Imperialism, Whiteness, The Republican Contenders and Me

Whiteness (M.A. Reilly 2014)

I.

In the foreword to Everyday White People Confront Racial and Social Injustice, Paul Gorksi offers this sobering insight about being White,

"...on subjects like White entitlement and bigotry, I am well groomed. When it comes to deflecting responsibility and exerting White supremacy implicitly or to participating actively and unapologetically in a hyperracist corporate-consumer capitalism even as I pretend to despise it, my family, teachers, caches, and others equipped me with an impressive spectrum of expertise and skills" (ix).

Gorski outlines three shifts in consciousness related to how racism is often situated by Whites. The first shift is from understanding racism as only an interpersonal matter to understanding it as an institutional matter. Racism is bigger than matters related to individuals. I think here of that insipid 1971 Coca-Cola ad from my youth about teaching the whole world to sing (in perfect harmony). Yes, such sentiment felt somewhat good--against the then recent race riots and the continuous shipping of young men to Vietnam, but it largely deflected attention and responsibility from more pervasive manners of racial and economic injustices that remained present, rooted--regardless of relationships and the notion of harmony.

The next shift Gorski references is from understanding racism as an institutional matter to understanding it as a by-product of imperialism.  Recently Rob and I have been recalling the many posters we were required to make in response to elementary school assignments. You may have memories of these too. These were geography assignments that had us gluing cotton balls, coffee beans, and pennies to poster boards to indicate the 'by-products' of other countries--most often those located in the Southern hemisphere.

I can still recall gluing a copper penny within the lines that signified Chile. At the time I was gluing that bit of copper to the map, the copper industry in Chile was undergoing a change in ownership. In 1971 when Coca-Cola was teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony, the newly elected Allende government in Chile was exercising its rights to nationalize copper mining. Up to that time, the mines had been owned and operated exclusively by North American mining companies. President Allende said,

This is maybe the most important act since our independence declaration, because it entitles a modification to the political constitution that accentuates and gives strength to the national feeling of our country…to nationalize and preserve for the state our country’s basic richness (from here).  

Preserving a nation's national richness would not be accepted without response.  And response came in the form of General Augusto Pinochet who assumed power in Chile following a United States-backed coup d'état in 1973 (ironically 9/11) when he overthrew President Allende and ended civilian rule. Pinochet would rule as a dictator for 17 years and his economic policies would be informed by neoliberal economic advisers, dubbed the Chicago Boys, because they had been educated at the University of Chicago under the influence of Milton Friedman. The Pinochet-dictatorship created favorable policies for foreign trade by privatizing state-controlled industries and social security, restricting labor unions, opening global trade markets, slashing government support of public education and providing government funding for private education companies to put in place for-profit schools. (Does this not seem familiar?) Yet none of that history was part of the "geography" lessons learned. Those early lessons ignored the many ways U.S. covert operatives serve corporate interests. We learned that American political, military and corporate actions that were not hidden were allowable and preferable. These acts against others were considered benign and often situated as being good for others. I'm reminded here of a speech given by Edward Said (1993) in which he explains that sense of American specialness.  He said,

so influential has been the discourse insisting on American specialness, altruism and opportunity, that imperialism in the United States as a word or ideology has turned up only rarely and recently in accounts of the United States culture, politics and history. But the connection between imperial politics and culture in North America, and in particular in the United States, is astonishingly direct (York University, 1993, from here).

Imperialistic power are often the policies of empires and they always require racial, gender, and economic imbalances. Michael Doyle, the historian defines empire as

a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, economic, social or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire (as quoted by Edward Said at York University, 1993).

The last shift in consciousness for Gorski is more personal, more of the moment. This is the shift that stays with me the most, connects me most directly to racism.  He writes that it is in understanding racism as a global act of imperialism that is reinforced by White privilege and consumerism. Gorski understands how his daily acts of consumerism make him complicit in the exploitation of disenfranchised communities. Again, I think here of Said who explains that even though the age of direct colonialism is over, the influence of empire remains.  He said,

imperialism lingers where it often has been in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as its specific political, ideological, economic and social practices (York University, 1993). 

