CLAJ 63.2 notes

 

FOR US/BY US/TO US: Quick notes on CLAJ 63.2

 

Dana A. Williams and Kendra R. Parker, the co-editors of College Language Association Journal 63.2, along with the contributors who wrote essays for that issue,  deserve our gratitude.  The issue motivates us to think more deeply about what matters for citizens who are constantly assaulted by data and narratives we continue to call "news."   Fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina and in the midst of global pandemic, Williams and Parker recognized the urgency of addressing racial unrest and cultural transformation.  Those topics are intimately related to public health and health care; domestic terrorism, economic disarray, and violence;  drug traffic, lurid entertainment, and mental health; political divisions which are immune to reason or repair.

 

The co-editors  did not back down from asking an accusatory question:  Do black scholars "use language, tropes, images and themes with which the full range of readers will be familiar"?  This question presupposes that American scholars are obligated to address citizens who are tormented by the motions of everyday life.  A small number  of scholars do try to speak to millions of people ( the so-called masses), but the majority of scholars  opt to preach in the relatively safe spaces of talk shows, Internet sites,  and religious institutions. In this sense, CLAJ 63.2 is an alarm clock about complicity and lame tactics of denial.

 

Give gratitude to the makers of CLAJ 63.2 for creating a forum  of relentless mirrors.  Do not, however, expect too much.  A few scholars will see themselves in the looking glass and be ashamed.  Only a few.  The rest will remember who signs their paychecks.  They will devise nuanced compromises.  However much  and however well  the CLA scholars  make  a case for integrity,  be assured the majority of American thinkers dare not participate in the revolutionary work of establishing a new rule of law which might murder systemic racism before the end of the 21st century.  Most thinkers  will not venture outside the deceptive  boundaries of professional  comfort zones.

 

The CLAJ forum tells us how  poorly informed  we are about the actual behaviors of readers/consumers. We do have some valuable, historical  studies of African American readers, but we lack long-term empirical studies  The crux of issues flavored with anger and anxiety occupies the gap.  Younger black readers, as David Green suggests, "move seamlessly between tweets, podcasts, film clips, and reading selections" (172). And far too many of them die as they navigate domestic combat zones.  A few scholars who are sixty and older are tempted to believe  the "new normal" of reading is an aspect of genocide.

 

 It is , as the forum proclaims,  desirable for African American scholars to work in concert rather than the isolation modeled on Eurocentric traditions.  It is not  desirable to work disjointedly from one project to another and to give scant  attention to the non-academic voices of the masses.  Why are those voices excluded from our symposiums and conventions? Those voices do matter greatly.

 

 Since 2016 we should know that utopian projects  most often end up in a fascist  wasteland . If we have not absorbed such a truth after 400 years of transforming Africans into Americans, we probably deserve to suffer the consequences of failing to teach David Walker's Appeal.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            August 24, 2020