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After Eric Garner: Invoking the Black Radical Tradition in Practice and in Theory #Blacklivesmatter

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After Eric Garner: Invoking the Black Radical Tradition in Practice and in Theory #Blacklivesmatter Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education ISSN 1545- 4517 A refereed journal of the Action for Change in Music Education Volume 15 Number 2 February 2016 Vincent C. Bates, Editor Brent C. Talbot, Associate Editor After Eric Garner: Invoking the Black Radical Tradition in Practice and in Theory #BlackLivesMatter Eric Shieh © Eric Shieh. 2016. The content of this article is the sole responsibility of the authors. The ACT Journal and the Mayday Group are not liable for any legal actions that may arise involving the article's content, including, but not limited to, copyright infringement. Special Features: For optimal viewing and to access endnotes and citations by simply placing the cursor over the corresponding number and date, download and open this document in Adobe Reader. Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (2) 126 After Eric Garner: Invoking the Black Radical Tradition in Practice and in Theory #BlackLivesMatter Eric Shieh Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School, New York City In this article, I document a series of pedagogical responses in my high school instrumental music classroom following the events of Eric Garner’s murder in New York City. Foregrounding traditions of black radical politics and aesthetics originating with the Black Power Movement in the 1960s, I explore their implications for classroom practice in a larger movement against the systemic killings of Black Americans in the United States. In this work, ideas of politicized listening, multimodality, response, and collectivity emerge, alongside a process of “fumbling” through issues of essentialism and authority, race and aesthetics. Keywords: Black Lives Matter, social justice, radical aesthetics, multimodality, instrumental music, Black Arts Movement 1. An Opening: Eric Garner (1970-2014) aniel Pantaleo is not charged for the death of Eric Garner, for putting Eric in an illegal chokehold, for pushing Eric’s face in the sidewalk while we D can all see on the video that Eric is saying I can’t breathe. The morning after in New York in my classroom I am looking for how it is we mark, we witness, we understand what the law will not understand (the verdict is “hard to understand” says former U.S. President George W. Bush, an equivocation best understood as refusal), and I find myself reaching for John Coltrane. I am reaching for Coltrane because today I need him to be something for us. I am reaching for a tradition of black radicalism in which and for which his music stands, a tradition whose demands, whose critique might call us into encounter with a contemporary social upheaval. This is the Coltrane heard as “an insistence on breaking the very patterns that he discovered” (Benston 2000, 123), the Coltrane of Shieh, Eric. 2016. After Eric Garner: Invoking the black radical tradition in practice and in theory #BlackLivesMatter. Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (2): 126–45. act.maydaygroup.org/articles/Shieh15_2.pdf Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (2) 127 “capitalism dying” and “can be”s (Baraka 1996, 2), the Coltrane that “blew away our passsst /and showed us our futureeeeee” (Sanchez 1973, 274) — the Coltrane upon whom the “topos of performed blackness is felt most resonantly” (Benston 1989, 176). I am hopeful something of the openings Coltrane provided to activists in the 1960s might become ours, and bring us closer somehow to Eric Garner and who we are in relation to him. My tenth-grade students and I play through and listen to his Alabama, an extended wail and interrupted improvisation over the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham by the Ku Klux Klan. I ask my students in the context of Eric Garner how we understand this music, and by this music I mean this wail — by which I mean this speaking, and speaking on the gross injustices dealt to black men and women in our country. I telescope the potential meanings of Coltrane’s work, momentarily, to ask what’s at stake in this music — to ask what power Coltrane holds, and whether we as musicians — or is it human beings or black or white or female or male or (in my case) Asian and gay — hold this power. I ask under what conditions and under what standings we find our way in to this music, and how we find our way back out, out from, outside of, through this music and through this world we inhabit. What follows is an exploration of my classroom practice in the wake of Eric Garner, who is not by any means the first (or last) victim of excessive force by police against black men and women,1 but embarrassingly the first to jolt me out of my complacency as a classroom teacher and demand my direct response. I thus pose this question for myself and for music educators and researchers: where is the space in our classrooms for a radical politics of engagement with