Speaking in code

Words that affected me during a teacher's professional development seminar,
The 20th Century and the African American Experience,
a NJ Council for the Humanities Teacher Seminar 2009


Word choice matters in all forms of conversation.
Tone and tenor are connotative and convey intent. Take the word "hot". Depending on the way it is said, it can fire the imagination in an appealing sense or be a warning to stay away or to be wary of something that will burn and make you uncomfortable. For five days in the summer of 2009, during a professional development seminar laden with scholarly jargon, tone and tenor gave layered meaning and ideas to familiar words. The topics were hot - language was couched in civility. To clarify or validate what was understood by an intended message, I asked questions and made thoughtful notes to replace outdated word use with more accurate and current phrases. Metaphoric descriptions of "marking" and "mythification" gave name to visual compositions that triggered emotional reactions in me. The word agency was the esoteric word of the seminar.

Agency is not a word I have heard routinely in most high school classes unless someone is naming a place like a real estate agency, employment agency, or the Social Security Agency, yet in the assigned seminar readings and the lectures the power of the word was evident. Agency quickly implies, to those in the know, that something changed because of what someone decided to do. According to Dr. Clement Price and Dr. Miriam Petty , in different discussions, agency refers to the actions of a person "taking control" to change the circumstances of their life or to specifically affect some kind of "autonomy." Agency is about self-determination, self-actualization, and self-motivation.

The seminar topics (see post "What was taught?") all dealt with the impact of racism in one form or another during the 20th century; a kind of anticipation of some sort of disturbance shivered through each session. However, there were no vitriolic eruptions - only tense questions and evidence to consider another point of view. Some of the words arched an eyebrows or moved persons to shift in their seats, huff mildly or smile smugly. A commonly used word like "slavery" was called out for reconsideration. Lacking definitive imagery, the word "slavery" begged the point that instead of using the assumptive term "slavery" that a better choice might be "enslaved" or "kidnapped into slavery." The latter phrase clearly staging a reality of the assault that took place. The idea of "slavery" as "porous" in relationship to the development of free Black communities brought to mind the people oozing through fences or a sieve-like apparatus dazed and confused.

The words "mythification" and "marking" now explain for me the continuing acceptance of stereotypes as characteristic of culture and ethnicity. "Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of elevation or demotion along a scale of human value" (Snead, 1994) Mythification "caters to a cultural appetite" (Petty). Then there is "marking." Snead's analysis explains "marking" as part of "image making rhetoric" and Dr. Petty explains it as the "use of visual code, markers" to register black stereotypes. There is "racial allegiance" to stereotypes; whites and blacks are willing receptors of the now familiar "mark" of stereotype despite evidence to contradict.

The word "historiography" explains influences of essayists, novelists, playwrights, and poets during a particular time. This concept reminded me of August Wilson's series of plays anchored in a neighborhood in Pittsburgh. His ten plays time travel in oral histories as part of the dialogue and rituals back through slavery, emancipation, coming of age, reclamation of place and manhood, and the agency of the human spirit.

The power of words resonated through a PBS film we watched: "Africans in America: Judgment Day. " As still images of enslavement were displayed, a sonorous voice read the words of David Walker, a former slave. From one of those letters the title of the PBS segment emerged and foreshadowed the plight of a nation: Judgment Day. The documentary director had skillfully used Walker's words to underscore the agency of John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry. The narrative of the raid and the passion of the individuals involved in the raid, left a somber foreboding feeling. The Raid at Harper's Ferry 1859 was the earliest recorded battle that signaled the inevitability of the coming Civil War.

Agency is about self-determination, self-actualization, and self-motivation. It is what teachers do everyday.

Words.