Troubling Sanctuary: A Black Teacher on College Behind Bars
by Drego Little
What does it say about America that one of the safest places for some people of color to learn, on purpose, is prison? Why do we often have to escape the education system for knowledge to find us?
The first thirty seconds of the documentary almost made me cry. Here was a Black man rendering the first page of Moby Dick beautifully, making Melville his. I have taught children of color for the last 17 years and my kids perform oratories and dramatic readings as well. The most common questions I am asked are ones like “why Shakespeare for those kids?” Or “what’s the The Odyssey gonna’ do for kids like them?” The questioners are usually white people who think they are liberals. They are deeply comfortable with their ideas about what should be off limits to students of color and couch their racism as care. College Behind Bars is a fierce rebuttal to people like them, but part of why I think the documentary works so well is that it is a well-wrought picture of the kind educational subversion people of color in America and their allies have had to practice for centuries now.
The students in the documentary tell stories about living in communities where school was “not cool” or where survival was a daily struggle. Not ideal conditions for learning. Even in survival mode they knew that they were missing out on something in school. I would argue that it was this observation buried deep in their pasts in the film, that enabled them to value the invitation from the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) and the support from other students. The achievement gap scholar Ronald Ferguson often says that there are two curricula in schools; the one that teachers teach and the one that students teach each other. We do not pay enough attention to the student taught curriculum in education, and College Behind Bars is a beautiful example of why we should take it much more seriously than we do.
I am a Black American teacher who did not attend high school. I started dropping out in slow motion January of my freshmen year and was basically gone by fall of sophomore year. Black America was under the siege that would change it for all future generations back then and my high school did everything it could to blame us for this fact. My salvation took two forms: literacy and disgruntled college students. I was an avid reader from a very young age and stuck with it because I had a mom who gave reading the same status as music or religion in the Black community, not a “thing” but just who you were. Because my school was near The University of Washington, when I skipped I’d read in the coffeehouses near campus. A group of students at one of my regular haunts found out I was a dropout and started handing me the books they wished they’d been assigned in their college classes. Some of these books were extolled with a passion I’d only seen in church or on Super Bowl Sunday. It was a powerful lesson about what care and concern look like in education and how vital intellectual sanctuary is for students from oppressed communities.
In the film Giovannie says that one of the most loving things ever done for him was when a friend pushed him to apply to BPI. In another scene Dyjuan tells a group of his classmates that prison officials can take everything but his books, even the computers, because when prison officials did remove computer access for a time, the BPI students “wrote papers by hand”. The support the students provide each other around the reach that rigor demands is a feature we should all take note of. When the women in the film are discussing their grades, not a single one of them ever speaks of quitting. Some of them earned grades on papers they are not so happy with, but it’s clear from their tone and how they speak to one another that lowish essay grades are rungs, not barriers. After watching this conversation viewers have no doubt these women will get this whole analytical essay thing dialed, and they do because as Shawnta’s story aptly shows us, college essays are paper demons compared to what women face in the streets.
College Behind Bars is remarkable for what it indirectly responds to as well as what it explicitly highlights. Two of the most disappointing traditions in American education regarding students of color are low standards and intellectual segregation. Watching John speak of himself and Odysseus like they were the same guy not only tells us that he understands his own journey but that he also understands Homer deeply. The same can be said when he refers to a character in King Lear as “greezy”, like some of the shady people he’s met in prison. This kind of intellectual engagement and extrapolation happens throughout the entire film. One of my favorite examples is when Tamika and Shawnta are comparing portrayals of women’s agency in novels by Jane Austen and Mary Shelley in ways that made me go back and reread both books. There is no discussion of the fact that some of the authors they read are dead and white. The BPI students work to realize what Maya Angelou said in her Bookworm interview with Michael Silverblatt “that all literature is true”. And they do this while taking the same courses and workloads that privileged students at Bard College have for years. If one doubts that rigor is a sign of respect for students, it is harder to do so after watching this film.
It is lovely to see the people in College Behind Bars embrace their gifts. That it happens in prison should not be cause for despair, but anger. What should trouble us, all of us, is not that they have found intellectual sanctuary in prison, but that they had to go there to get it.
