Saturday Edition
Why I am Wary of Geoffrey Canada As a Social Commentator
by Mark Naison | Special to NewBlackMan
I have been wary of Geoffrey Canada as a social commentator ever since he published a book called Fist, Knife, Stick, Gun whose first section describes the Morrisania section of the South Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s as a hell hole, a place plagued with violence and negativity. Violence and negativity there certainly was, but there were also great neighborhood sports programs, vibrant churches, great music and arts programs in the public schools, and many mentors and "old heads" who helped guide young people away from trouble.
Canada's grim vision of this predominantly Black section of the Bronx, contradicted by literally scores of interviews I did with people who lived in the same community, was a disturbing example of literary "tunnel vision"- an author's propensity to make his personal experience universal. By contrast, read Allen Jones' The Rat That Got Away: a Bronx Memoir, set in South Bronx housing projects and neighborhoods in the same time period, whch recognizes that the same community could contain hustlers, political activists, striving students, gang leaders, protective parents, drug dealers and inspired teachers and mentors.
Today, Canada's seems to apply the same tunnel vision to education when he views failing schools as the bane of struggling neighborhoods and says that private business would never tolerate such failures. But such a comment could only be made by someone who doesn't examine the role of the private sector in America's inner city neighborhoods, which was to shut down operations, and move out when neighborhood conditions and global economic trends made them unprofitable.
While public schools in these communities remained open, factories shut own, banks closed their doors, insurance companies and banks redlined the areas, landlords abandoned and burned properties, and whole business districts disappeared. In many cases, it was neighborhood public schools, hardpressed and occasionally disorderly as they were ( read Janet Mayer's wonderful book As Bad As They Say: Three Decades of Teaching in the Bronx) were the one place where young people could find support and inspiration when they were abanoned by private capital, and savaged by government cutbacks.
To now hold these very same public schools up to scrutiny as failures in an otherwise successful society can only be done by erasing what has happened in inner city America in the last 40 years. Global economic trends, coupled with government policies which siphoned wealth upward, destabilized and in some instances destroyed inner city neighborhoods, not teachers unions and poorly run public schools.
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Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.
