‘Going Public’ With the Humanities in a Fake News World

When submitting the proposal for my book on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, I was fully prepared for a rejection. It’s an odd manuscript, and there were reasons to say no, including my positioning of this scholarly work as a form of activism and, with that, insisting on the inclusion of a coda—not exactly scholarship, more a personal essay—in which I tried to convince my readers, some who may not be in favor of large-scale reparations for slavery, about the need for precisely that, the urgent need for reparations, now.

To my near shock, the book was enthusiastically supported, by my already-keen editor and by Routledge’s board. In the prospectus, I quoted artist Charles White’s words: “art must be an integral part of the struggle. It can’t simply mirror what’s taking place … It must ally itself with the forces of liberation.” I wrote that while Morrison surely operationalized this dictum, the same applies to scholar-teachers: we must ally ourselves with those forces rather than simply represent, theorize or “teach about” them. I further contended that such alliances do not dilute the power of the research as research, the value of the teaching as teaching, that both can remain true to themselves despite aiming to be and becoming “activism,” despite breaching customary boundaries and “going public.”

Truthiness vs. Falsehood

We produce knowledge. That is our foreswearing. Knowledge based on research. Research that would and does remain impartial, reasoned, is often materialist but always practices fidelity to truth—satyagraha—motored neither by logical fallacy nor by whitewashing nor by fake news.

What “knowledge” prompted a group of individuals to break and enter the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, knowledge they possessed with a certainty so cast-iron as to justify committing a crime that might procure a treason charge? And what is the relationship between that episteme and those that prevail across academia? It would appear that the producers of scientific knowledge based on scientific research, that the teachers of how to critically think, thus how to reasonably discern the difference between knowledge, truth and everything else, are in a battle with fake news, fake knowledge and false truths.

Surely this melee is as old as knowledge itself. But it is a pedagogical difficulty much augmented today, and with a peculiar and extraordinary exigence. Is global warming real? Are the Clintons devil worshippers? Of course, we know that they are not. Of course, climate change is the single gravest challenge facing the planet, a real truth proved beyond reasonable doubt. Yet we know, just the same, that many Americans are equipped with a contradictory knowledge they know to be true: that climate science is easily rejected, or worse, that, like several new vaccines, it is a strategically deployed liberal hoax.

As teachers, as academics, as intellectuals, as persons simply, what is our responsibility in the face of knowledges so false we scoff and snicker, those of us well educated enough to know? I teach in the City University of New York system, at one of CUNY’s two-year colleges, which—thanks to our elitist public education funding structures—means most of my students are coming out of this city’s least effective public high schools … least effective because least funded because located in economically precarious neighborhoods. Some of the wrong knowledges referenced are ideas a representative number of my students enter the classroom in fully convinced possession of. And it is difficult—as a teacher, more vocation for me than job—to not take seriously, and with compassion, their sometimes-outrageous claims, those same “truths” that got the Trump regime into office once, almost secured it a second time and goaded a group of flag-bearing Americans to commit our highest crime. I know they are victims of a system that defrauded them of the public education they deserved, one that should have engaged them in critical analysis, in poetry explication, in the study of Algebra 2/trigonometry and independent film but instead offered test-prep modules and standardized exams, each one following hard upon the next.

Test prep as a model for secondary education leaves little space for the many things we do so students can understand that real problems are rarely tidy either-ors. The gift of postsecondary learning is the critical thinking that precludes setting religious conviction and proven science into false winner-loser competitions, such an influential paradigm today owing to its popularization on reality TV—Will the humanities live to fight another day? Tune in next time! Thoughtfulness as education praxis means recognizing that religion and science are not contenders in an all-or-nothing contest, not a binarily opposed dueling twosome, one evil, one good. And isn’t that the adult world college prepares students for, a place teeming with the tragic paradoxes and befuddlements that make it, at once, thorny and utterly sublime? Learning thinking makes it possible to work, as civic contributors, from more nuanced awarenesses, from the places of impasse and possibility between things, to make out that boundaries and bridges are often a self-contradictory paradox, one and the same.

