Substituting Prisons for Schools

The current debates about multiculturalism in higher education represent more than insular disputes between warring factions of professional academics. They also, with few exceptions, harbor an indifference to the world outside of the university that borders on bad faith and ethical irresponsibility.

As more and more young people face a world of increasing poverty, unemployment, and diminished social opportunities, progressive educators must become more attentive to how multicultural politics gets worked out in public spheres that are currently experiencing the full force of the right-wing attack on culture and racial difference. It is no longer possible for academics to make a claim to a radical politics of multiculturalism by defining it merely as a set of intellectual options and curriculum imperatives. Academic multiculturalism must also examine actual struggles taking place in the name of cultural difference within institutional sites and cultural formations that bear the brunt of dominant machineries of power designed to exclude, contain, or disadvantage the oppressed.

In spite of conservative Nathan Glazer's claim that we are all multiculturalists now—as if the multiculturalists (whoever they might be) need only have the force of logic on their side—the growing assault against racial minorities has entered a dangerous and militant stage. This is evident, in part, in the celebration in the popular press of overtly racist books by authors such as Dinesh D'Souza, Charles Murray, and their increasingly color-blind liberal cohorts such as Jim Sleeper and Randall Kennedy, but also in the more overt acts of police brutality and daily violence being waged against young black and brown Americans who are filling up America's prisons at an alarming rate. The institutional and cultural spheres bearing the brunt of the racialization of the social order are increasingly located in the criminal justice system, the urban public schools, in retrograde anti-immigrant policy legislation, and in the state's ongoing attempts to force welfare recipients into workfare programs. Moreover, the popular imagination is being fed a steady diet of racial panic and right wing extremism through a host of Hollywood films that suggests that urban kids who are black, brown, and poor are not only dangerous and pathological but also disposable, subject to attacks by vigilantes and “night riders.”

During the last five years, a number of Hollywood films such as Dangerous Minds (1995), The Substitute I (1996), and High School High (1996) have cashed in on the prevailing racially coded popular “wisdom” that public schools are out of control, largely inhabited by illiterate, unmotivated, and violent urban youth who are economically and racially marginalized. The increasingly familiar script suggests a correlation between urban public space, rampant drug use, daily assaults, broken teachers, and schools that do nothing more than contain deviants who are a threat to themselves and everybody else. The film 187 is a recent addition to this genre, but takes the pathologizing of poor, urban students of color so far beyond existing cinematic conventions that it stands out as a public testimony to broader social and cultural formations within American society that makes the very existence of this blatantly racist film possible.

Directed by Kevin Reynolds and written by Scott Yagemann, a former school teacher, 187 narrates the story of Trevor Garfield (Samuel L. Jackson) a science teacher who rides to school on a bike in order to teach at a high school in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Garfield is portrayed as an idealistic teacher who against all odds is trying to make his classes interesting and do his best to battle daily against the ignorance, chaos, and indifference that characterizes the urban public school in the Hollywood imagination.

In the film's opening scenes, students move through metal detectors under the watchful eyes of security guards. The school looks more like a prison, and the students, with their rap music blaring in the background, look more like inmates being herded into their cells. The threat of violence is palpable in this school and Garfield confronts it as soon as he enters his classroom and picks up his textbook, which has the figure “187” scrawled all over it. Recognizing that the number is the police code for homicide, Garfield goes to the principal to report what he believes is a threat on his life. The principal tells Garfield he is overreacting, dismissing him with “You know what your problem is? On the one hand, you think someone is going to kill you, and on the other hand, you actually think kids are paying attention in your class.” But Garfield hasn't left before the principal confirms his fears by revealing that he has told a student in Garfield's class that he has flunked the course. Not only has the principal violated Garfield's privacy, but the student who he has flunked is on probation and as a result of the failing grade will now be sent back to prison. The threat of violence and administrative ineptitude sets the stage for a hazardous series of confrontations between Garfield and the public school system. Garfield leaves the principal's office terrified and walks back to his classroom. Each black male student he now sees appears menacing and poised to attack. Shot in slow motion, the scene is genuinely disturbing. Before Garfield reaches his classroom, he is viciously and repeatedly stabbed with a nine inch nail in the hallway by the black male student he has flunked.