the current Black Lives Matters movement? By radical, I indicate a politics that moves beyond sympathy or support and toward a restructuring of value and understanding and practice, musical and otherwise. It is worth pointing out that this question of politics in the classroom, and even radical politics, is not new for this profession (see, for example: Bradley 2012; Hess 2015; Shaw 2012; Gould et al. 2009; Benedict et al. 2015; Allsup and Shieh 2012). In a recent issue of ACT, numerous researchers call upon frameworks that are important in this work, drawing upon the anti-racist framework of George Dei, the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, and Gloria Ladson-Billings’s culturally responsive Shieh, Eric. 2016. After Eric Garner: Invoking the black radical tradition in practice and in theory #BlackLivesMatter. Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (2): 126–45. act.maydaygroup.org/articles/Shieh15_2.pdf Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (2) 128 pedagogy (see Talbot 2015). Here I look instead to a different body of scholarship, associated with black radical politics and aesthetics reaching back to and before the 1960s that has been largely absent in these conversations. This absence is striking, given the explicit relationship between music and politics explored by this work (“black radicalism is (like) black music” declares Fred Moten (2003, 24)), but perhaps not entirely surprising given its origins with the Black Power Movement which is often marginalized in representations of the African-American struggle for civil rights. My argument, which is also a negotiation in my classroom, is that this tradition suggests a particular stake in the question of radical politics of music, and radical politics in relation to black lives. A word by way of my relationship with this tradition of black radicalism: I first encountered its scholarship as an undergraduate student interested in the intersection between music education and social justice. I gravitated to the writings of Amiri Baraka because of his conviction that black revolutionary thought was inseparable from understandings of how black musicians perform, position themselves, and are positioned with respect to a historical past (more on this to follow). For me, as a Chinese American aware of my own struggles with racism and marginalization and in the Midwestern United States, Baraka’s foregrounding of identity politics and the power in the collective history of a people resonated. It is important to recognize, however, that the narrative of black radicalism is not in many ways my narrative and that where I represent and extend upon its theorizing here it changes in my telling. I make my own negotiations here and in my classroom, and ask readers to make this an opening rather than an end. In a similar way, the personal stories and intersecting identities of my students play a role in how they take up the call of black radicalism and Black Lives Matter. It is also useful to keep in mind that this tradition, in its relationship to ideas of racial ontology and “blackness,” opens to issues of essentialism — the reduction of groups of people or cultures to a set of defining characteristics. It thus contains the potential to limit the meanings and agencies of black music and musicians and activists while reinforcing ideas of inherent racial difference. I suggest throughout that like the understandings of Coltrane nurtured in this tradition, it is possible to improvise upon such conceits — an extended negotiation or fumbling through terrain Shieh, Eric. 2016. After Eric Garner: Invoking the black radical tradition in practice and in theory #BlackLivesMatter. Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (2): 126–45. act.maydaygroup.org/articles/Shieh15_2.pdf Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (2) 129 that is fraught with considerations of essentialism and race, aesthetics and authority. In detailing such improvisations in my own practice and thinking, I propose ways of engagement in the music classroom that are both enabling and timely for music educators in a world of Trayvons and Erics, Michaels and Tamirs — a world “where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise” (Garza 2014, para. 2).2 2. A History: Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) Situated at the opening of a field, engagement with the black radical tradition requires grappling with the rupture, the response to state violence, that is the work of Amiri Baraka (née LeRoi Jones) — founder of the Black Arts Movement, poet, playwright, performer, music historian and critic. Consider Baraka’s aesthetics from the 1960s: in “The Screamers” (1967), an early short story, he imagines the performance of fictional jazz musician Lynn Hope. Over the course of (and through) the performance, a black audience divided by class is drawn into solidarity and led out of the club into the streets where — with Lynn playing at the fore — they “made to destroy the ghetto”: We screamed and screamed at the clear image of ourselves as we should always be.
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