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University of Connecticut OpenCommons@UConn Doctoral Dissertations University of Connecticut Graduate School 12-1-2014 But They Mean to Do Right: Stories on African American Male Teachers K. Jahi Adisa University of Connecticut - Storrs, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations Recommended Citation Adisa, K. Jahi, "But They eM an to Do Right: Stories on African American Male Teachers" (2014). Doctoral Dissertations. 612. https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/612 But They Mean to Do Right: Stories on African American Male Teachers K. Jahi Adisa, PhD University of Connecticut, [2014] This collection of interrelated stories seeks to disrupt the prevailing narratives of African American men. These narratives are social constructions that categorizes African American men as either respectable (good) or unrespectable (bad). In these stories, I attempt to expand these narrow categories and explore other possibilities of African American manhood. Through my research and creative endeavors, I have sketched out male-spaces of dad, brother, and son as being fruitful areas where my characters and where actual male identity form. The Critical Preface analyzes the historical and current trends of African American identity formation in general and African American men’s in particular. Additionally, the preface situates my fiction within the broader context of African American male writers writing about African American men and others. Chiefly, I place my work among James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” Ernest J. Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying and In My Father’s House, and Percival Everett’s Damned If I Do. In this work, I show the relationship between my fiction and theirs, while at the same demonstrating how each of us resists the stereotypical categories of African American men, writers, and fiction. But They Mean to Do Right: Stories on African American Male Teachers K. Jahi Adisa B.A., University of the District of Columbia, [2000] M.A., University of Connecticut, [2003] A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut [2014] i Copyright by K. Jahi Adisa [2014] ii APPROVAL PAGE Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation But They Mean to Do Right: Stories on African American Male Teacher Presented by K. Jahi Adisa, B.A., M.A. Major Advisor ___________________________________________________________________ Ellen Litman Associate Advisor ___________________________________________________________________ Patrick Hogan Associate Advisor ___________________________________________________________________ V. Penelope Pelizzon University of Connecticut [2014] iii Table of Contents Critical Preface 1 Strawberries and Tequila 44 Here’s to the Bad Guys 76 The Last Cigarette 97 Nats versus Braves 121 Hidden Wells 142 But They Mean To Do Right 166 Square 214 A Good Caretaker 245 iv Adisa 1 But They Mean to Do Right: Stories of African American Males Teachers Disrupting the myth of our “narrow limits of tradition.” When I started writing these stories about African American male teachers, I had to contend with two myths, two prevailing perceptions of African Americans: the docile, happy “Negro” and the brute, violent “Negro.” These mythological perceptions existed in the contours of the antebellum mind and in the structures of white supremacists’ world, where whites were perpetually superior to others, especially Africans. I also had to contend with the politics of respectability that began in the late-nineteenth century, where Postbellum African Americans viewed the behavior of poorer African Americans as unacceptable. These codified identity- markers have shaped the ways in which African American men are viewed; either we are seemingly content with playing music, entertaining people, or earning a place at the table, or we are aggressive, agitated, angry because the world hasn’t give us enough or anything, so we have to exhibit our frustration through physical force manifested in violence on ourselves, on our families, or on our communities. These identity-markers continue to follow African Americans even when their utility appears antiquated. For instance, if one examines how President Barack Obama is discussed in the news one would be confused by the Janus-face caricature shown. At once, he is viewed as “weak” or “slow to act” and at the same time “a dictator” or “a tyrant.” Though most of these comments come from the political right, these and worse terms have been used by the progressive left1. Another example: in a recent The New York Times article, television critic Alessandra Stanley suggested 1 Cornell West and Tavis Smiley, for instance, have criticized the president as creating a plantation mentality, especially about African American journalists in general and MSNBC, specifically. Adisa 2 that “When Shonda Rhimes writes her autobiography, it should be called, ‘How to Get Away With Being an Angry Black Woman’” (par. 1). Stanley’s joke was a poor attempt at a pun on Rhimes’ latest television show, “How to Get Away With Murder”2. A final example comes from First Lady Michelle Obama. In her 2013 commencement address to Bowie State graduates, Obama used the history of the university and the history of African Americans’ quest for education during and after slavery and through Jim Crow segregation to demark a schism within the community. She said: But today, more than 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, more than 50 years after the end of Separate but Equal, when it comes to getting an education, too many of our young people… just can’t be bothered. Today, instead of walking miles every day to school, they’re sitting on couches for hours playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming of being a teacher, a lawyer, or a business leader, they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper.3 In her critique, the First Lady points to the real problem that exists within the country and particularly within the African American community. Yet, in this sense, her rhetoric makes being educated within a college or university system “acceptable,” whereas, to aspire to be “a baller” or “a rapper” is deemed unacceptable, an affront to the historical legacy of African Americans of the past who struggled to found schools to teach African Americans how to teach others in our communities. Moreover, this part of her address accentuates the roles of “a teacher, a lawyer, or a business leader” over the roles of “a baller or a rapper” with little regard for the difficulties and challenges inherent in all of these professions. In contextualizing the importance of education in 2 Rhimes, the creator of Gray’s Anatomy and Scandal, has been successful with television series that offer a diverse cast; Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder feature African American women in leading roles and are often the objects of affections of white men. 3First Lady Obama goes on to cite statistics regarding dropout rates of African Americans and the economic differences of having a B.A. over a high school diploma. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqLpX1QPNNc Adisa 3 African American communities, Obama misrepresents the baller/rapper meme as being one of uselessness, unattainability, and “fantasy.” Worse, by choosing two professions that are predominately African American and male, she implies/appears to be saying that those who fantasize about becoming athletes (the colloquial expression is baller) or rappers are lazy, unacceptable black men. Like with many other commentators, the politics of respectability has had an equally long history, especially when discussing African American men4. Yet, First Lady Obama did not invent this meme. Nor did Stanley create the phrase “angry black woman.” These identity- markers of acceptability and unacceptability have existed alongside the dichotomy of docility and brutishness. Since the auction block, Africans and their descendants have been categorized and essentialized. In Query 14 in Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson attempts to differentiate the nature and physiology of Africans from those of Indians and whites.5 Jefferson’s thoughts on Africans are presented as scientific observation, but in reality are completely racist imaginings. He writes, “A black, after a hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of morning” and compares enslaved Africans to animals when they are “disposed to sleep” (266). Being categorized as “inferior” in the late-seventeenth and early- eighteenth centuries, and being shown as caricatures during the 19th and early 20th centuries, undoubtedly distorted the lives of formally enslaved men and women while creating within the broader white American- 4 Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Charles Barkley and the Plague of ‘Unintelligent’ Blacks” traces this respectability politics to the Postbellum Era in the South when lynching was seen as a way of punishing those African Americans deemed as undesirable by other middle class African Americans. 5 In this section of Notes of the State of Virginia, Jefferson posits what to do with enslaved Africans should they be emancipated; his conclusion is that “blacks… are inferior to whites in endowments of both body and mind” (271); thus, they must remain in bondage, as act of “natural history.” Adisa 4 psyche a feeling of unapproachable superiority6. Highlighting the effects of this distorted view on African American men, Susan Booker Morris suggests, “these misrepresentations served to disseminate the view of black men as well suited to slavery. These images offered nostalgic revisions of slavery times, protecting the idea that slavery was not harmful. But with emancipation, so the cultural narrative claimed, came the responsibility of whites to keep black men in the mindless docility that best suited them” (77). As a result of keeping African Americans, and in particular African American men, confined to their designated spaces of either acceptable docility or unacceptable brutishness, the narrative of what it meant to be an African American man became easily reducible.

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