Consumerism and White privilege are expressions of political, ideological, economic, and social practices. The way I live via the the entitlements I am afforded and to some degree still covet are actions that reify racism and allow the "economic top" 20 percent of Americans to live lives well beyond the rest of us on the planet.

II.

I was thinking about the difficulty that living White and privileged produces as I viewed the Republican debate this past week. I was wondering whether the public outcry via Ferguson and the many Occupy Wall Street movements might prompt at least one question about economic and racial justice. Did none of those Facebookers want to ask about race? Economic injustices? After hearing the presidential contenders volley Tough on Isis utterances and the many ways they would defund Planned Parenthood for what felt like more than the first hour, I began to doubt if the more pressing matters of privilege and race would be discussed.  Apart from asking Ben Carson, the only Black candidate, in the closing minute of the debate what he would do to heal America's racial divides and a quick response before the cut-to-commercial from Scott Walker about police brutality, this debate was mute about matters of poverty, economic injustice and race.

D.D. Guttenplan in The Nation summarizes the importance of this when he writes,

One of the reasons elections matter is because they hold up a mirror to the kind of country we are—and the kind of country we want to be. On tonight’s evidence America (or at least that portion of America represented by the Ohio GOP’s invited audience) is a country that applauds a bully, fears all foreigners, knows that the system is rigged to favor the rich—and will fight to the death to keep it that way.

One might think to look to the government to help move the country from maintaining at all costs security and wealth for the few to seeking economic and racial justice for the many.  But that does not seem likely. We seem hell-bent on sacrificing our selves or at the very least, our neighbors, in order to keep consuming what we can ill afford.

Why do we do this?  How can we stop this behavior?

III.

Earlier this year I was making a piece of art (see below) and I wasn't necessarily sure as to why I combined the image with the quote from Deleuze and Guattari.  Now my understanding is more certain, better coded.

1950s (M.A. Reilly, 2015)

White privilege as expressed as consumerism abhors being in the middle of things. By necessity,
privilege is a top-down view.  Being in the middle of something requires a very different way of seeing and being. Eliminating the middle is in many ways a way to maintain injustice.

And perhaps this middle space is one I need to remind myself to occupy more frequently.  Being in the middle affords me and you a space where we can be more critical of our lives and the effect those lived lives have on others and ourselves.

The Problem of Over-Coding Knowledge at School

The Bath (M.A. Reilly, 2013)

The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines.

 (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1987, p. 9)

As I read Mikael Holmqvist's (2003) "A Dynamic Model of Intra- and Interorganizational Learning" I was taken by his explanation of exploitation suggesting that as organizations "learn to refine their capabilities; they exploit their existing knowledge; they learn to focus their activities on certain domains; they learn what brings success and failure" (p. 99).  Exploitation is about making use of what has been. It's a means to stability, or at least the suggestion of stability.  Holmqvist tells us, "Exploitation is about creating reliability in experience. It means productivity, refinement, routinization, production, and elaboration of existing experiences (p. 99).

Schools, largely governed by imposed standards and high stakes testing, are most often places of exploitation.

These are spaces where clinging to past success as measured by state tests and avoiding failures as suggested by state testing results lead to an "elaboration of existing experiences."  How might we counteract such hegemony? Holmqvist recommends that organizations  "create variety in their experiences as well, by experimenting, innovating and taking risks" (p. 99). This is the process of exploration.

Schools are striated spaces in need of exploration--of lines of flight.

I think a lot about these potentially clear and striated spaces and the dynamic of lines of flight and over-coding that resituate space as being cleared and/or striated.

Building and collapsing.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) help to name this potential tension between exploitation and exploration when they write:

It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again (p. 20).

