Strange Fruit, Systemic Racism and Education – Reflections from a Teacher

I like many other educators, writers and commentators we have been appalled by the barbaric and brazenly racist murder of George Floyd. Attorney Van Jones described ‘the knee to the neck’ as a lynching, ensuring we view this act within the context of a longer line of historical racist violence and murder.

Being a music journalist (of sorts) before I became a teacher, I often turn to songs that give voice to the pain, frustration and politics felt by those directly affected. This disgraceful lineage of murder, violence and lynching is hauntingly evoked by Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, the words of which are transcribed below. Writer Abel Meeropel was inspired by Lawrence Beitler's iconic 1930 photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith and the imagery invoked resonates today as we process the trauma of continued violent acts against people of colour and minorities.

The impact of Billie Holiday’s repeated performance of Strange Fruit, sung as it was in front of a variety of audiences, cannot be over stated. It was appropriately called an “a declaration of war” and other commentators have suggested it laid the foundations for the civil rights movement itself. As that momentum grew in the 1960s Nina Simone’s version of Strange Fruit added another layer of depth to the song’s impact as its message and defiant graphic imagery propelled protests forward, helped by Simone’s personal uncompromising stance during that turbulent time. The layering of lynching images over the perfectly pitched rendition of the words, in the link provided, now adds even greater gravitas and will continue to educate those who confront the brutal realities of the violence enacted against African Americans.

Southern trees

Bear strange fruit

Blood on the leaves

And blood at the roots

Black bodies

Swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hangin'

From the poplar trees

Pastoral scene

Of the gallant south

Them big bulging eyes

And the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolia

Clean and fresh

Then the sudden smell

Of burnin' flesh

Here is a fruit

For the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather

For the wind to suck

For the sun to rot

For the leaves to drop

Here is

Strange and bitter crop

It is the unadulterated confrontation with the act of violence that draws parallels with George Floyd’s horrendous murder. In the late 1930s audiences were forced to face images of “black bodies swinging in the southern breeze…big bulging eyes and the twisted mouth” and the impact was considerable. Of course for many African Americans this was an all too familiar lived reality so the hypocrisy and veneer of gentility evoked by the “gallant South” is quite rightly punctured by these arresting, violent pictures.

This visceral engagement with racist murder can accelerate the urgency of the responsive change required. It is necessary to fully understand the need for action and a deeper awareness of the structural impact of racist discourse, economics, identity politics and even urban planning. It is no longer enough for those of us who have benefitted from white privilege and institutional advantages to continue to pay hollow lip service to headline statements but rather to engage in more substantial action that examines the structures and processes that as Holiday sings are “the blood at the roots”.

This was the reason why many years ago in a British school overseas (that was itself far from reflective of its own complicity in unexamined institutional prejudices), I introduced Strange Fruit to my Langston Hughes poetry unit to provide students with palpable and meaningful context. We listened to other Blues tracks and discussed the ‘sublimation’ of the Trumpet Player and A Dream Deferred and appreciated Hughes’ attempt to link the emerging Civil Rights movement with global uprisings against British colonialism in Hong Kong, Singapore, South African and India. However this is only a tiny step towards deeper engagement and these tweaks to the curriculum can only achieve so much without a wider consideration of an institution’s impact on many different fronts. This is why alumni from schools I have worked in have issued challenges to educators, administrators and governors alongside Rachel Engel’s An Open Letter to the International School Community

So the challenge for us as educators is to do the hard work behind the rhetoric of mission, visions and values statements to then detail and challenge the mechanisms of institutional injustice. As Obama stated it requires an engagement with not just alluring presidential politics but the more mundane metropolitan policies that control policing recruitment, profiling, and training. As Ibram Kendi outlines in his 2019 text, How To Be Anti-Racist to move from the platitudes of ‘non racism’ to active ‘anti-racism’ requires a deeper understanding of the layered processes acting historically across the intersections of class, gender, socio-economics and politics. Raising awareness of Systemic Racism including implicit bias, redlining, economic disparities and incarceration rates is a necessary baseline educational requirement. This is why students themselves are writing to schools I have worked in demanding changes to the curriculum to provide every student with a foundational awareness of colonial practices, white privilege, structural impact and the important distinction between equity and equality in restorative practices (see links below).

This indeed marks the work of one of Langston Hughes’ last pieces of writing performed by Nina Simone herself. Backlash Blues again confronts the visceral pain of the legacies of slavery with a list of the institutional expressions of systemic racism as the ‘backlash’ ripples through injustices of taxation, housing, conscription and education. It echoed through to my generation as the band Chapter and Verse educated us in 1990 about the intricacies of the Blues tradition sublimating pain into expression and political action. The Black Whip like Public Enemy’s Fight the Power and Burn Hollywood Burn introduced a new generation to the necessary tutorials required to understand the depths and interplays of systemic racism. As KRS 1 invoked in his 1989 rap You Must Learn the battleground is education and there is no substitute for doing the hard work to enable a full understanding of the contexts that lead to the normalisation of violent practices.

To be clear, this is not pushing a particular party line or ideology. Rather it is an argument for full access to a strong liberal arts education that should be available to everyone regardless of school, family or regional context. 

