The Student As Nigger

              THE STUDENT  AS  NIGGER
By  Jerry  Farber
First published in 1967 in the Los Angeles Free Press, "The Student As Nigger" has become the first classic of
underground and student press. Its author, Jerry Farber, was, at the time of its writing, an English teacher at Los Angeles
State College. The article has stimulated discussion and sometimes controversy wherever it has appeared. Now Farber has
published a book, THE STUDENT AS NIGGER, which contains the full length version of this essay and several other essays
on education in addition to a few short stories. The article reprinted here is shorter than the original version. In editing we
have tried to delete those examples that obviously do not apply to Guilford as we are not a state school nor are we a
public high school. Whether all of the charges leveled by Farber can be applied to Guilford is debatable. However, we are
agreed that we have heard the complaints raised herein many times before, and we have felt some of them ourselves.
Students are niggers. When you get that straight, our schools begin to
make sense. It's more important, though, to understand why they're niggers.
If we follow that question seriously enough, it will lead us past the zone of
academic bullshit, where dedicated teachers pass their knowledge on to a
new generation, and into the nitty-gritty of human needs and hangups. And
from there we can go on to consider whether it might ever be possible for
students to come up from slavery.
First let's see what's happening now. Let's look at the role students play
in what we like to call education. At Cal State L.A., where I teach, the
students have separate and unequal dining facilities. If I take them into the
faculty dining room, my colleagues get uncomfortable, as though there were
a bad smell. If I eat in the student cafeteria, I become known as the
educational equivalent of a niggerlover. In at least one building there are
even rest rooms which students may not use. At Cal State, also, there is an
unwritten law barring student-faculty lovemaking. Fortunately, this
anti-miscegenation law, like its Southern counterpart, is not 100 percent
effective.
Toy  Governments
Course  in  Slavery
What school amounts to, then, for white and black, alike, is a 12-year
course in how to be slaves. What else could explain what I see in a
freshman class? They've got that slave mentality; obliging and ingratiating on
the surface but hostile and resistant underneath.
As do bjack slaves, students vary in their awareness of what's going on.
Some recognize their own put-on for what it is and even let their rebellion
break through to the surface now and then. Others - including most of the
"good students" - have been more deeply brainwashed. They swallow the
.bullshit with greedy mouths. They honest-to-God believe in grades, in busy
work, in General Education requirements. They're pathetically eager to be
pushed around. They're like those grey-headed house niggers you can still
find in the South who don't see what all the fuss is about because Mr.
Charle "treats us real good."
College entrance requirements tend to favor the Toms and screen out the
rebels. Not entirely, of course. Some students at Cal State L.A. are expert
con artists who know perfectly well what's happening. They want the degree
or the 2-S and spend their years on the old plantation" alternately laughing
and cursing as they play the game. If their egos are strong enough, they
cheat a lot. And, of course, even the Toms are angry down deep
somewhere. But it comes out in passive rather than active agression. They're
unexplainably thick-witted and subject to frequent spells of laziness. They
misread simple questions. They spent their nights mechanically outlining
history chapters while meticulously failing to comprehend a word of what's
in front of them.
Self Hatred
The saddest cases among both black slaves and student slaves are the
ones who have so thoroughly introjected their masters' values that their
anger is all turned inward. At Cal State these are the kids from whom
every low grade is torture, who stammer and shake when they speak to a
professor, who go titrough an emotional crisis every time they're called upon
during class. You can recognize them easily at finals time. Their faces are
festooned with fresh pimples, their bowels boil audibly across the room. If
there really is a Last Judgment, then the parents and teachers who created
these wrecks are going to burn in hell.
So
have to take
are   niggers.   It's   time   to   find out why, and to  i
long look at Mr. Charlie.
i  this i
Students at Cal State are politically disenfranchised. They are in an
academic Lowndes County. Most of them can vote in national elections ~
their average age is about 26 - but they have no voice in the decisions
which affect their academic lives. The students are, it is true, allowed to
have a toy government run for the most part by Uncle Toms and concerned
principally with trivia. The faculty and administrators decide what courses
will be offered; the students get to choose their own Homecoming Queen.