Breaking off.
Starting up again.

This rhizomatic world, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, is one where exploitation and exploration co-exist and how we shift and move between these spaces, reclassify and clear these spaces are worthy of our notice, our naming, our time.

Cited

Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Mineapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.
Holmqvist, Mikael. (2003).  A Dynamic Model of Intra- and Interorganizational Learning. Organization Studies 24(1): 95–123. 

Rhizomes - This Is Pushing My Thinking

Screenshot from Rhizomes by Marc. 

I stumbled across this slideshare by Marc while (re)turning/delving/wading in the stream/avoiding while finding middles of things/leaping into topics/discussions/questions about 
a vanishing point in a line of flight.

I  had queried rhizomes.  

House by the Tracks (Reilly, 2008)

I am keen to conceptualize what a vanishing point in a line of flight might mean and to whom and in what named context. 

I'm not satisfied to understand this as an abstraction--a(re)reading of Deleuze & Company. 

I want to be able to layer an understanding of this on to something I make as I think it is important for reasons I cannot name, today.  

In the Middle (Reilly, 2014)

(And here in that small space of tacit knowing, I want to eventually say something about standards and how they define us as they doom us. No hyperbole intended.)

I don't know why this is pulling at me, but I trust that there is something here/there/undisclosed I need to learn/unlearn/relearn/abandon/soak up/ignore.


Well you know how that goes, and not.



This slideshow caught my eye.  

Perhaps it will interest you too.

Rhizomes from Marc

Minds as Rhizomes

I have been thinking about the development of  my company, Blueprints for Learning.  What follows are some initial thoughts about the business, the importance of relationships and kindness, and the primacy of individual and collective agency at the thinking and feeling levels of the work...

When I think about Blueprints and possible ways of mapping the business, I imagine something like this that attempts to show the infinite possibilites of connections:

minds as rhizomes (M.A. Reilly, 2013)

Blueprints a consulting business. When you hire us, you hire a team that can be designed based on specified and emerging needs and strengths.  We provide direct services for schools, especially those in inner cities and our work in helping to nudge achievement is significant.

I am joined by a cadre of very talented consultants and we are program-less.  We are a design business, not a program.

The more interesting plan we adopt is to follow the talents and intuitions of those we employ and those we serve.  Doing so leads to rhizomatic possibilities and increases the project's energy by locating the work in the present moment.

Our motto might be: We stand where we can see our feet. 

A few ideas that (in)form the work and ways of working:


I.

Learning is making and navigating pathways that are always local, always situated. There is no getting outside the system for a more global look, regardless of the technologies employed.

All viewing is local and deeply personal. As such kindness is required.


II.

In writing about the limitations of knowing the whole of a network in the form of an encyclopedia, Umberto Eco (1984) states:

Such a notion ... does not deny the existence of structured knowledge; it only suggests
that such a knowledge cannot be recognized and organized as a global system; it
provides only "local" and transitory systems of knowledge which can be contradicted by
alternative and equally "local" cultural organizations; every attempt to recognize these local
organizations as unique and "global" --ignoring their partiality--produces an ideological
bias (p. 84).

Partiality, when recognized is a strength.


III.

Where things break, new possibilities may emerge.


IV.

The ideas expressed in I, II, and III (in)form the decisions (to some degree) of the company so that breakage, slippages, and other (mis)haps are understood as emergent, not causal; as potential lines of flight; not effects.  We look for these breakages and in doing so find that these actions encourage naming, problem framing and solving--and alongside this, agency.


-----------------------


As we involve other consultants in the work and connect with teachers, principals, superintendents, and the children and their families--these multiplicities create a consciousness informed by ideologies that are familiar and not.  This is surely a gift.

A density emerges that cannot be traced, but can be lived in the present.  We think of this as minds as rhizomes.  The plural usage is important.  There is no single user mind. What we think of as my ideas is really a matter of collective agency that occur across minds, not within one. This is what makes the work transforming and powerful.

