by Cally Waite
It's funny what happens to an idea. When I dropped the notion of "Joy" as a theme into our editorial discussion, I thought of it as a light way of reversing our course of talking about harm, resilience, and all the heavy things that we were coming up with as the theme for the next issue of this journal. We can't forget, though we try to, that we are existing today in a very different reality, collectively and individually, than we inhabited eighteen months ago. I understand why it will be considered wrong for me now to try to identify "the highlights" of the pandemic. But didn't the anxiety, fear, and closeness of that early period also create the chance to focus on the moments of absolute joy we were able to experience no matter what the circumstances? Weren't those moments clarifying? I saw my capacity for joy as a fleeting thing that might help me understand myself—and might allow other people to know a little about me and themselves in the context of a world that had utterly changed.
I was surprised to find joy during a period marked by social isolation and personal fear that ranged from the micro to the meta—from existential crises to the blues to inaction to basic boredom. The challenges of living life during the height of the pandemic, before a vaccine was even a possibility, were tough. Was it wrong, in the context of people dying in huge numbers and the overt cruelty and fecklessness of government leaders, to feel joy? When it did happen, I was surprised and immensely pleased and grateful. Joy is what kept me going during the pandemic. I was thinking intensely about what we were going through as we were going through it. I was never as much in the moment as I was during that period. And I'm not that kind of self-monitoring person. I like to dwell on the past. I am, after all, a historian. I also like to think about the future because I like to think I can shape that. It's the here and now that has always made me a little crazy. The pandemic induced bouts of sadness and depression. There were days when I simply couldn't muster the will to get up and make the day happen. Then joy would appear. It gave me something to think about.
Joy is something so fleeting it feels indescribable. My concrete thinking friends want no part of this discussion -- it's too ethereal. My realist friends don't want joy to have anything to do with happiness because joy is feeling ALL the feelings at once. Who can untangle them? My well-read scholarly friends reject my challenge to them to define joy. They quote other scholars. I have come to the conclusion that joy is a motherfucker. I assure you I mean that in the best way. Our inability to define it makes the word all the more luscious and attractive. Its indefinability makes it theological—turns it into sacred music. Now that mental health professionals are employing joy as "a goal," shouldn't we keep stressing its untamable nature?
Our group of editors meets every week, and the conversations that we have bring me joy that is immeasurable. I feel sometimes that in some of those conversations we are redefining knowledge. Every week I debate not showing up because I don't have anything to say, or I'm overworked or locked up in the pettiness that defines our academic careers and lives. And then our zoom conversation begins and even with an agenda, it rambles. We disagree with one another in interesting, non-competitive ways. No one is trying to conform to the rules of "academic discourse." No one is trying to rein others in. The conversation goes where we take it. There are moments of silence because we are knocked out by what another has said. And then we explain our silence to each other. The joy is not in being affirmed. The joy is in the flow of words that come out unfiltered because of the trust that exists amongst us. The joy is in being seen and heard. The self that appears in these conversations is not the performative one that we use within our respective colleges and universities. There is no need to perform in this setting. Who I am as a thinker includes my self-assured assessment that I don't know what the hell I am talking about. Yet my co-editors listen as though I have something to say. Sometimes there is no place to hide and that's OK. I rejoice in seeing and speaking with this group of people each week. So why not make joy the theme of this issue?
And as I was thinking about all this (and feeling pretty good about the multiple meanings and understandings of joy I felt swirling within me), I suddenly realized joy was becoming used as an empty pseudo-therapeutic term of cure and healing all around me. What I had experienced privately had suddenly become a generic and universally prescribed affect circulating endlessly through social media, the Internet, and some administrative circles. The word was everywhere. It was the universal answer for all that ailed us. Joy was offered as a synonym for "self-care." And all I could feel was that joy itself had been betrayed by being instrumentalized into another means of forgetting. And now I feel that it is crucial for everyone to remember this betrayal by trying hard to preserve the memory of what the daily life of the pandemic was really like.
American history's contentious and complex past shows that collectively we as a people prefer not to delve into the dark periods of our shared experience (consider, for instance, the exploitation of Black lives and life from 1619 to the present). I fear that the ethic of joy the pandemic contains will be purposely and systematically misused by the historical record. Joyful resilience is a gift people can give themselves by supporting others. It is a social accomplishment. It is not an ethos of affect to be appropriated as a management tool to vindicate unjust present power relations and affirm the inevitable necessity of the status quo. How we tell the story of this time matters enormously. How we relate our joy to it is of fundamental importance.
