Pete Seeger was nearly 80 years old when I saw him perform with Arlo Guthrie in St. Paul, Minnesota. He seemed to take a nap on the stage while Guthrie was playing, an approach to life that may have helped him to live another fifteen years. It was 1988, a year and a half before I began teaching full time more than half the country away in Bakersfield, California. It was a great night. Although not too familiar with Arlo and Seeger’s music, I eagerly joined some great friends who were enthusiasts. We traveled from Decorah, Iowa to St. Paul and slept on the floor of a big old house near Macalester College where someone’s brother lived.
At one point, Arlo addressed the audience, commenting on the continued relevance of many of Pete’s and his dad’s songs. He mused that this may speak to their timelessness, or, he added with perfect comic timing, perhaps things had “been fucked up far longer than anyone had anticipated.” I feel this, often. Even more with each passing week since I started drafting this post more than a year ago.
The Cold War was already winding down when friends and I saw Guthrie and Seeger. As young people we were naturally alert to both the possibilities and the dangers in this transition. Fears of nuclear war and living under totalitarianism, both of which my occasionally febrile adolescent mind entertained, seemed to be lessening. We continued to oppose the militarism of the Reagan years, but also felt a sense of possibility. I considered myself realistic about the flaws in this country, about its foundation in racial and gender hierarchies. But, I had so much to learn.
We were all involved in the anti-apartheid movement, especially solidarity with Namibian1 students on campus. My outrage at the clear evils of apartheid blinded me, at least somewhat, to the problems in the US. I remember a Black scholar from South Africa patiently explaining, in response to question that I asked, that the United States and South Africa were actually quite similar. I consider this the beginning of my understanding of the dynamics of settler colonialism. The subsequent history of South Africa demonstrates Apartheid‘s legacy, much like the legacy of dispossession of Indigenous people, racialized slavery, Chinese exclusion in the US.
As White supremacy lost its grip on the South African state in the last decade of the 20th Century, it was too easy to see this progress as parallel with civil rights movements in the US. Graduating from high school twenty years after legislative triumphs of the African American Civil Rights movement in the US and political decolonization around the world perhaps it was natural to see general progress, albeit too slow and uneven, as the natural state of affairs. Maybe US society could live up to its promise. And, if so, education, including the inclusive, critical history education that I have made my life’s work, could play an instrumental role.
Obviously, this was not the shape of what was to come three decades later. Nearly ten years ago I naively suggested that White Americans needed to study more history without considering that millions openly supported turning the US more fully toward racialized authoritarianism. I did not see the multiple ties to Apartheid South Africa at the engine room of American fascism. I should have. The anti-anti-racism of the 2010s conservative movement was clearly a successor to the anti-anti-Apart speakers of the 1980s. I’m sure that John Roberts was comfortable with both crowds.
Two years ago when the school year started it was the first time since Nixon’s first term that wouldn’t be entering one as a student or a teacher, although I continue to educate youth and mentor preservice teachers. This has prompted even more reflection on the past, mine and the world’s, than usual, and I’m a pretty prone to rumination just normally. I had honestly hoped that things would be a little less fucked after three and a half decades of teaching. It’s a real blow.
There is one thing that my twenty-year-old self had right: it is always right to bear witness. A few months after hearing Guthrie and Seeger, I was standing by on side of the road with a friend as cars entered a freeway in Minneapolis each of us holding posters with two words: Contra Cocaine. For the kids out there, this was a protest against the illegal funding of the Contra forces in Nicaragua. The Contras supplemented their (illegal) US funds with drug trafficking. I have tried to bring the energy of this two person protest to 2020s. Despite the body blows to my life’s work. I will continue to bear witness.
- Namibia was under South African rule, including Apartheid in the 1980s. A young Peter Thiel had a very different experience there, compared to the Black students that I knew. ↩︎
