rhetorical tradition is especially useful in studying communication between different kinds within complex hierarchies. In literal terms, the powerful simply have power and the powerless do not. This is what makes us feel so trapped in schools. But in the imagined world of a play, both the powerful and the powerless contribute to the movement of the plot, influencing each other, and contributing to a totality that is beyond the absolute control of either party.

Once we understand young people as genuinely equal actors in the drama of the nation, not as pawns or victims or props, many more possibilities will begin to come to mind for entering the action and moving it along toward insurrection. In fact, they are moving us along already.

3 Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970).

4 Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

5 Jonathan Swift describes the literalism of the Great Academy of Lagado in Gulliver’s Travels: “An expedient was therefore offered, ‘that since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on.’…[M]any of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things; which has only this inconvenience attending it, that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged, in proportion, to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us, who, when they met in the street, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burdens, and take their leave.”

6 Bernice Johnson Reagon, If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me: The African American Sacred Song Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 63–64.

7 Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 33–34.

8 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 143–144.

9 Ibid., 144.

10 See Bryan Crable, Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke: At the Roots of the Racial Divide, 79–111.

11 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California, 1969/1950), 140.