 The exponential growth of ideas occurs when we function rhizomatically.

Thinking About Rhizomes, Beginnings and Endings

The Middle of Something (M.A. Reilly, October 2012)

I.

I made the image above early in the morning--the same morning I was thinking about rhizomes.



II.

It's early morning also when I come in from making images and notice a tweet Gloria Jacobs sent last night--well at least last night via my time zone.

Two things catch my attention: 

• this idea of coming into the middle and
• the rather provocative use of the term, curation. 

I am wondering about the way we situate ourselves and how that placement establishes beginnings and ends. I also wonder about the practice of curation.  Curation suggests the preservation/restoration of some type of artifact by act and location. Whether we are speaking of museum curation, digital curation, sheer curation, healing--something is preserved and perhaps restored.  

III.

Curation is the juxtaposition of things; a hybrid that rises out of things placed alongside things. Gloria has me stretching this definition to now include people alongside people. 

Curation is an act of bring another into an ongoing conversation--into a specified context.


IV.

Later in the morning I read this by Bruno Latour (2009) and again am thinking about rhizomes and Gloria's tweet:

Action is not done under the full control of consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled" (p. 44).

It is the idea of action as a node and how it is a "conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies" that halts me, even as other ideas swirl around me.  


V.

I am standing in a stream, becoming aware of my position as the coldness of the water swirls around my ankles and calves even as I know that such awareness is fiction.


VI.

Are we not always in the middle? Is that not what makes death so pronounced and beginnings of life so contested? Do we mark beginnings and endings when we (re)frame action, separating a contextualized frame from the stream?  I wonder about this in light of teaching and learning and wonder how differently we might name these acts if we de-emphasized beginnings and endings, and focused more keenly on the middle of things.

VII.


Edward Said (1975) wrote that “a beginning is accepted as a beginning after we are long past beginning and after our apprenticeship is over” (p.76). Said explains “that we make and accept it [such beginnings] at the same time that we realize that we are ‘wrong’” ( p. 78).

Work Cited:
Latour, Bruno (2007-09-06). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies) (p. 44). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Said, Edward. (1975). Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia University Press.

Visualizing School Reform & School Redesign

In 1958, Thomas Pynchon wrote "Entropy," a short story published in his book, Slow Learner.

"Nevertheless," continued Callisto, "he found in entropy or the measure of disorganization for a closed system an adequate metaphor to apply to a certain phenomena in his own world. He saw, for example, the younger generation responding to Madison Avenue with the same spleen his own had once reserved for Wall Street: and in American 'consumerism' discovered a similar tendency from the least to most probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos. He found himself, in short, restating Gibbs' prediction in social terms, and envisioned a heat-death for his culture in which ideas, like heat-energy, would no longer be transferred, since each point in it would ultimately have the same quantity of energy; and intellectual motion would, accordingly, cease." (Slow Learner, 88-89)

I wonder about this heat-death of ideas when I think about school reform.  I was thinking about energy it takes to fuel school reform and how top-down methods simply do not produce enough energy to even sustain themselves, let alone fuel 'other' interests, approaches. Just visually the design of top-down reform for complex matters seems an odd match--perhaps a hold over based on the idea of input-output systems where the mater at hand is at best, complicated, but never complex.

Visualizing School Reform

Humans mess up such simple systems.

We are inherently unpredictable.

Rhizomatic redesign methods allow for the potential of far more energy to be produced as simultaneous actions can and often do occur as a rhizomatic system is one without a beginning or end, but exists intermezzo: in the middle of things.

Visualizing Rhizomatic Redesign

Hmm.  A bit of playing about on my part.
Wondering what you think.

A Brief Introduction to Rhizomatics Via Sheri Leafgren’s Reuben’s Fall

prepared by Jane M. Gangi, Ph. D.

Last semester Driscoll (2005), in Psychology of Learning and Instruction, discussed rhizomes in connection with constructivism:

The rhizome is a tangle of tubers with no apparent beginning or end. It constantly changes shape, and every point in it appears to be connected with every other point. Break the rhizome anywhere and the only effect is that new connections will be grown. The rhizome models the unlimited potential for knowledge construction, because it has no fixed points…and no particular organization. (p. 389)

Driscoll thinks of “spaghetti”; Eco thinks of “marbles”; I think of daffodils.

Sheri Leafgren (2009) thinks of Reuben’s fall:

Reuben fell. My professional life defined itself eighteen years ago when Reuben fell on the hard school-linoleum floor outside my classroom door. I was a young(er) person and a more naïve teacher at the time, blithely enjoying my lively class of kindergartners, covertly noticing some of the more interesting children in the kindergarten class down the hall, and on that morning, fully engaged in minding the interactions of the children in my own classroom when I heard the hard smack and muffled grunt signaling Reuben’s fall. When I went to the door to see had happened to disturb the commonplace silent, gender-based, double-lined trek connecting Mrs. Buttercup’s kindergarten class to the restrooms at the end of the hall, I witnessed a significant event.

            In the aftermath of Reuben’s fall, Julian—one of those spirited, full-of-verve, curious, “bad” children whom I had coveted for my own classroom—had left his place in the back of the line to reach Reuben where he had fallen near the front of the boys’ line and, as I  arrived at the door, was helping him off the floor, asking, ‘Reuben, are you okay?’

            As the other children steadfastly maintained their places in their straight, silent, boy and girl lines, Mrs. Buttercup shook her head, held up two fingers, and said to Julian: “That’s two, Julian. You are out of line and you are talking. You’re on the wall at recess.” (p. 15)

As a result of Reuben’s fall and Julian being made to stand on the wall, Leafgren conducted research on disobedience and wrote a dissertation. Her dissertation resulted in the book, Reuben’s Fall.

James Baldwin

“The greatest achievement of art is the ‘laying bare of questions which have been hidden by answers’” (as cited in Leafgren, 2009, p. 110). So, asserts Leafgren, is great research.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework for Leafgren’s dissertation (and book) comes largely from Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari (1987): “In developing a comparison between a rhizome and a tree as a metaphor of the contrast between two forms of logic, they name the tree’s linear structure—from roots through the trunk, to the branches—as a metaphor of the fixed, determining and linear logic that explains things in terms of cause-and-effect relationships…” (p. 36). In contrast with this vertical structure is the rhizomes lateral structure.

Leafgren’s 5 lines of inquiry on classroom disobedience:

1.     Disobedience (and childhood itself) as a form of deficiency (developmental, moral/religious, social, and behavioral) and/or as problems to be solved.

2.     The need for a particular order and control in schools and the means of achieving child compliance—and, as a result, “a positive, productive classroom atmosphere conducive to student learning…

3.     The teacher’s perspective and role in children’s moral and social behaviors, and the complexity of child compliance. Often discussed from a constructivist perspective in comparison to the more behaviorist approaches in the two prior categories, the goal here, however, is the same—to assert the authority of the teacher, but as a moral authority instead of a coercive one.

4.     The political, philosophical, and spiritual constraints of school morality. Within this category are researchers who study the state of school itself and authors who, with a more philosophical bent, write about the ideals of school(ing) in contrast to what they perceive as the state of school.