As educators teaching an international literature programme twenty years ago we reflected on which narratives might transport students viscerally into those worlds of systemic racism, identity politics and lived realities. As a teenager studying for a year in Southern Mississippi, an outstanding educator Dr Sandra Shattuck gave me that opportunity by introducing us to the writings of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Malcom X, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and bell hooks. It was made clear to me during this course what was at stake when confronting ‘post colonial theory’ and the need for a re-examination of the taught curriculum. The realisation that The Bluest Eye, Invisible Man or Their Eyes Were Watching God were rarely included in mainstream literary course collections not only limited a deeper understanding of ‘black lives’ but deprived the world of some of the greatest insights into the human condition. Returning to Europe it became a catalyst to unearth the hidden narratives of what Paul Gilroy calls The Black Atlantic diaspora experience shunted through the slave trade triangle linking West Africa, to Britain/W. Europe and the Americas/Caribbean. That is the tragedy of systemic racism left unchallenged because in doing so it over determines, over privileges and fossilises thought, art, perspectives and beliefs of a particular hegemony. As a white, male teenager I was not overtly aware of the need to engage with British Black or African American literature, music, art or identity politics to redress the elevated platform and priority given to white European male discourse. It was simply a response to excellence, relevance and aesthetic depth. Not only are educational courses, cultural artefacts and literary texts diminished by allowing the under representation of marginalised voices to continue but boardrooms, science labs, government agencies and businesses too. It is reminiscent of Wade Davis’ conception of an ‘ethnosphere’ much like the biosphere. Every time an indigenous population loses its last speaker of an ancient language all of humanity suffers because the wider ethnosphere retracts and we lose diversity of thought, insight and knowledge.

So where do educators go from here?

Cleary we need to continue to empower student agency that is already activating responses, solutions and challenges. Young people of colour or other marginalised groups are best placed to articulate their experiences, suggestions and actions. This must be both the starting and finishing points as any changes should be experienced as impactful by students themselves. Current conditions have created an environment where both alumni and students are willing to share ‘hidden’ experiences they have had with institutional or unchallenged racism. They are also able to articulate their frustrations with curriculum content and disparities between values and practices.*

Faculty themselves can also reflect and consider their own practices, pedagogy and positioning. When I trained as a teacher at Goldsmiths College, University of London, the work of British Black academics such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy were core reading requirements. Equally the racial diversity of my fellow teacher cohort enabled my own education to broaden and accelerate. It begs the question about how best to emulate these conditions if that is not the default situation for teachers graduating from colleges today? Recently on a conference call with colleagues in North America I was asked to reference an educational theorist who has really influenced my career. I mentioned Paolo Friere’s seminal text Pedagogy of the Oppressed and his clear, pragmatic insights into the mechanisms that perpetuate systemic injustice, whether class, gender or race related. Colleagues in Canada in the process of confronting the traumas of residential schooling for generations of First Nations students will be fully cognisant of educational oppression. Friere’s critical pedagogy foregrounded the role of education has in then unpicking biases, agendas and norms that undermine equity. This of course does not mean that teachers have to ‘perform’ activism in similar ways however we should all be reflective practitioners who engage with social justice and create safe havens for students to do the same. I worry whether this foundational element of teacher training is still in place or if the awareness that was afforded my cohort at Goldsmiths through curriculum choices and content is evident elsewhere? The First People’s Principles of Learning platform and First Nations education work with the province of British Columbia is certainly a beacon of hope moving in this direction.

Of course the work of ‘deliberate diversification’ in all professions needs much more work and attention. I am part of that problem myself as a representative of the most privileged demographic group who has benefitted from this elevated platform. However, as the first member of my family to attend university, receive a full scholarship, access a grammar school designed to provide social mobility to students from lower socio economic backgrounds and a grateful recipient of endless government grants, there are connections and overlaps that open up dialogue. These are the “intersections” Ibram Kendi endorses in How To Be Anti-Racist and provide a platform of hope for all of us to make positive contributions. Please be clear that in opening ‘intersections for dialogue’ there is no intention to conflate experiences. There are obviously significant degrees of difference between levels of socio-economic challenge and the brutality faced by visible markers of race. Knowing how to identify opportunities for collective anti-racist discourse whilst not insensitively appropriating distinctive narratives is an important distinction and part of the deeper education I am advocating. As Brad Baker @bradleybaker, the influential Squamish Nation educator taught me some years ago, the paralysis problem of inaction for fear of saying or doing the wrong thing, is equally frustrating. This is particularly acute in education which is why we need to open up this debate and accelerate the change. I may have already said the wrong thing in which case help me understand where I am at fault. However I agree with Brad as long as we are well intentioned, remaining silent is no longer an option.

Craig Davis

08/06/2020

*Kehinde Fadipe – English and Drama Teacher at Dulwich College Singapore

“While they should be encouraged, perhaps Craig could consider that conducive environments should be created to help them feel comfortable to do so if they wish to. I know as a young girl in an English boarding school, like so many other black people (specifically us Africans) in all-white environments, we are already from wealthy, privileged backgrounds and just aren't placed to speak on realities we are still trying to understand ourselves. So, I think, 'empower[ing] student agency' is about all students being better informed and being able to have discussions and debates not black or Asian students leading the way.”

Kehinde was very supportive in reading and encouraging the distribution of this piece through her own networks. Her point is often overlooked by those of us in a rush to provide better platforms for discussion – High School students are also teenagers struggling to find their voice on a number of levels and this is a key issue to remember. Thank you.

Links to petitions from ex-students mentioned above:

Calls to decolonise the International Baccalaureate Curriculum

https://medium.com/@rachel.engel/an-open-letter-to-the-international-school-community-our-role-in-the-black-lives-matter-movement-c92ba725d93c

Example of a petition to change the text list for the GCSE UK national curriculum 

Teach British children about the realities of British Imperialism and Colonialism: