Decolonizing Public Education: Some Thoughts on the CFA Strike Vote

I.

Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, Antiono Gramsci, and many others on "the left" have argued that public institutions are tools of capitalist oppression, upheld by dominant ideologies and perpetuated within processes of interpolation and subjugation. A complicated way of saying that institutions like education serve and coerce us into capitalist ideologies and relationships with one another.

In Woman, Race, and Class (1983), Angela Davis shows us that public institutions and even activist movements for social change are co-produced not merely by capital's class relations (bourgeois v. proletariat, for example) but by a classism intricately co-produced by racism, sexism, and homophobia.

In other words: Public institutions pretend to be public -- to serve the public -- but actually serve capital's interests and the state that upholds them.

II.

Education is but one public institution whose role is to serve capitalism's working ideologies and practices.

For Native peoples, for instance, education has worked in concert with other institutions -- like religion and the military -- to forcibly and violently expand the United States as an empire over the lands and bodies of Native peoples. Forced relocation, governmental ("tribal") liquidation, and assimilationist education programs targeted Native lands and bodies as resources for the capitalist state. Through systematic fraud and military invasion, the state appropriated Native lands and bodies for its own, turning both into exploitable properties and commodities.

These programs were co-produced by dominant ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality. Native peoples were represented as inferior people with barbaric, savage "societies". Native women were denied their historic role in negotiations and treaty making processes, denied property rights by Congress and the courts, physically abused and sexually raped, made over into servants of boarding schools, 'white' ranches, and the wealthy. Native men were discriminated against, murdered, beaten, and made over into farm hands and soldiers. Native two-spirits were murdered, raped, incarcerated, and forced into heteronormative categories and classrooms.

What these histories and practices show us is how education works as an apparatus of capitalist state control and empire building.

III.

The effort to transform public education systems -- from charter schools to universities -- into "for profit," privatized schools is the logical development of capitalist ideologies and aims. Ideologies and aims that make students over into indentured servants to transnational banks and their corporations, with lesser and lesser quality in education (not to mention less and less radical) and more and more desperation for jobs that are not there when they graduate.

PBS Frontline's "College, Inc." provides an excellent analysis of how this is happening. The California Faculty Association provides an excellent set of resources for understanding its principles.

The story goes like this: Public higher education universities are funded less and less by the federal/state government. They respond by hiring less and less tenure and tenure-track faculty and more and more temporary lecturers, providing less and less in pensions and health benefits, and encouraging faculty to take early retirement and even other jobs. They respond by pushing more students into the classroom, charging students more for tuition, forcing students to take more expensive classes (on-line and summer session), and cutting back scholarships and other financial support. Desperate to finish their degrees, students are indentured to student loans they will never be able to pay off in their lifetimes. Meanwhile, the profits that universities accrue through these cost savings measures -- made on the grounds that they are broke and underfunded -- are disproportionately poured into administrative costs. Not the classroom.

The result is a far more conservative, limited, and unchallenged learning environment for students and more and more profit to the university and its administrators.

I speak from experience. I finished my Ph.D.from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2000. I owed $81,000 in student loans -- not merely because of tuition increases, though there was that (to the tune of 400 to 500%), but because during the eight years it took me to complete my degree -- the majority of which I worked as a teaching assistant and lecturer -- saw the .com financial boom in the greater bay area, resulting in ever escalating costs of living. For instance, I paid $525/mo. in rent and took home $950 for nine months out of the year in salary. Hard to live like that for very long. So, I graduated with student loan debt. I have paid about $600/mo. on that debt every month for twelve years. That's $86,400, for those of you not doing the math. But the principle on my student loan has only gone down by about $11,000. I still owe $71,000 on the loan. I continue to pay $600/mo. So, you tell me where I will be in 17 years when -- at 67 -- I will be eligible and probably asked to retire? While they continue to gut my pension and destroy social security, usually on the grounds that we (the public) are not doing enough? Meanwhile, I rent a small room in someone else's house 22 miles from campus to save money on rent to keep up with payments on my student loan. Payments that go to a bank that has earned about SEVENTY FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS in interest off of my payments over the last decade?

Tell me, again, how this is not a system aimed at maintaining and expanding a capitalist empire? Co-produced by ideologies that tell me I am not a good enough citizen because I am Native? Lesser because I have made "unpopular" decisions about marriage and kids? Lesser because I am a woman?

