Holding Back the Race

...But they were paying for little more than a backward curriculum and a poisonously racist environment...

...Miss Jones was herself hired with funds legally ticketed for a reading specialist-which she wasn't...

...Although she is described by her publisher as a "civil rights activist...

...Bateson alleges that schizophrenia is induced in a child when he or she is unable to interpret the ambiguous messages received from a parent...

...she displays little awareness of social or historical contexts...

...The faculty-Predominantly black -consisted of a depressing melange of senility, incompetence, exploitation, and despair: Classes were conducted by ancient dowagers who had not opened a book in years and regularly assigned the last one they had read...

...We can see that a kind of double bind obtained for everyone at Thomas...

...During her year at Thomas, the college was in the process of regaining its accreditation-a fact unknown to its undergraduates-and the author angrily rails against the lax standards that allowed the school to win back its lost credentials...

...Since she was not writing a dry, sociological study full of charts and statistics, her account should have focused on her own experiences with the students and faculty...

...Poor rural families sent their children to Thomas with a blind trust that their money was buying a decent education...

...The entire campus functioned-or malfunctioned-through a series of interlocking, mutually reenforcing double binds...

...Yet...

...But Uncle Tom's Campus should be read...

...Nor do we get much sense of personal involvement or self-analysis from Miss Jones...

...It was clear that they had little or no understanding of the white world, believing that a white skin was a sure ticket to a life of leisure...

...In trying to understand the etiology of schizophrenia, Gregory Bateson has formulated what he calls the "double bind" theory...

...A small number of genuinely dedicated instructors beat their heads against the wall for a few semesters, before leaving or succumbing to the malaise and perquisites of bush-league academia...

...Miss Jones amply documents the pervasive self-contempt manifested by the black staff: Nothing worthwhile, it was believed, could come from the undergraduates, and anyone displaying an ounce of creativity was charged with "holding the race back" or "acting the nigger...

...Make-out" men, endowed with equal amounts of talent, charm and cynicism, offered courses while lusting after position and students...

...author, "The Party of Eros" Combining an anthropologist's detachment with a moralist's rage, Ann Jones has written a bitter, slashing and unmerciful account of her year of teaching at a small Southern black college...

...She never probes behind the ubiquitous hostility and distrust on campus, or records whether she was able to break down the cultural and racial barriers...

...To do so has involved, first, becoming aware of the nature of the situation and, second, taking individual and collective action to reform it...

...Because the book is rather narrowly drawn, it will be discounted by some as simply one more muckraking recitation by a white liberal Yankee who stayed around long enough to gather her incriminating material, then scurried back North to hand down her judgments from on high...

...Miss Jones' book, however, is not without its shortcomings...

...Obviously, there is something wrong with such a description, and perhaps a more fruitful approach would have been to suspend moral and institutional analysis for an examination of the destructive roles the people at Thomas were forced to act out...

...Miss Jones, who now teaches literature at the City College of the City University of New York, took the job at Thomas (a pseudonym) unaware of the nature of black colleges or the South...

...It is right on target in its charges...

...In contrasting the rebellious (and, to her mind, praiseworthy) Northern urban blacks with their brothers and sisters from the rural South, she borders on a type of contempt not far from what she is criticizing...

...She also berates the Federal government for failing to inquire where its money went after reaching the hands of the college's president and business manager...

...What does this j'accuse add up to...

...surprisingly, not one person in the book emerges as a human being with complex feelings and ideas...

...And Miss Jones felt she could not acquiesce in the ruination around her, but to attempt innovation and reform was to run the risk of being branded a racist or a troublemaker...

...Indeed, the word itself was often used, and male students were sometimes addressed as "boy...

...A way out is hard to envisage...

...The result is that the child is quite literally wrong however he reacts-he is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't...

...The administration held the teachers in contempt, and they responded by treating the students as "niggers...

...Still, if the predicament seems grim at Thomas, and at schools like Thomas, it is well to recall that social and personal double binds have been broken in the past...

...Though Miss Jones does not offer thoughtful prescriptions for change, she does rivet our attention where it belongs...

...Moreover, the black teachers tried to tum the students against the white instructors with flagrantly racist slurs and innuendoes...

...Uncle Tom's Campus is a valuable document of the pathological history of black and white together...

...If one were to take Uncle Tom's Campus at face value, everyone at Thomas was either a fool or a dupe, to be pitied or censured...

...The students were castigated for being stupid, but were also resented or repressed if they showed any initiative...

...While literal escape is probably the best solution for those who can manage it, there is no clear answer for the great majority...

...For instance, a mother may indicate affection and love verbally, but her tone of voice and body posture may "say" the opposite...

...It is not, as the careless reader might suppose, an ill-tempered diatribe against all black colleges?only a plea that the worst of them be closed down and the students redirected into the better black schools or into community colleges...

...As a woman, Miss Jones was subjected as well to unashamed sexism...

...She discovered a school presided over by a mendacious president and his lackeys, a hierarchy based on power and status, and a "plantation psychology" of submitting to superiors and tyrannizing inferiors...

...Beyond this, Miss Jones does not suggest any remedies...

...Much of the Federal boodle flowed to outside consultants, yet if their reports happened to be critical, the president and his underlings would disregard the conclusions or bad-mouth them...

...Unless the bind is somehow broken, says Bateson, it will lead to withdrawal into apparent stupidity or passivity, overinterpre-tation approaching paranoia, or a blind lashing out...

...Her picture of Southern blacks as almost unfailingly docile and intimidated, for example, ignores the fact that it was students like those at Thomas who initiated the sit-ins of the early '60s when nobody else was doing much of anything...

...Refugees from foreign countries were hired because they possessed a coveted doctorate, although they could scarcely speak English...

...Thus, Uncle Tom's Campus can best be seen as an eye-witness supplement to Ralph Ellison's famous portrayal of a black college in Invisible Man, or as documentation for the arguments presented by David Riesman and Christopher Jencks in The Academic Revolution...

...The instructors were employed to improve the skills of the undergraduates, yet to do so threatened their emotional investment in a status quo that granted them the all-important reward of feeling superior...