Occasionally when student leaders get uppity and rebellious, they're either
ignored, put off with trivial concessions, or maneuvered expertly out of
posiijon. t * k f
A'student at1 Cal State js expected to know his plffee. He calls a faculty
mentfber "Sir" Or "Doctor" or "Professor" - and he smiles and shuffles
some as he stands outside the professor's office waiting for permission to
enter. The faculty tell him what courses to take (in my department, English,
even electives have to be approved by a faculty member); they tell him
what to read, what to write, and, frequently, where to set the margins on
his typewriter. They tell him what's true and what isn't. Some teachers
insist that they. encourage dissent but they're almost always jiving and every
student knows it. Tell the man what he wants to hear or hell fail you out
of the course.
Lobotomized  Students
More discouraging than this master-slave approach to education is the fact
that the students take it. They haven't gone through twelve years of public
school for nothing. They've learned one thing and perhaps only one thing
during those twelve years. They've forgotten their algebra. They've grown to
fear and resent literature. They write like they've been lobotomized. But,
Jesus, can they follow orders! Freshmen come up to me with an essay and
ask if I want it folded, and whether their name should be in the upper
right hand corner. And I want to cry and kiss them and caress their poor
tortured heads.
Students don't ask that orders make sense. They give up expecting things
to make sense long before they leave elementary school. Things are true
because the teacher says they're true. At a very early age we all learn to
accept "two truths," as did certain medieval churchmen. Outside of class,
things are true to your tongue, your fingers, your stomach, your heart.
Inside class things are true by reason of authority. And that's just fine
because you don't care anyway. Miss Wiedemeyer tells you a noun is a
person, place or thing. So let it be. You don't give a rat's ass; she doesn't
give a rat's ass.
The important thing is to please her. Back in kindergarten, you found
out that teachers only love children who stand in nice straight lines. And
that's where it's been at ever since. Nothing changes except to get worse.
School become more and more obviously a prison.
Mr  Charlie
The teachers I know best are college professors. Outside the classroom
^and taken as a group, their most striking characteristic is timidity. Just look
at their working conditions. At a time when even migrant workers have
begun to fight and win, most college professors are still afraid to make
more   than   a   token   effort   to   improve   their   pitiful   economic   status.
Professors were no different when I was an undergraduate UCLA during
the McCarthy era; it was like a cattle stampede as they rushed to cop out.
And in more recent years, I found that my being arrested in demonstrations
brought from my colleagues not so much approval or condemnation as
open-mouthed astonishment. "You could lose your job!"
Now, of course, there's the Vietnamese war. It gets some opposition from
a few teachers. Some support it. But a vast number of professors who know
perfectly well what's happening, are copping out again. And in the high
schools, you can forget it. Stillness reigns.
I'm not sure why teachers are so chickenshit. It could be that academic
training itself forces a split between thought and action. It might also be
that the tenured security of a teaching job attracts timid persons and,
furthermore, that teaching, like police work, pulls in persons who are unsure
of themselves and need weapons and the other external trappings of
authority.
Fear of Students
The general timidity which causes teachers to make niggers of their
students usually includes a more specific fear - fear of the students
themselves. After all, students are different, just like black people. You
stand exposed in front of them, knowing that their interests, their values
and  their  language  are   different  from  yours.   To   make matters worse, you
may suspect that you yourself are not the most engaging of persons. What
then  can protect you from their ridicule and scorn?  Respect for authority.
That's what. It's the policeman's gun again. The white bwana^s pith hefint.t.
So you flaunt that authority. You wither whisperers with a murderous
glance.   You   crush  objectors with erudition and heavy irony. And worst of
all,  you  make  your  own  attainments seem not accessible but a awesomely
remote.  You conceal your massive ignorance - and parade a slender learning.
Murder of Literature
The teacher's fear is mixed with an understandable need to be admired
and to feel superior - a need which also makes him cling to his "white
supremacy." Ideally, a teacher. should minimize the distance between himself
and his students. He should encourage them not to need him - eventually
or even immediately. But this is rarely the case. Teachers make themselves
high priests of arcane mysteries. They become masters of mumbo-jumbo.
Even a more or less conscientious teacher may be torn between the need to
give and the need to hold back, between the desire to free his students and
the desire to hold them in bondage to him. I can find no other explanation
that accounts for the way my own subject, literature, is generally taught.