Joy is now being used as a form of erasure. Joy is being used to help us ignore the more than 600,000 lives nationally and the 4.5 million lives globally that have been lost. Joy is being used to help us forget the callous, cruel, and inhumane presidential administration in power in the US during 2020, and the remnants of supporters who hold congressional seats. If we focus on joy, we needn't remember the tremendous toll that the past 18 months have taken and we don't have to think hard, or at all, about what the future holds. Joy is even being used to deny what was clearly an insurrection and attack on the national Capitol even as we watched in real time a group of "patriotic citizens taking a joyful visit to the halls of Congress." Joy is a distraction from the lack of vaccination, the inability to curb this virus, and the recognition of how close we are to the precipice of the collapse of this empire founded in 1787. I'm pissed that joy has now been made into a "solution" and a tool for explaining away what has happened since early 2020.
The universality that everyone can experience joy—but not everyone's experience is the same—is crucial for my understanding. To abandon the theme of joy for this issue meant that I was also abandoning some of my joy. I refused to do that. So let me talk about my sense of it. I want to talk about teaching and learning as transformative activities that are joyful for me and have grounded me over the last several years. Joy came from working with students.
During the pandemic I was deeply touched and humbled by my students and advisees who showed up intellectually. I was in my feelings when I considered how important the work of learning and creating knowledge is and was for them. When I say teaching, I mean the exchange of ideas and the development of a learning community. Grading papers has never been my jam.
Let me take a hard look at where I want to locate my moments of joy. They happen in and around learning. I'm a historian of education and my focus is onnineteenth-century higher education. But the way the field has come to be defined professionally omits the central fact that the history of the United States remains largely untold. The stories of women and people of color are left out of the strivers' narrative that shapes the mythic tale of the United States. How did a young republic build itself into a world power in a few centuries on the basis of enlightenment ideals and hard work? Who was doing the building? Each piece of scholarship that considers the agency of women and people of color in American history makes the story of the US richer, more complex. The real, fully told, messy and pain-filled story is deeply paradoxical and infinitely more interesting than the mythical one. This history has the power to change how we see our present and how we prepare for our future. But it is crystal clear that this broader understanding of the founding and development of the United States is deeply threatening to many.
Teaching the history of African American education brings me absolute joy. The joy of this class is the sense of discovery that I see in my students as they begin to see a different view of American history and in many cases a view of their own role in understanding and shaping the present and future. Additionally, there is great joy in making this course the centerpiece for understanding American history as opposed to a marginalized niche history important to only a few. It is a joy to expand thinking—my students' and my own.
The course I teach on the history of African American education is dangerous because it is inadequate. How do we tell the story of education of people of African descent in the United States in fifteen weeks? Every semester I have some students tell me that the course is life changing. Students have changed careers after taking this course, and many write years later that they are still reflecting on what they read, or the work they are doing is influenced by the knowledge they gained. I also have students who say it was the greatest waste of their time and I shouldn't be allowed in a classroom ever again. The history of African American education can be a hot topic, the temperature rising depending on the demographics of the class. My fear over what will happen in the classroom has diminished significantly over the years because so many crises have erupted that I feel I can handle almost anything that gets thrown at me. (This year I had a student tell me that he sympathized with the slave owners and their moral struggle.)
I have taught this seminar with twenty students ranging down to four students. Generally, it is a racially mixed class, but the majority are students of color. From the outset this course presents a change for white students and many struggle. Few have had a black professor before, as they tell me at different points during the course, and it is even more rare that they are the minority in classroom in a PWI. It is often their first experience of being in the minority. Added to that, the course is centered in a narrative where white people are not the main focus. They struggle to find where "their story" is. I lack empathy for that position because that is how students of color often feel in most of their courses. "Where is my narrative in this course?" "When do we talk about my experience as crucial and not ancillary or in need of translation?"
It is here where students begin to see that the prevailing narrative of the white founding fathers is inaccurate. It is incomplete and inadequate. African Americans and whites did not live separate histories. The stories of all are, at their core, American stories and all are central to the growth and development of the United States. Some students come prepared for a fight, questioning if there is such a thing as Black history. Others come prepared to have their positions affirmed. Still others see themselves as arbiters and experts on African American history. They come to "test" my knowledge and legitimacy. Students are always surprised when they discover that their fight isn't with me.