IV.

I wonder what decolonizing public education would mean. How do we get the empire's interests out of our classrooms, out of our intellect, out of our work? When so much of all of it is defined by capitalism? Is it possible?

I have been asked to vote to strike, to support the CFA in its now failed negotiations with the CSU over faculty contracts. I do not want to do this. I am afraid about paying my bills. Meeting my financial obligations. But the CSU seems to think we are paid too much, given too much, teach too little, and sacrifice nothing to a system that demands our loyalty. Really? I have been working since 2008 without a contract and without a contractual raise. While cost of living skyrockets in a failed economy, exaggerated by living in one of the most expensive places in the United States to live. But I am not doing enough? Alrighty then.

Guess it's time to strike. In the language of capitalism that the system speaks, it is the only action they pay attention to.

Liquor Sovereignty: A Manifesto

(Reposting from February 2011.)


Having smashed the offensive against the people’s right to liquor, We the People, have launched a large-scale counter-offensive against the lies of the enemy. We are on the advance, working through the World’s Dives Handbook, moving out from our centers in all directions. United, the enemy flees before us in fear and trepidation.

The situation between the enemy and the people has fundamentally changed over the last several hundred years.

The enemy would like the people to believe that there were no intoxicants or hallucinogens in the Américas before they arrived with theirs. The enemy would like the people to believe that -- unacquainted with such substances the people quickly became addicted and lost their self-control. The enemy wants the people to believe that they killed all the animals for their fur to trade for the enemy’s liquor. That the people gave up their women to trade for the liquor. They want the people to believe that, over time, the people became drunk, lazy, and useless. All because of liquor.

The enemy is good at telling lies. Especially about itself. They want the people to believe that hundreds of years ago the enemy was reformed by a new consciousness as radically democratic revolutionaries. That they warred against the evil empires of the day and were victorious, forcing the empires to withdraw and establishing a New Nation (a “united states”) based on the democratic principles of personal freedom, liberty, and brotherhood (yes, brotherhood, for the New Nation was misogynist and sexist!).

But this New Nation quickly passed its oppressive laws to take away the people’s rights. They called these laws the Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts (from 1790 to 1847) and said that the people needed them because they had become lazy, stupid, and useless on liquor (ignoring its own criminal indiscretions during the prohibition era).

These laws did not help the people. They forbade the people from enjoying their rights, to possess liquor on their own lands and in their own homes. They criminalized the people’s rights to liquor. They forced the people to trade only at posts where the enemy could be present to control them. They took away the people’s rights to control their own trade, lands, and economies. All because they said the people were powerless to resist the liquor—prone to addiction as the people were, without any immunity to resist against such a disease, succumbed to and even demanding liquor as currency.

The enemy tells lies about the people that are not even clever. It tells these lies so the people will blame themselves for the poverty and the despair they live in. These lies work to legitimate the violence, fraud, and greed of the colonial-imperial state that is still at the heart of the New Nation. These lies represent the people as inferior and weak, sexually wanton and lazy, violent, given to impulsive and self-destructive behavior. After all, if the people are these things, then certainly the New Nation is justified in responding with all its force to civilize them.

The people must tell their own histories about liquor to be truly liberated. They must be united and aligned with others committed to the truth!

They must tell how the colonial and imperial structures of domination made them poor and engendered violence between them.

This is not a lie.

It is not to say that poverty and violence were absent before the enemy came (that would be stupid and wrong). This is to say that the image of the people as naturally and culturally inferior refuses to acknowledge the ways that the New Nation’s colonial and imperial forces produced the conditions in which liquor was used as currency with the people. That the enemy enabled and then exploded control of the fur trade across the continent with liquor; that liquor as currency was responsible for the people’s economic indenture and exploitation; that the illegal sale of lands by the people’s councils to speculators, and then their cessions by treaties to the New Nation, meant in part to alleviate those debts and secure foods and supplies to alleviate the people’s poverty and despair.

It was all part of the New Nation’s attempt at total genocide of the people.

The people must be liberated from the lies of the enemy!

They must overthrow the enemy’s lies!

Take back the liquor!

Every person must rise up, their shot glasses held high in the air, and pronounce together in spirit:

Liquor sovereignty is decolonization by the exercise of self-determination over what one puts in one’s body.