That is critical thinking. Yet many students enter class knowing global warming is a lie, knowing COVID vaccines are unnecessary. One thing I know for sure: they believe what they know. And yet we don’t scoff or snicker in our role as pedagogue. We do not disdain the student who wouldn’t watch the film Pride because it featured gay characters, who kept her head down on the desk for two hours refusing to learn from it the social justice lesson that was our subject matter. We do not snicker or scoff at those who declare climate change a pile of hooey or boycott Langston Hughes’s poetry because they googled him and discovered he was gay … after which, they tell me they are disappointed in me, as their teacher, for having made them love him as I do.

Despite that in saying this the student hurt both her teacher and her fellow students, those who are gender nonconforming chiefly, despite that I know she did not intend injury—to her, she was speaking her truth, something I steadfastly call students to do—still, the classroom is a space where such encounters occur. Or can occur. Critical thinking sometimes involves hurt and—lest we forget—inspiration, too, because it pulls the epistemic foundations out into the light, for mere (yes, sometimes painful) awareness certainly, but also for scrutiny. The dialogue that Langston Hughes moment spurred, spanning multiple classes, was undoubtedly an educational flashpoint for every student—27 in my public university rhetoric class. In my recollection, it was carried by several students who, as often happens in these moments, instantaneously became our teachers. There was my bright, big-voiced Latino male student who outed himself, pronouncing both he and Langston “big homos.” There was the Orthodox Jewish female student who understood homosexuality finally because of a close relative thus identified. There was the African American “jock” who spoke of the night he and his football friends accidentally went to a bar in Park Slope on gay night and the wonderful corrective this “error” became for them. The unintentional hurter learned much in this case, apologizing, by all accounts sincerely, partly because I made a conscious choice to not alienate but keep her engaged and included.

The Pride incident ended differently. A fabulous, thoughtful, respectful class discussion took place—numerous students again morphing—but was met by a steely wall of silence. It culminated in the student filing a religious discrimination complaint against me for showing a gay film.

It’s not always a happy ending, as we know. But the point is that this classroom is not any classroom. It’s a humanities classroom, one in which various learning curves become uniquely possible, and not merely for the student who did not mean to harm but did, but for every student. In this space, we study history, literature, film, theater, art history, communications and language, all political, social, cultural, all messy and meaningful, or potentially so. This social gathering space—imperiled by a pandemic but more concerningly by attacks on humanities disciplines, fields and texts, like the recent censorious and censorial assaults on critical race theory or on the novel Beloved—it is one of those desperately rare social geographies in which the split, discordant choirs generally being preached to meet face-to-face, encountering one another at the truth line, the walls, shields, silences dropped now such that hurt is possible—but also something else.

The Humanities?

In the humanities classroom, wrong and true knowledges, structurally partitioned epistemes play out their meanings as we, they, teachers, students figure out how to talk to each other about them, how to be a class after the injurious exclamation, how to do so without further harm and without disowning either the hurter or the hurt. The value of this is greater even than knowledge because such gatherings often become preparatory dioramas of the complex circumstances our students will confront in their futures, where the career dramas they’ll negotiate—like those we negotiate, in our careers—transpire in an educational mimesis.

But will such teachable-learnable moments continue to present themselves? Will the teaching of critical thinking, reading and rhetoric remain a substantive part of postsecondary education? Will the humanities live to fight another day?

Our students—mine certainly—need that training: to learn to analyze, to learn to believe in the product of their thinking, and at last to learn to inform, develop and defend it. I witness my students, most having recently exited highly impoverished high school experiences, literally coming to life discovering a logic, a meaning, a truth that belongs to them and emboldens their self-sustainment and their educational outcomes. Even as we instinctively bristle, contending with bias in the classroom, nevertheless, I am certain my students were improved—in Aristotle’s cathartic sense of becoming smarter, more sensitive, more deeply aware—because, once upon a time, I was chastised for loving Langston Hughes and “making” them love him, because, once upon a time, I was upbraided for teaching a gay film.

