Why Education Is Useless

Chapter Four: Identity

CHAPTER FOUR Identity IN WHICH GEORGE WALLACE IS REMOVED FROM THE SCHOOLHOUSE DOOR ... It must have been in the early 1960s that I first heard the joke. Maybe I came across it in an article quoting Malcolm X, to whom it is often attributed , or maybe I heard it from my older cousin Ronnie, who quit his doctoral studies at the University ofWisconsin to go down to Mississippi to work in "the Movement," as it was called. At this late date I cannot be sure how it came to me, only that I have been troubled by it ever since I was a child. The joke asks, "What do you call a black man with a Ph.D.?" and it answers, 1\ nigger." For the boy that I was, this was certainlytoo much to take in. That boy wanted to hear brave tidings about the prospects for the civil rights movement; he did not have any experiences that would equip him to understand the bitterness, the cynicism, and the contradictory strains of fatalism and defiance that make this joke work. I suppose I realized, vaguely, that calling out the National Guard to escort a few black students into high school and university buildings would not be the end of the story. They did not make boys much more naive than I was, though, that kid who watchedJames Meredith on the TV and marveled at his courage. At that time I believed the education for which young people such as Meredith were fighting-as they were spat upon, jeered, threatened -just had to mean something, in fact had to mean everything. After all, education meant everything to me. I did not enjoy school any more than the next guy, but I did love learning and always thought of myself in terms of what learning Inight make me, not in terms of my background or present circumstances, which I was desperate to transcend . It is a commonplace that education "liberates people from their social origins," as William G. Bowen puts it, but the occupational mobility to which Bowen's statement refers was not my primary concern.1 The lib- CHAPTER FOUR ~ I08 eration I had in mind was not a socioeconomic index but rather a question of the kind of person I was to be. It was my identity that concerned me, my conception of myself as distinct from superficial indices such as occupation or wealth or place ofresidence. Unwittingly, I had committed myself to the ideal of education associated with the philosophes of the eighteenth century: the ideal in which all dogmas, superstitions, inherited authorities, and merely customary beliefs must open themselves to rational inquiry, which alone gives us truth and through which we find our dignity as individual human beings. The notion that education might be useless to change one's identity was unthinkable to me. If that should be the case, then I was setting myself up to be the butt of a joke. For ifa black man with a Ph.D. is to be called a nigger, then an educated white boy must be a phony, a tool, or a fool. It followed that ifl were to be truthful with myself, whatever sense I could make of this self would depend on what I could make ofthis grim joke as I went on to experience further the nature oflearning in the contemporary United States. The joke seems to have haunted others as well. It appears in a rap recording by Trick Daddy titled 'l\merica." It serves as a reference point for the journalist Ellis Cose in The Rage ofa Privileged Class (1993), in which he reports a variant that he attributes to David Dinkins, the former mayor of New York City: '1\. white man with a million dollars is a millionaire, and a black man with a million dollars is a nigger with a million dollars:' It is also recalled in influential books published during the 1990s by Shelby Steele and Stephen L. Carter, two scholars who take issue with much of the current thinking on racial identity and education .2 Readers might be surprised that writers as conservative as Steele or as cautiously liberal as Carter should even mention this joke in passing , for it must seem utterly caustic toward their professions of faith in educational opportunity under the current dispensation ofthings in the United States. Neither ofthem is stupid, though, and neither wants to be seen as such; and so they allow this reference into...