Just back from three day sojourn through central and western New York—specifically Albany, Buffalo and Fredonia, all places that critical to my intellectual development at various points of my career. I earned a BA and MA in English from SUNY-Fredonia, my doctorate from the University of Buffalo and taught for six years at SUNY-Albany. The Book House at Stuyvesant hosted a joint signing with myself and Janell Hobson and the English Department at SUNY-Fredonia hosted a lecture and signing for me as part of the college’s homecoming activities.
The highlight of my trip though was conversation between myself and Masani Alexis DeVeaux that was hosted by Talking Leaves Books in Buffalo. Talking Leaves is one of my favorite book spots in the world. Founded in the midst of the heady political times of the early 1970s, it remains a bastion of sophisticated left sensibilities as well as a shining example of a business committed to social justice and community involvement. Still remember picking up my copy of Tricia Rose’s Black Noise at Talking Leaves—literally grabbing my copy as they opened the shipment (my colleague and friend Greg Dimitriadis picked up the other copy that day back in 1994).
Of course, Alexis and I have a history—much of it lovingly recalled throughout the pages of New Black Man. Though we could have “performed” as Mama Soul and Soul Baby (the metaphor for our intellectual relationship) Alexis (who attended the Saturday march in DC) thought it would be better to use our conversation to discuss political realities in the post 9/11, post-Katrina world. What occurred was a great conversation about pedagogical strategies, the generational divide among The Left and the need for a new language of social justice—a language more in sync with “generation ipod” and finally wrested from the grips of the Old Left.
One particularly interesting moment during our conversation about language was a discussion of the word “activism”. In her former role as Chair of Women’s Studies at the University of Buffalo, Alexis mention that she often had to defend to administration the department’s desire to maintain small class sizes. Her simple response to them was that the classes needed to be small because the students were, in part, being trained to become activists. Activists? And as you would expect from any university administrator, in their minds, activism was equated with “Take Back the Night” events, locking administrators in their offices or students taking over the President’s office. Fair enough—and don’t think that their aren’t a large amount of students on our campuses who think of activists and activism in the same light, hence their desire to distance themselves from any thing that even hints at an act of activism.
But Alexis made the point the activism should begin with equipping our students (and the folk) with the skills to critically access their relationship to power and to that which actively disempowers and marginalizes them. I’ve been thinking about this definition as I introduce the students in my “Introduction to African-American Studies” class to the activist example that was Ella Jo Baker (Courtesy of Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement : A Radical Democratic Vision ). Many of my students see activism as something that belonged to the “1960s” and thus out of place with their contemporary lives. Like so many others—Joy James, Manning Marable and Charles Payne quickly come to mind—I’ve always seen “Black Studies” as a site of praxis—theory and practice imagined in the name of social justice. And in 2005 there is perhaps no better example of praxis than Ella Jo Baker, particularly because as a “middle aged” women in the late 1950 and early 1960s she understood the importance of embracing “youth culture” as a means of helping black youth realize their own political goals.
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The original impetus for my trip to Western New York was the 35th anniversary celebration of the Educational Development Program (EDP) at SUNY-Fredonia. EDP is an offshoot of the Educational Opportunity Program, a program that exist on all 66 of the State University of New York’s campuses. Created by legislation pushed through the New York State assembly in the late 1960s by Buffalo’s Arthur O. Eve. 35 years after the program’s founding, more than 40,000 folk have earned undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees from SUNY campuses because of the program. I am one of those 40,000 graduates. As a “SUNY-baby” (I earned three degrees from SUNY institutions) who benefited greatly from the Educational Opportunity Program and the Underrepresented Minority Fellowship (also the brainchild of Eve), I derived great satisfaction from the six years that I spent as a professor at SUNY-Albany. Arthur Eve understood that the hallmark of a productive society was an educated and skilled professional workforce. He also understood that blacks, Latino/as and poor whites were underrepresented within the SUNY system. Out of realities of “need” and “social utility” came a vision that ultimately was in the best interest of the State of New York and society at large.
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