The people and their allies demand:

(1) The people unite amongst themselves and with their allies against the enemy’s racist lies to proclaim that the people are not biologically or culturally inferior or prone to alcoholism or the interpersonal violence it engenders. These lies about the people fuel structures of oppression and exploitation. There is no post-colonial! No post-imperial! No “settler society.” There is only Empire.

(2) The people proclaim that sobriety and abstinence in and of themselves are not their goals. True self-discipline is an ethic of personal and collective responsibility. Drink and play responsibly!

(3) The people do not believe that anyone “gets off” (forgiven or otherwise excused by the enemy’s religion) for the interpersonal violence and other crimes committed when drinking or drunk. Take responsibility for yourself and your drink!

(4) The people seek to abolish the enemy’s dictatorships over their bodies and spirits and those of their allies. Personal freedom and liberty are the desired values, but not when their terms are dictated by the enemy and privilege heterosexual domination (aka the brotherhood). Non-heterosexuals and women (not necessarily mutually exclusive) must be empowered!

(5) The people assert that true liberation will come when the status-quo order is steadily and non-violently disrupted and disturbed. Liberation takes stamina!

(6) The people and their allies seek to abolish (not to co-opt) the institutions and policies of the enemy’s regimes, they are what is responsible for the people’s oppression. Self-administration is now self-determination!

(7) The people proclaim that the terms of all personal desires must be reclaimed. Rediscover your bodies and spirits, your intellects, your passions and desires, your eroticism and play. That is decolonization!

[This manifesto seeks comrades and collaborators to contribute and edit......]

Borders

By the time my Dad graduated from high school, he had already run away from home several times.

He and his three older brothers were born in Oklahoma. In 1940, when my Dad was eight, they and my Grandmother moved to Los Angeles, California, to join my Grandfather who had moved there the previous year to secure employment and housing.

On the eve of their move, my Grandmother pleaded with her four young sons not to tell anyone in Los Angeles that they were Indian. Because, she explained, “They kill Indians in California.”

For an eight year old, this proved to be a defining moment. One that Dad spoke of frequently as the time he internalized a kind of fearful shame in being Indian. It wouldn't be until he joined the Navy, he would say, that he learned to feel pride again in who he was.

In the meantime, afraid of being hated and murdered, he learned to allow people to assume he was of Mexican descent (which they often did in southern California because of his darker complexion). Unknown to him at the time, this was something many Native Californians had done since the mid-1800s to escape the state-reimbursed militia groups who roamed California's lands and towns looking for Indians to kill. Those who survived included many who "passed" as Mexicans, often working as farm hands to escape the attention of the militia.

My Dad, restless and unhappy growing up in LA, ran away many times. One time he and a friend hopped a train and got as far away as Kansas before they were caught and returned home.

The last time, Dad and a friend took off for Mexico. He figured that after a year of high school Spanish he was fluent enough in the language that they could make their way. And, after all, he looked Mexican.

So when they got to the border, Dad pretended to be Mexican -- figuring this would be his easy passport across the border. But speaking in his broken one year of high school Spanish to border patrol only got he and his friend detained.

My Grandfather was not happy at having to drive from LA to the border to pick them up. He said nothing to them on the three hour drive home.

I wonder, if today, my Dad and his friend wouldn't have been arrested and detained -- for who knows how long. And what, then, Grandfather would have had to say about that.


On Deportations: From Frontline, Lost In Detention: "Today, Immigration and Customs Enforcement director John Morton announced that 396,906 people were deported during the 2011 fiscal year, the largest number in ICE’s history." ...

So Much Hate

Jimmy: Part I:
Growing Up Behind the Orange Curtain

My brother Jimmy and I are only three years apart in age – he younger than I – but we might as well have grown up on different planets.

He inherited our father’s darker skinned complexion, I our mother’s lighter skinned complexion. His first grade experience – at our otherwise overwhelmingly ‘white’ suburban elementary school campus in southern California – was marred by regular after school bullying and fist fights. I remember one afternoon, after one such altercation, we were in the kitchen with my Mom. Jimmy asked her, in all quiet sincerity, if there was any way to “wash off the brown” so that he wouldn’t get picked on anymore. He was slowly rubbing his arm and looking at mine.

