<<#$>>: 12.6.99, 2:45 p.m.

 

Thomas is the best.

<< 11:47 a.m.

Bored now with the implication that I'm a "bad" political subject because I'm in graduate school -- do you want to tell me what my proper "revolutionary" place in society is?-- I quote Wahneema Lubiano ("Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor: Multiculturalism and State Narratives"):

When I was six years old and I saw someone stomped to death in front of me as a result of a gang war, then I thought I knew what goodness was and what badness was. In the community's response I thought I saw that power was something you used in order to make sure that everybody was good in your imagining of what the good could be. Over the years, I've been traumatized in other more subtle ways and always my response to it has been that you must get in and grapple with the trauma, as opposed to allowing yourself simply to feel the injustice of it, or feel your own implication in the exercise of it. In other words, my complicity in the production of an elite research university system is not all I can be or do.

[T]he academy itself is part of what George Lipsitz has called "the enormous industry of meaning making." The pressure that is organized under the sign of multiculturalism and placed on universities, colleges, and the public school system to change curriculum, admissions, and faculty and staff composition, has forced such institutions to respond, in however adequate and attentuated a fashion, to the demands of traditionally marginalized cultures for the inclusion of individuals, for group power, and for some reorganization of these institutions. It can be made to do more. But why would we want to make a sinking ship do more? Apart from the fact that the ship is something that is going to pull us down if it doesn't transform, if it isn't made to transform, we will have abandoned it to others. To abandon the university as a site for this kind of work is to abandon the incredibly powerful if co-effected relationship between the university system, the primary and secondary educational system in the United States, and a military and international global economy.

 

 

 

 

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