5.     The value of dissent and noncompliance toward an authentic democratic good life, reflecting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s caution: “your goodness must have some edge to it—else it is none” … (p. 19)

Leafgren’s rationale for using rhizoanalysis as methodology:

…identities grow and shift rhizomatically. And so, ways of researching with children also need to be rhizomatic—overlapping, multi-focal and shifting with time. Rhizoanalysis challenges the idea that one moment in a child’s life may be “caused” by his/her stage of child development, his/her gender, his/her teacher or by what another child said or did. Scientific findings of research using the representational “tree logic” of cause and effect are difficult to implement in education because humans in schools are embedded in complex and changing networks of being and social interaction. As each participant in every interaction has variable power to affect one another from day to day, and in the ordinary events of life, the generalizability of these educational research findings is greatly limited (Berliner 2002, McNaughton 2003). The non-representational lateral logic of rhizoanalysis serves to create tensions related to “changeability, diversity, ‘noisiness’ (complexity)” and so highlights the complex and shifting links between…gender, cognition, class, race, culture, obedience, and compliance as the links shoot in unpredictable ways into a particular moment in a child’s life…. (p. 22)

Leafgren’s Research Questions:

1.     In what ways do the kindergarten children disobey in the context of the kindergarten classroom?

2.     In what ways are the kindergartners’ moments of disobedience representations and enactments of something more than merely disobedience?

3.     In what ways are the kindergartners’ moments of disobedience opportunities for responding to others in caring, ethical ways and for acting out the possibilities that a spiritual childhood provides, such as reverence, awe, wonder, reflection, vision, commitment and purpose; and the sensitivities in awareness sensing, mystery sensing, and value sensing…? (p. 83)

Connections between rhizoanalysis and “Dissent and the Democratic Good Life” (Leagren, 2009, p. 77)

Butchart (1995)

Since the fifties, disciplinary literature has fallen silent on the long-term social objectives of school discipline, stressing the immediate control of students. The emphasis has shifted from ends to means and strategies. Rather than developing philosophies of discipline linked to visions of a preferred social order, writers have developed systems and models whose only criterion for success is their short-term goal of classroom order.

Dewey (1985):

[Democracy is]

Simultaneously a way of life, an ethical ideal, and personal commitment. Specifically, it is a way of life in which individuals are presumed to be self-directing and able to pursue their own goals and projects. No society that maintains order through constant supervision and/or coercion can be rightly called democratic. Further, individual benefit and the common good are mutually enhancing in a democracy. (as cited in Leafgren, 2009, p. 119).

More from Deleuze and Guattari:

Rhizomatic thought is multiplicitous, moving in many directions and connected to many other lines of thinking, acting, and being. Rhizomatic thinking deterrorializes arbolic striated spaces and ways of being. Rhizomes are networks…build[ing] links between pre-existing gaps between nodes that are separated by categories and order of segmented thinking. (as cited in Leafgren, 2009, p. 90).

Rhizomes are about mapping new or unknown lines and entry points, not tracing which records old lines or patterns. (as cited in Leafgren, 2009, p. 23)

In conclusion, Leafgren (2009):

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I worry about small things being lost. Children are not just small things themselves—they are great appreciators of small things: a silly joke, a fly crawling on the window, a ray of sunlight, a tickle fight, a secret” (p. 248).

“The memory of Reuben’s fall forever serves as a symbol of my resistance to order for the sake of order, valuing control over concern and sacrificing kindness to a keeping of the rules” (p. 253).

References

Driscoll, M. P. (2005). Psychology of learning and instruction (3^rd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Leafgren, S. L. (2009). Reuben’s fall: A rhizomatic analysis of disobedience in kindergarten. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

For Further Reading

Deleuze, G.

Guattari, .

More Thoughts

George Betts (creator of the Autonomous Learner Model) at the University of Northern Colorado was invited to study high school drop-outs. By hanging out on street corners, he gradually coaxed them back to school. Once there, he gave them IQ tests, which showed them to be off-the-charts (NOTE: I am not a huge IQ fan [see S. J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, 2^nd ed., for the whole sorry history of IQ testing]; they are easy to undertest and hard to overtest, so that is where Betts’s information is helpful).  Betts called them “disenchanted” and tried, in the Autonomous Learner Model, to formulate ways that would make school more engaging to bright, although often disobedient, students.