By the time we had both finished high school, we had been well socialized into the political importance of the differences in our skin colors. Depending on which parent we were with had long since determined who was thought to be adopted; depending on what we were wearing and where we were seemed to determine who was paying attention….. By the time I was in my late twenties, my Dad’s male co-workers were thinking I must be his girlfriend – it never occurred to them that we were related. And Jimmy’s slow but steady fall into alcohol and drugs and crime and jail was perceived as, well, predictable.

When Hate Is No Longer Skin Deep

There is nothing more potent, quick, and threatening than the assumptions made based on appearance.

On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year old African-American, was walking from a convenience store to the home of his father’s fiancé in a gated community in Sanford, Florida. He was wearing a hoodie, snacking on Skittles and iced tea, and talking on his cell phone to his girlfriend. He was stalked and murdered by a neighborhood watch coordinator, who has yet to be charged.

On April 29, 2010, Vincent Kee, a 22-year-old Navajo man with developmental challenges, was lured into an apartment in Farmington, New Mexico, by three men in their twenties. The men tortured Kee for hours. They shoved a towel in his mouth to muffle his screams, burned a swastika into his arm with a wire hanger, shaved another swastika onto the back of his head, wrote “KKK” and “White Power” all over his body, and severely beat him. Two of the three men have since been convicted and sentenced; federal charges against all three are pending.

What do the crimes committed against Trayvon and Vincent have in common?

They were both targeted by hate. A hate so deep it was triggered into rage and violence by the mere superficiality of appearance.

Jimmy: Part II:
Discharge

Jimmy has, since he was discharged from the Army and estranged from his wife and child in the early 1990s, gone for long periods of time without being in touch with his family (he has lived in so Cal, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico....). This time around we have not seen or heard from him in what seems like a decade.

Every time I hear or read about a Trayvon or a Vincent, I cannot help but wonder if Jimmy’s distancing of himself from us as his family is not born of a sense of alienation and difference within us as his family. (Our parents separated when we were 13 and 10, respectively. Jimmy's relationship with my Dad had always been strained and seemed to become even more so after then).


In other words.... A schism, carved out by the racisms and sexisms of social hate and violence against “men of color,” has seemed to cut "below skin deep" into his very sense of self and place and home. Like the bullets that pierced into Trayvon’s body and the brandings and writings burned into Vincent’s skin and hair.

The Hate of a Crime, the Crime of Hate

Matthew Wayne Shepard was a gay 22-year-old student at the University of Wyoming. He met two men at the Fireside Lounge in Laramie, Wyoming. They offered him a ride home but took him instead to a remote area where they robbed, pistol-whipped, and tortured him. They left him to die, tied to a fence post. Shepherd was found 18 hours later by a cyclist. He died the next day, still in a coma from his injuries, which included multiple fractures to the back of his head and right ear.

James Byrd Jr., a 49 year-old African American man, was offered a ride by three men. They drove him to a remote area of town, beat him, urinated on him, and chained him to the back of their pickup truck. They dragged him behind the truck for three miles, swerving from side to side. Byrd died after his right arm and head were severed after his body hit a culvert. The men dumped his torso in front of an African-American church and scattered the rest of his remains in 81 different places around town.

In 2009, a hate crimes prevention bill was passed in their names. The bill requires the FBI to report annual statistics on hate crimes. The FBI's Hate Crime Statistics for 2010 reported the following number of hate crimes against the following racial groups:

2,725     African Americans

            747        Hispanics

697        Whites

203        Asians

47          American Indians/Alaska Natives

Racial bias accounted for 47.3 percent of all hate crimes. Religious bias accounted for 20 percent of hate crimes; sexual orientation accounted for 19.3 percent of hate crimes; ethnic/national origin accounted for 12.8 percent of hate crimes; and physical disability accounted for 0.6 percent of hate crimes.

A 2010 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center notes that, "Violence against American Indians, much of it motivated by racial hatred, is a pervasive yet obscure problem that is especially prevalent in so-called border towns.... American Indians are more likely than people of other races to experience violence at the hands of someone of a different race," with 70% of reported violent attacks perpetrated by non-Indians.

 But even those numbers are not entirely complete, for it it is estimated that only 10% of hate crimes against American Indians are reported.

Jimmy: Part III:
Justice In Love

I would like to believe that Trayvon will find some peace, some freedom in his journey, with the just arrest and conviction of his murderer.


I would like to believe Vincent's wounds will heal, in time, with his scars.

I would like to believe I will see my brother again. And he will know he is loved.