After the first week students are intrigued, curious, on edge, nervous, fearful, out of their depth, angry or some mix of these emotions. For some, this cocktail of feelings remains for the whole semester. I feel the same range of emotions throughout the semester framed by both excitement and hopelessness. I have learned that my course asks, according to my students, "too much" of them. On the first day, I state from the outset that it will be challenging. I ask them to come to this course with an open mind, but also with a heart open to learning. The syllabus hasn't been given out yet, so they aren't quite sure where to look or how to process this notion. I want to establish that we have to build a community where it is OK to not know and to be ignorant. I ask them to presume that when someone asks a question it is for genuine interest and not to inflame a situation, and I encourage people to be courageous enough to admit what they don't know. I want to discourage the use of questions to inflame and offend. I want to affirm that they are best used to truly learn with. Similarly, responses should not be used to shame or to attack, but to genuinely educate. This is necessary because we are a diverse group of people, and we bring our own context to the classroom. Furthermore, the reading is going to elicit emotional responses that might include anger, fear, or sadness mixed in with many other feelings. I tell then that there are some things that can't be read on the subway because of the emotions that may surface.
I too have to come with an open heart. I have the responsibility of "holding" this group. If I am to ask them to give all of themselves in this course, I have to provide them with a demonstration of what that sounds and looks like in a classroom. My job is to reassure them by my ability to accept without sustaining offense or injury the volatility of their emotions. My acceptance assures them of the reality of my commitment to their use of such emotions—however intense or extreme—for everyone's learning (especially their own) and no one's emotional or psychological harm.
I remind them that history is analytic work. When we lead with emotion there is no place for the conversation to go. How can we contribute to others' understanding or even advance the conversation about the topic, if we can never move past how we feel in a discussion? Emotion can obscure the reasons for disagreement or deeper analysis of what is being read and discussed. I emphasize that while these readings may elicit strong feelings, I am less interested in how one feels about the work than what one thinks about the work. This is good practice for all of us.
As students introduce themselves, they share why they are taking the course. Overwhelmingly, they want it to inform their classroom practice, or make things "better" for children of color or better understand educational history. They want to understand how they can "make a difference" in students' lives. Sadly, this course will do none of those things overtly. It is time to reset expectations. I'm not going to teach them how to make it better in their classrooms. Furthermore, I expect that many will leave this course with more questions than answers. That's when I know I've done my job. I'd like to think that at my best I've created the feeling Frederick Douglass had when he learned to read: "I came to believe that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view to my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but no ladder upon which to get out. . . . Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it."1 It is precisely this yearning and frustration that led Douglass to freedom and knowledge.
On the first day of class I confound my students by telling them that this course is about education and not schooling. Schooling and education are inextricably linked in our society and even more so in a school of education. What happens if we separate them? To define education is the task of this first class meeting. I ask them, as "experts" in a school of education, "How do we define education?" "How do we do so without talking about schooling?" I play the foil, while recording on the white board, the answers that are a bountiful garden of jargon. As a "mere" historian, I ask them to break down what they are saying to a lay person's ears. If they say education is about learning, I want to know what learning means. If education is about knowledge, what does knowledge mean? I agree with them that it's difficult to define. It's like trying to give instructions for how to swallow. There is some part of it that is undefinable. But they've had a good time calling out answers and I've challenged every answer, probing deeper, searching for understanding of what they mean. We discuss formal and informal education, places where they've learned or loci of knowledge that are outside a classroom. At some point they are looking for this conversation to be over. They are intrigued by the question, but they are also waiting for me to give a definition that will shape the direction of the course and their thinking. I admit that it was an exercise whose purpose was to break the habit of thinking of education solely as schooling. Furthermore, I want them to consider if education and learning are always "good." I want them to ask themselves if learning is always positive? Does it "better" a situation. And if education, as they come to agree, is something about learning and teaching, what exists between the gap of what is taught and what is learned? Are we sure that what we intend to teach is what is learned?