Fifteen months later Garfield has relocated and finds a job as a substitute teacher at John Quincy Adams High School in Los Angeles. The students in this school are mostly Latino. They wear oversized pants and torn shirts, carry boom boxes blaring rap music, and appear as menacing as the African-American students Garfield taught in Brooklyn. As the camera pans their bodies and expressions, it becomes clear that what unites these inner-city students of color is a culture that is dangerous, crime-ridden, and violent. Assigned to teach his class in a bungalow, Garfield's first day is a nightmare as students taunt him, throw paper wads at him, and call him “bitch.” Garfield has moved from New York to California only to find himself in a public high school setting that has the look and feel of hell. Images of heat rising from the pavement, pulsating rap music, shots of graffiti, and oversized shadows of gang members playing basketball filtering through the classroom window paint an ominous picture of what Garfield is about to experience.

Ellen Henry (Kelly Rowan), a perky, blond computer science teacher, tries to draw close to Garfield, but he is too battered and isolated, telling Ellen at one point that when he was assaulted in New York, it robbed him of his “passion, my spark, my unguarded self—I miss them.” Garfield's descent into madness begins when his bungalow is completely trashed by the gang members in his class. He becomes edgy, living in a shadow of fear heightened by his past. Ellen then tells Garfield that Benny, a particularly vicious gang member in his class, has threatened to hurt her, and indicates to Garfield that she doesn't know what to do. Soon afterwards Benny disappears, but her troubles are not over as Benny's sidekick, Cesar, and his friends kill her dog. As a result, Cesar becomes the object of vigilante justice. Roaming drunk near the LA freeway, he is stalked, shot with a spiked arrow, and while unconscious his finger is cut off. The tension mounts as Ellen finds Benny's rosary beads in Garfield's apartment and confronts him with the evidence that he might be the killer. Garfield is immune to her reproach, arguing that someone has to take responsibility since the system will not protect “us” from “them.” Ellen tells Garfield she doesn't know him anymore, and Garfield replies “I am a teacher just like you.” As the word circulates that Garfield may be the vigilante killer and assailant, the principal moves fast to protect the school from a lawsuit and fires him.

Garfield, now completely broken, goes home and is soon visited by Cesar and his gang, who inspired by the film, The Deer Hunter, force Garfield into a game of Russian roulette. With little to lose, Garfield tells Cesar he is not really a man, and ups the stakes of the game by taking Cesar's turn. Garfield pulls the trigger and kills himself. Forced into questioning his own manhood, Cesar decides to take his turn, puts the gun to his head, and fatally shoots himself as well. In the final scene of the film, a student is reading a graduation speech about how teachers rarely get any respect, the shot switches to Ellen who is in her classroom. Ellen takes her framed teaching certificate off the wall, throws it into the wastebasket, and walks out of the school.

The conditions that produce such denigrating images of inner-city public schools—poverty, family turmoil, violent neighborhoods, unemployment, crumbling school buildings, lack of material resources, or iniquitous tax structures—are, of course, absent from 187 and all other films in this rising genre. Depoliticized, Hollywood portrays public schools as not only dysfunctional, but also as an imminent threat to the dominant society. Students represent a criminalized underclass who must be watched and contained through the heavy-handed use of high-tech monitoring systems and military-style authority. Instead of smaller class sizes, inspiring teachers, visionary administrators, and ample learning resources, the children of the urban poor are treated to the latest “security” techniques. Hence, urban schools are increasingly subject to electronic surveillance, private police forces, padlocks, and alarms more suggestive of prisons or “war zones.” Films like 187 carry the logic of racial stereotyping to a new level and represents one of the most egregious examples of how popular cultural texts can be used to demonize black and Latino youth while reproducing a consensus of common sense that legitimates racist policies of either containment or abandonment in the inner cities. The depictions of urban youth as dangerous, pathological, and violent, in turn, finds its counterpart in the growth of a highly visible criminal justice system whose get-tough policies fall disproportionately on poor black and brown youth.

Such policies represent more than the celebrated “war on drugs,” they threaten to wipe out a whole generation of young black males who are increasingly incarcerated in prisons and jails, and whose populations are growing at the rate of about seven percent a year and costs more than 30 billion annually to operate. The figures are disturbing: “Between 1983 and 1998 the number of prisoners in the U.S. increased from 650,000 to more than 1.7 million. About 60 percent of that number are African-Americans and Latinos. More than one-third of all young black men in their 20s are currently in jail, on probation or parole, or awaiting trial. We are now adding 1,200 new inmates to U.S. jails and prisons each week, and adding about 260 new prison beds each day.”

This state of affairs is compounded by the disturbing fact that as a result of serving time nearly half of the next generation of black males will forfeit their right to vote in several states. How can a cultural text such as 187 be used to engage students in addressing their own views on race and multiculturalism? At the very least, educators can address 187 not merely in terms of what such a text might mean but how it functions within a set of complex social reactions that create the conditions of which it is a part and from which it stems.