Literature, which ought to be a source of joy, solace and enlightenment,
often becomes in the classroom nothing more than a source of anxiety - at
best an arena for expertise, a ledger book for the ego. Literature teachers,
often afraid to join7 a real union, nonetheless may practice the worst kind
of trade-unionism in the classroom; they do to literature what Beckmesser
does to song in Wagner's "Meistersinger." The avowed purpose of English
departments is to teach literature; too often their real function is to kill it.
How  it Happens
Vanity, fear and will to power are what turns the teacher into Mr.
Charlie. You might also want to keep in mind that he was a nigger once
himself and has never really gotten over it. And there are more causes,
some of which are better described in sociological than in psychological
terms. Work them out, it's not hard. But in the meantime what we've got
on our hands is a whole lot of niggers. And what makes this particularly
grim is that the student has less chance than the black man of getting out
of his bag. Because the student doens't even know he's it it. That, more or
less, is what's happening in higher education. And the results are staggering.
For one thing damn little education takes place in the schools. How
could it? You can't educate slaves; you can only train them. Or, to use an
even uglier and more timely word, ydu can only program them.
I like to folk dance. Like other novices, I've gone to the Intersection or
to the Museum and laid out good money in order to learn, how to dance.
No grades, no prerequisites, ,no separate diniitg rooms; they just turn you on
to dancin&r. That's' education. Now look at what happens in 'college. A friend,
of mine, Milt, recently finished a foi*. fdance class. For his final, he haa "to
learn thipgs like this: "The, Irish are known for their wit and imagination,'
qualities reflected in their dances, which include the jig, the reel and the
hornpipe." And then the teacher graded^iim, A, B, C, D, or F, while he
danced in front of her. That's not education. That's not even training.
That's an abomination of the face of the earth. It's especially ironic because
Milt took that dance class trying to get out of the academic rut. He took
crafts for the same reason. Great, right? Get your hands in some clay?
Make something? Then the teacher announced a 20-page term paper would
be required - with footnotes.
After       Graduation
Another result of student slavery is equally serious. Students don't get
emancipated when they graduate. As a matter of fact, we don't let them
graduate until they've demonstrated their willingness - over 16 years ~ to
remain slaves. And for important jobs, like teaching, we make them go
through more years just to make sure. What I'm getting at is that we're all
more or less niggers and slaves, teachers and students alike. This is a fact
you might want to start with in trying to understand wider social
phenomena, say, politics, in our country and in other countries.
Educational oppression is trickier to fight than racial oppression. If you're
a black rebel, they can't exile you; they either have to intimidate you or
kill you. But in high school or college they can just bounce you out of the
fold. And they do. Rebel students and renegade faculty members get
smothered or shot down with devastating accuracy. Others get tired of
fighting and voluntarily leave the system. This may be a mistake though.
Dropping out of college for a rebel is a little like going North for a Negro.,
You can't really get away from it so you might as well stay and raise hell.
How do you raise hell? That's a whole other article. But just for a start,
why not stay with the anology? What have black people done? They have,
first of all, faced the fact of their slavery. They've stopped kidding
themselves about an eventual reward in that Great Watermelon Patch in the
sky. They've organized; they've decided to get freedom now, and they've
started taking it.
Student as   Teacher
Students, like black people, have immense unused power. They could,
theoretically, insist on participating in their own education. They could make
academic freedom bilateral. They could teach their teachers to thrive on love
and admiration, rather than fear and respect, and to lay down their
weapons. Students could discover community. And they could learn to dance
by dancing on the IBM cards. They could make coloring books out of the
catalogs and they could put the grading system in a museum. They could
raze one set of walk and let life come blowing into the classroom. They
could raze another set of walls and let education flow out and flood the
streets.^ They could turn the classroom into where it's at - a "field of
action" as Peter Marin describes it. And believe it or not, they could study
eagerly and learn prodigiously for the best of all possible reasons - then-
own reasons.
They could. Theoretically. They have the power. But only in a very few
places, like Berkeley, have they even'begun to think about using it. For
students, as for black people, the hardest battle isn't with Mr. Charlie.- It's
with what Mr. Charlie has done to your mind.
1 "Civilization that tolerated slavery dropped its
slaveholding cloak but the inner feelings remained .. that
the practice of slavery stopped over a hundred years
ago, but the minds of our citizens have never been
freed." -Report of the National Advisory Council on
Civil Disorders
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