Up until this point there's been some lively discussion and students feel they are "indulging" me in this conversation that has no answer. And I have to admit it's fun to see the range of responses as they try to figure out how these exchanges fit into the course, or what trickery I might be up to. There is humorous curiosity ranging to deep skepticism. I tell them that there is no real answer, it's open for interpretation, and, honestly, that I'm curious to know how other people think about this question. Then I drop the bomb about why we are spending so much time making this distinction. It is an important separation because Black people in the United States didn't have access to schooling for almost 200 years of their history in this country. Does that mean they didn't learn? Clearly not, but for those of who came to the course thinking about Black schooling, they are disappointed, because a big chunk of this course is about learning and hearing directly from those who learned and taught outside of schools. As we near the end of the class meeting, I give the foundational question regarding education, schooling, and their value or "goodness." "One is born into slavery**," I say to them, "but one must learn how to be a slave."I pause before continuing.* "The first works we will be reading consider how one learns to be a slave."*
Using Thomas Webber's Deep Like the Rivers along with Roll Jordan Roll by Eugene Genovese, we consider the life of the slave and slave community. I want to provide some context for those first readings which are going to consider the education of the slave—but not in terms of literacy. Although I say this a couple of times, and I say this every time I teach this course, I am still sincerely interested in this foundational question of how one must learn to be a slave and more importantly, why we've never considered it as a part of education. That is where I end the class, sending students off to rethink what this course is about, why they took it, and if they want to stay.
This is a lot to ask of students during a first class. I recognize that. But I am a true believer in education and the life of the mind. Some students trust the process immediately. Others come to embrace it reluctantly. With both, I feel joy watching their metamorphosis. This is why I teach. It's why I believe so much in knowledge and thinking as transformation and power. Of course, this doesn't happen all the time. This course is hard work and feelings are hurt, minds are challenged, people are angry (sometimes with me), and they don't always like what happens or even want to come to class. I feel the same way for the fifteen weeks of the semester. Some weeks I feel nothing but dread. Still, I know that true joy comes from all this.
I know from experience that some students will come back to class wanting to make it a more traditional chronological history course that doesn't ask these types of questions. There will also be a small group of students, both Black and white, who are there, by their own account, to teach me and to push back to a place where they are more comfortable. I'm talking about those who believe learning is about affirming what they already know and see their job in my class as making sure that I am not shaking that foundation of the history they've already been taught. Regardless of historical texts and evidence that challenge those views, they want to bring me round to a narrative that is more familiar, doesn't delve too deeply and supports what they understand and have been taught in the past. They cannot budge from the founding fathers, meritocratic history with white men at the center of the narrative that they've been taught since their elementary years. But that is not what my class is about. And making people comfortable and affirming what they already know is not who I am as a teacher. I want to shake these mythic foundations and make room for more narratives and perspectives that do more than complement the "grand" narrative. Some students confuse me or stymie me. It is in these moments that I must consider the gap I mentioned above—that space between what I think I'm teaching and what they are learning. It fascinates me and confirms that learning is difficult for all of us.
I have learned from my students—through painful experiences that made me think more deeply about my teaching and adjust it to take on profound topics that rock foundations. This is where I have had to learn to hold steady. My goal is to teach history, American history re-centered. My joy comes from those who, almost against their will, let in knowledge that expands and challenges what they already know. This is joyful—not because students have come round to my way of thinking, but because they have created their own way of thinking. They have come to question all that they know and are seeking answers that can satisfy them.
This moment is magical and soul lifting. It is so much more than happiness. It is joy. It can't be contained or measured or even described. Watching that transformation happen is why I do what I do. This joy is often only for me. These same students are often angry. I've pushed them to question all that they took as fact. I've opened them up to how much they don't know. They ask why they didn't know this history before. White and Black students are raising questions about the fundamental knowledge by which they narrate their lives.
My goal is to teach American history. African Americans had to create their own space to exist in the United States, but their existence is at the core of American history. African Americans, from the slave trade forward, have been central to the economic growth and to the social, cultural, and political development of this country. The secret of that centrality constitutes a deeply protected and hidden narrative of its own. A great deal of effort continues to be expended to erase African Americans from American history. Even before the current fear of Critical Race Theory, the desire to deny the foundational truths of who built the country has been evident. I want to make that history known. My job is to tell the story that many fight to keep hidden. My students become engaged with me in the space between what is taught and what is learned. Here are where my moments of joy lie. To experience that joy I must also experience the sadness, the frustration, and the helplessness that comes with teaching and learning. Joy, in all its fleetingness and in its acknowledged sorrowing, is sustaining nourishment. By Its pain and frustration, I am assured of joy's absolute lack of instrumentality. This allows me to place it at the core of my existence as a person and as a teacher.
1 Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (New York: Dover Publications, 1995), p.24 Chapter VII).