Engaging the potential discursive effects of films such as 187 might mean discussing the implication of this Hollywood film in appropriating the name of the controversial California proposition to deny mostly non-white students access to public schools. Or engaging how 187 contributes to a public discussion that rationalizes both the demonization of minority youth and the defunding of public and higher education at a time when in states such as California “approximately 22,555 African Americans attend a four-year public university...while 44,792 (almost twice as many) African Americans are in prison [and] this figure does not include all the African Americans who are in county jails or the California Youth authority or those on probation or parole.”

Hollywood films such as 187 must be addressed and understood within a broader set of policy debates about education and crime which often serve to legitimate policies that disempower poor and racially marginalized youth. For example, nationwide state spending for corrections has increased 95 percent over the last decade, while spending on higher education decreased 6 percent. Similarly, “over a ten year period, the number of correctional officers increased four times the rate of public higher education faculty.” It is not surprising that the chosen setting for 187 is primarily California, a state that now “spends more on corrections (9.4 percent of the General Fund) than on higher education.” While it would be absurd to suggest to students that films such as 187 are responsible for recent government spending allocations, they do take part in a public pedagogy and representational politics that cannot be separated from a growing racial panic and fear over minorities, the urban poor, and immigrants.

Films such as 187, The Substitute I & II, and Dangerous Minds fail to rupture the racial stereotypes that support harsh, discriminatory crime policies and growing incidents of police brutality, such as the highly publicized torture of Abner Louima by a Brooklyn patrolperson or the recent shooting death of Amadou Diallo by four New York City plainclothes police who riddled his body and an apartment building vestibule with 41 bullets, in spite of the fact that Diallo was unarmed. Such films have little to say about police assaults on poor black neighborhoods such as those conducted by former LA police Chief Daryl Gates against south-central Los Angeles.

What is unique about 187 is that it explores cinematically what the logical conclusion might be in dealing with urban youth for whom reform is no longer on the national agenda, for which containment or the militarization of school space seem both inadequate and too compromising. Carried to the extreme, 187 flirts with the ultimate white supremacist logic, i.e., extermination and genocide of those others deemed beyond the pale of social reform, inhuman, and despicable. 187 capitalizes on the popular conception reported endlessly in the media that public education is not safe for white, middle-class children, that racial violence is rampant in the public schools, that minority students have turned classroom discipline into a joke, that administrators are paralyzed by insensitive bureaucracies, and the only thing that teachers and students share is the desire to survive the day. But the implications of cultural texts such as 187 become meaningful not just as strategies of understanding and critical engagement that raise questions about related discourses, texts, and social issues, they also become meaningful in probing what it might mean to move beyond the sutured institutional space of the classroom to address social issues in related spheres marked by racial injustices and unequal relations of power.

The popularity of such films as 187 in the heyday of academic multiculturalism points to the need, in light of such representations, for educators to expand their understanding of politics as part of a broader project designed to address major social issues in the name of a multiracial democracy. This suggests getting beyond reducing multiculturalism to simply the study of texts or discourse in order to address multicultural politics as part of the struggle over power and resources in a variety of public spheres. This might mean, as Michael Berube points out, struggling to change how the “economics of school funding and school policy [work to] sustain segregation in American public education [through] inhuman fiscal policies that have ensured the continuous impoverishment of schools attended wholly by black or Hispanic schoolchildren.” Or what it might mean for students to engage in a politics of multiculturalism aimed at reforming a criminal justice system that disproportionately incarcerates and punishes minorities of class and color. Issues of representation and identity in this case offer the opportunity for multicultural educators to explore and challenge both the strengths and limits of cultural texts.

This suggests developing a pedagogy that promotes a social vocabulary of cultural difference that links strategies of understanding to strategies of engagement, that recognizes the limits of the university as a site for social engagement, and refuse to reduce politics to matters of language and meaning that erase broader issues of systemic political power, institutional control, economic ownership, and the distribution of cultural and intellectual resources in a wide variety of public spaces.

I recognize academics can not become public intellectuals by mere force of will, given the professional and institutional constraints under which they operate. But if multiculturalism is not going to take seriously the link between culture and power, progressive educators will have to rethink collectively what it means to link the struggle for change within the university to struggles for change in the broader society. This may be risky politically and pedagogically, but the promise of a multicultural democracy far outweighs the security and benefits that accompany silence, conformity, and a retreat into color blind politics.  Z