The sweet spot—unvanquishable precedent for the need for the humanities—is located right there; that search begins and can end with Aristotle’s Poetics. Probing further, we find colossal additional provisioning for it, but the case to sustain and buoy humanities education is answered in his antique defense. Aristotle called critical thinking κάθαρσις (“catharsis”), arguing both that it is education’s foundation stone and that it is inspired by “poetry”—by which he meant art, and in the lectures comprising Poetics, particularly literary art. The storyteller, tragedian, poet, painter shapes mimetic real-world miniatures—dioramas of the institution, dollhouse replicas of historical persons or of ourselves, our homes, our prisons—art pieces that call us to consider the world through them, and at the distance of a suspended disbelief, shielded by the theatrical fourth wall, by art’s conceptual mechanisms, which form “safe” geographies for deep, real, true thinking.

Training in the humanities teaches thinking and, again lest we forget, it teaches feeling, too. The cathartic experience Aristotle husbanded—brought to you © the Humanities classroom—engages both. In the aftermath of an incident of homophobia in the classroom, as with the staged tragoidía, we were awash in emotions—anger, pity, sadness, anxiety, fear—in bathwaters of difficult, prickly feeling. And it was the will of the group to stay on topic for all the time it took this catharsis to be spent, for us to come back together as a working-learning collective by means of that gush of affect that fills our bodies then quells, like a tide receding or a curtain drawing, but which also—and this is the important part—leaves a residue.

The residue is the Virginia Woolfian nugget of truth—let us also call it knowledge—that outlasts, and is valuable. The residue is the point, the paideia, the reason the humanities must never be dismissed, nor reduced, neither foreclosed nor imperiled. The reason the humanities is worth fighting for.

Generative Publics

There is little room for cathartic critical understandings in test prep, in a math problem, on a petri dish. The STEM universe, a grand and essential teaching-learning landscape, is not enough. Education needs its entire body, all its appendages, to work; otherwise it’s a Tin Man who, though he has no heart, yet “knows” the biology of the circulatory system. #STEMIsNotEnough

But neither is the classroom. The response today must be greater than any single rhetorical sum, more complex than any single defense in the manner or example of Poetics. The issues are more urgent, the republic more polarized, the political discourse seedier, the yellow journalism yellower, so bereft of ethics as to “fake news” numerous citizens into committing mutinous crimes, so irresponsible as to politicize, thus further jeopardize, public health in the time of a pandemic that emptied the streets and shut the world down.

Aristotle, not enough. The task is not merely to save the humanities, it is to morph the humanities—together with STEM—and, by extension, the university at large. Revision, rearchitect, build it outward. The task: how to join our scholarship, our classroom, our co-curricular undertaking with various generative publics; how, outside the campus borders, to tender our convincing well-researched truths about history and eco-sustainability, about slavery and sexuality, our lesson plans on Langston Hughes?

Judith Butler wrote, in her final President’s Column in the MLA Newsletter, that “the future of the humanities may well depend on realizing that the best case for art, poetry, literature, and performance is already being made by our most publicly engaged fields.” Writing of the kinds of events that “draw from publics who do not regularly see their histories and creative works monumentalized in older versions of the literary canon,” she called attention to critical sites within the university that function as conduits linking campus life to life worlds outside it, to “those who require the humanities to live a more illuminated life.”

Reading Butler, I recalled “pushing” my manuscript on Beloved on Routledge, contending that it can and should transcend the ivory tower, be part of dialogues beyond academic conferences. Much as I’d never thought of myself as a public intellectual, I realized I was morphing into just that—trying to shape, render visible, bring about the linkages Butler articulates in that column and more urgently in her 2021 MLA presidential address. For some time I’d been (re)imagining and reinventing my research as something that, remaining scholarly, would nonetheless plug in to and help to build the liberation work of Charles White.

That’s our good fight, and it necessitates moving multiple needles simultaneously, key among them the strategic, committed bridging of humanities content over into the generative, liberatory, still scholarly publics that avail, as, where and when. As Northern Irish statesman John Hume once reminded us, in our time, the borders that divide and also link us are shifting, and so must we: “The kaleidoscope is shaking, patterns will be changing, we must plan accordingly.”