"I don't know what you take me as..."

“And I know my rights so you goin' need a warrant for that

‘Aren't you sharp as a tack? You some type of lawyer or something?

Somebody important or something?’

‘Child, I ain't passed the bar, but I know a little bit…’”—JayZ, 99 Problems

“There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.”—Michel Foucault (1991) by Didier Eribon, Trans. by Betsy Wind, Harvard UP, p. 282.

What qualifies as knowledge? Intellect? A smart idea? A powerful idea?

When I listen to the many struggles and judgments that infuse education discourse, these questions (always these questions) return to me.

It surprises me how uncomfortable the words “I don’t know” can make us. Considering the current rate of expansion and mutability of our knowledge, I am not sure how any epistemological certainty is absolutely privileged above another: I’m even more perplexed by our lack of embrasure of uncertainty as a condition that frames our judgments. I think on some level, we all like to feel safe with what we know. Emotionally and cognitively, it is hard to acknowledge the absolute boundaries of our way of knowing without feeling kind of “out there.” Perhaps, when we begin to take on the mantle of “intellectual” (as seems to be required part and parcel to acquiring academic credibility), and when that identity is reified by social expectations that we use our way of knowing to uphold a persona of “intellectuality,” we find ourselves clinging so tightly to our knowledge-base for fear of losing our small stake in an otherwise cold and unpredictable world. We don’t want to let anyone down, ourselves included. And in our fear and fervor, we begin to assert our own way of thinking—sometimes without thinking or knowing—into the lives of others, the ways of others. We stop seeing their knowings as knowings at all. In our smallness, we see their knowledges as unsafe, invalid, and unlike us. Because how can there be space for our intellectuality and theirs as well? Maybe we would like to know them, and maybe they would like to know us, but the risk of saying, “I don’t know. I don’t really know what you know,” is too high and too burdensome.

Time to lay some burdens down.

This week I read James Traub’s City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College. I don’t know what to think about it, precisely. What to feel about it. Traub’s heart seems like it is in the right place [meaning, he, by his own admission, “wanted City College to work,” (p. 18)], but his own analytical and philanthropic goals seem to get in the way of his ability to see how the curation of knowledge can lead to the blind exclusion of entire epistemic and cultural value systems (most notably those least historically like his, though he seems unaware of this exclusive tendency). On the one hand, I feel the desire to be compassionate toward Traub’s attempt to discuss the intersecting lives of others as they exist within the institutional framework that is City College. I believe his goal was most likely to champion the value of education, itself, so I am inclined to see his best intentions. But best intentions or not… It is not easy, if even possible, to represent “the other” with any completeness, so Traub’s analysis—institutional or not—was bound to be fraught with misrepresentations by its very sociopolitical nature. Still, is there empathy, that component so necessary in exploring other knowledges with any hope of learning anything at all?

Not authentically. At one point Traub points to City College’s motto, Respice, Adspice, Prospice: “Look back, look before you, look ahead” (p. 9). Traub, in his discussion, carries out this creed: what he fails to do is look inside. He fails to look with. Most of all, he fails to realize what he can’t see. Traub makes the mistake that so many like him make by assuming an insider’s view of knowledge even while exoticizing the very people and groups he refuses to self-identify with. Addressing the condescension of Traub’s historical-political account of City College is tricky because he does provide student testimony from individuals that seem to allow for representation of genuine experience, and often these experiences do contain authentic systemic themes of economic and political struggle. However, Traub’s oversight is in allowing the individual to represent the whole, and I’m afraid that his view of City College fell prey to the reductivist stereotyping that happens when one privileges their own scope and reach of knowledge without recognizing its limited capacity to see the comprehensive value of others’ social position.

 Consider the following:

People at City tended to think of the college as a supremely successful experiment in international living. Especially in New York, with its apparently insatiable appetite for tribal conflict, the City Cafeteria—where Hatians and Morroccans and Russians and Puerto Ricans and Sri Lankans and Peruvians and Khmers and African Americans talked to one another like civilized human beings—was an uplifting spectacle. And this was particularly true for many of City’s middle-class white Americans, who tended to be far more taken with issues of multiculturalism than were the multicultural immigrants themselves. At lunch one day I met an English major who had grown up in a small town outside of Lincoln, Nebraska. Cindy had gone to an all-white high school, and when she brought a black friend home one afternoon her father threatened to throw her both of them out of the house. Now she was living in a Hispanic neighborhood in Manhattan, taking Bible study class in Harlem, and dating a Korean guy. It was Cindy’s idea of heaven. She looked around at the sea of faces in the cafeteria and said, “What I like about this place is that the smallest minority is blondes. (p. 17)

Funny thing about privileging your own knowledge—it privileges so many other things implicitly, too. Culture, class, civilization, humanity. To the point that it blinds you to the possibility that perhaps the existence of others’ lives and intellects might not be there for your self-indulgent sense of “entry into” some kind of “tribal” buffet of experiences. (Quite frankly, I find this entire passage rather repulsive and naively written to the point of absurdity.) It never occurs to Traub that he, too, is a race and a knowledge among many, Harvard-educated, though he may be. It never occurs to him that at City College, a blonde/white English major perhaps shouldn’t be singled out as civilized among the tribes, in a privately white heaven: rather, she (like Traub) has not yet learned to see herself with/in the people around her, a reciprocal contributor. He never asks the most vital question—what could they teach me?

Perhaps it might feel safe to hold on to old knowledges, old mottoes, and old ideas—that “civility” looks and sounds like a girl from Nebraska or Traub, himself. But this is not the new, functional, or pragmatic. It is not empathetic or kind. It is not wise. And if an education should be good for anything at all, it should be learning to let go of old ideas that are no longer helpful and embracing new ones that move us forward, scary though they may be.

"I don't know what you take me as / or understand the intelligence that Jay-Z has..." Indeed! I'll just let him do the teaching on this one!


To find out more about City College: http://www.ccny.cuny.edu