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  • Feminist Praxis, Online Teaching, and the Urban Campus
  • Cherie Ann Turpin (bio)

When Johnnetta B. Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall wrote Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women's Equality in African American Communities, their work was clearly inspired by the foundation set in place through the work of earlier Black feminist scholars and teachers who sought to rewrite and rethink the way in which Black women approached the ideas of community and leadership. Rather than approach the task of teaching young people as outsiders, Cole and Guy-Sheftall assert a need for us to begin with our own transformation:

The sixties slogan "Each One Teach One" is as relevant today as it was during the civil rights and Black Power movements. Our first task then is to change our own behaviors. As we evolve, those around us will notice and respond to the changes. There will be questions, confusion, criticism, and resistance. Many will claim that they would like to change, but simply "can't." We can encourage them, we can teach by example, and we can model the behavior that will create positive change. (220)

In order to "teach by example" and to "evolve," we who consider our presence in the classroom to somehow reflect a feminist consciousness, especially within the context of an urban, majority people-of-color classroom, must seek out and develop strategies of teaching that demonstrate transformation from being agents of racist, sexist, and classist oppression to becoming agents of innovation, enfranchisement, and egalitarianism.

Cole and Guy-Sheftall's call for Black academics to become beacons of transformation is a difficult task to undertake, given the difficulties of balancing out the challenges of racism, sexism, and classism on an historically Black university campus within an urban environment. Despite the assumptions some outsiders may have about them, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are just as vulnerable to the ills of racism, colonialism, classism, and sexism as are majority institutions, notwithstanding the makeup of the population. Within our own communities, oppressive structures can and are reinforced by assumptions of inferiority based on race, class, and skin color. bell [End Page 9] hooks contends that social class tends to reinforce racial disparities through the collusion of those African Americans who have reached economic success in the current sociopolitical structure and who choose to participate in the oppression of those who are not part of the advantaged class:

These conservative black elites, chosen and appointed to positions of authority by the mainstream, not only take charge of interrupting and shaping public policy that will affect the lives of underprivileged black folks, they police black folks who do not agree with them or support their agendas. That policing may take the form of preventing folks from getting jobs, getting heard if they speak and/ or write publicly, or deploying various forms of psychological terrorism. (Where, 95)

Within such an environment, those who would break away from the conventional modes of thinking and acting with regard to those who are not part of the bourgeois class take significant risks to their own status. Within such a system, young people within our community who are not middle or upper class become especially vulnerable to what Rochelle Brock refers to as becoming "dehumanized":

Black children enter the educational system and begin to lose their concept of self from the very first day they sit in class ignored by the curriculum, the teacher, and the system. Bit by bit, they are stripped of the seed of humanity. (93)

Black teachers and professors who seek to counter the devastating effects of these practices have been placed in difficult positions, given the expectations of their complicity in a system that believes in the superiority of Western, male-centered civilizations and institutions. As noted by Brock, these expectations include a perpetuation of these beliefs into the next generation of those disadvantaged who are fortunate to be educated out of poverty:

I know that in a system of colonialism, the colonizer has a dual purpose in educating the colonized. The first is socialization into accepting the value system, history, and culture of the dominant society. The second is education for economic productivity. (29)

Nevertheless, as academics, Black...

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