by Isabel Ortiz
As a teacher of ENG 2100 and 2150 for the last three semesters, I have often wondered if I am enacting what bell hooks calls “education as the practice of freedom.” What does the practice of freedom look like? I’ve asked myself. What does it feel like? What does it sound like? How will I know that it’s taking place in my class? Though to a certain degree unanswerable, these questions acquired a particular urgency last semester as, at some of the worst moments of the ongoing U.S.-sponsored genocide of Palestinians, the brutalization of protesting students and faculty, as well as the firing of faculty who spoke out about Palestine threatened to quiet this type of work in the classroom.
In the moment, I drew on my own experiences of liberatory education for strength. I remembered TAing for Gary Okihiro, whose lecture class, Third World Studies, had felt electric to me. There, students strove to locate themselves in centuries-long histories of colonialism and capitalist “underdevelopment” of the Global South, approaching decolonization as an ever-unfolding process with both material and psychic features. Gary generated electricity in his classes by emphasizing that there was a place for everyone in liberation struggles and that students could take action in many forms, just as long as they never stopped caring, showing up, and talking about oppression. In lecture, students often asked Gary if he could please just tell them what they should do. He frustrated them with his consistent refusal to answer, borne out of complete confidence, he said, in their potential to come up with some vast and beautifully precise form of resistance to colonialism that the world had not yet seen. Gary died last Spring, and it’s a small comfort to know that he stayed (physically) with us just long enough to witness the swirling dream that he carefully cultivated in his students for so many years coming to life in encampments on college campuses across the country.
In my ENG 2150 class last semester, I adopted the theme Colonization, Capitalism, Self so that my students could meet the moment through the tradition of decolonial thought that I had taught in Third World Studies. We slowly read works such as Césaire’s “Discourse on Colonialism” and Memmi’s “Situations of the Colonized.” There were moments of satisfaction in being able to grope our way through difficult texts and acquire some common language to discuss the structural character of colonization. But the magic that had been in the room when teaching these thinkers with Gary eluded me. White students responded to the ideas with interest, but as if they did not pertain to them at all. Non-white students seemed to appreciate being given words to language a generalized experience of alterity, but I wasn’t sure if I was really reaching them.
I had included The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison on the syllabus as a way to explore how capitalism and colonization worked at the level of the self. The book tells the story of three young girls, Claudia, Pecola, and Frieda, growing up in Lorain, Ohio in 1941. In her foreword to the 1993 edition, Toni Morrison writes that the novel meant to describe the effects of anti-black racism by appealing to a universal experience of rejection: “There can’t be anyone, I am sure, who doesn’t know what it feels like to be disliked, even rejected, momentarily,” she writes. “When this happens, it is some consolation to know that the dislike or hatred is unjustified— that you don’t deserve it. And if you have the emotional strength and/or support from family and friends, the damage is reduced or erased. We think of it as the stress (minor or disabling) that is part of life as a human.”1
The “emotional strength” required to respond to rejection is dramatized in an early scene in which 11-year-old Claudia listens to her friends Frieda and Pecola discussing “how cu-ute Shirley Temple is.”2 Claudia fiercely reacts against the notion that Temple’s blue eyes and blonde hair make her worthy of “worship”3: “younger than both Frieda and Pecola, I had not yet arrived at the development of my psyche which would allow me to love her.”4 When Claudia receives a white doll for Christmas, she destroys it in order to get at the source of the appeal that feels like a precondition for acceptance within white supremacist culture. “I had only one desire,” she says “to dismember it […] to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.”5 She then confesses to attacking real girls too: “The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls,” she says, adding, “the indifference with which I could have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so.”6
When I taught this text for the first time, we read the first two pages of the novel together, then broke into small groups to read this scene. From behind the podium, I listened to students gasp and even more surprisingly, laugh, as Claudia’s violent fantasies and acts were revealed. Some sounded like they were laughing in discomfort, but others were laughing with a pleasure that Morrison’s writing definitely doesn’t foreclose. Morrison’s deadpan account of Claudia’s readiness, as an 11-year old little girl, to indifferently “axe” another one is blunt, arresting, and — yes, to me 100% — funny. “She’s really disturbed,” said one of the gasping students, shaking his head. “I think she has a psychological disorder.” Another agreed that she did, but saw this as grounds for empathy, confidently asserting that the child was definitely neurodivergent, like him. “Is she autistic?” he asked me. “Or is it ADHD…”
Discussion ensued about whether we should “condemn Claudia.” Some students defended her on grounds that I had thought were obvious: she was a child. But many struggled to view her actions as anything but pathological. I left class that day happy that I had succeeded in getting my students to sit up a little straighter than usual at 7:50 A.M. But I also couldn’t help but feel like we had gotten derailed. In debating whether Claudia was sane or not, we weren’t thinking about her motivations in terms of the universal human character of rejection that Morrison was trying to bring out, and we definitely weren’t talking about the society that gave rise to them.
By the time I taught the text again this year, I came prepared. “What do you guys make of Morrison’s use of the word ‘fascinating’ before ‘cry of pain’ as Claudia describes pulling back the little white girls’ eyelids? What does this tell us about her motivations?” A student offered that the narrator’s use of the word “fascinating” could mean that she didn’t understand the effect that her actions would have. “It’s like she didn’t realize that they were… human,” she said, laughing slightly. We then focused more on Claudia’s self-analysis: “When I learned how repulsive this disinterested violence was,” she writes at the end of the passage, “that it was repulsive because it was disinterested, my shame floundered about for refuge. The best hiding place was love.”7 What did Claudia mean, we wondered, in saying that she was repulsed by her violence because it was disinterested? Perhaps it indicated that she devalued violence without purpose or meaning; banal, casual violence, a feature of the very white supremacy to which she was reacting. What made love such a good “hiding place,” and what kinds of alternatives might exist to the “fraudulent love” for Shirley that she eventually, reluctantly assumes?
Overall, my students this year seemed to find Claudia’s actions more understandable. Many appreciated her for her rejection of conformity— why should everyone like the same thing? Why should she pretend to love Shirley Temple if she doesn’t? Across my three classes, I noticed that when discussing Claudia’s motivations, white students were more likely to argue that she was jealous of white girls, while non-white students largely emphasized her curiosity about the world. Per Morrison’s intent, most students related to the alienation of having a different, fiercely-held preference than everyone else in a group. All along there was laughter, and I realized that this too was an essential part of the work that the text does on its readers. Fanon gives us critical tools to theorize the effect of violence against the oppressor on the oppressed. But by putting the revolutionary impulse to reject white supremacy into the body of a small child, Morrison makes it safe to hold the question of violence for oppressed people particularly close. By making that experience fun, she also lowers our defenses and desire to preach, opening space for pleasure in a discussion about liberation. As the necessity to practice freedom in the classroom persists, the vibrancy of her work holds insights not only for anti-racist pedagogy, but toward the goal of getting students to read— and live— honestly.