William Rodney Herring's Courses

1. What is the purpose of the Oakland School Board's resolution?
2. What is Ebonics? How is it defined?
3. What authorities are cited? How are they credentialed?
4. How do the authorities weigh in on the issue? What are their judgments about Ebonics?
5. What are the main arguments against the Oakland School Board?
6. Summarize the article in no more than three sentences.

Original:

In the first chapter of John Hay’s 1883 novel, The Bread-winners, one word tells us everything we need to know about the distinction between the admirable and the vulgar. Predictably, given the novel’s sympathies, these two kinds of people map respectively onto the wealthy and the poor. In the opening scene, the working-class, but socially ambitious Maud Matchin visits the aristocratic, widowed Civil War veteran, Arthur Farnham, ostensibly looking for work but, as we soon discover, actually hoping to charm Farnham himself. She proposes employment at the library, which has two advantages: since he’s on the library board, he can help her get a job, and since she’s seen him there for board meetings, she knows such a job would ensure that she sees him again. Farnham asks her whether she can handle the job, and she replies, “Certingly, sir!” (14). Maud’s use of this word certingly is complex enough that we should pause over it. What does it even mean? Clearly, Maud has mispronounced certainly, but why? One possibility is that she lets a dialectal pronunciation slip in to her otherwise uninflected speech.

As the syllabus indicates, read Ch. 2 of The Sense of Structure. Then:

Write a paragraph describing something you did or something that happened this weekend. Pay attention to:
a. Whose story are you telling?
b. What is the emphasis in each sentence, and where is that topic presented in the sentence?
c. How much separation are you leaving between subjects and verbs? And what is the effect?
Don’t worry about writing this way: write your paragraph and then revise it with a, b, and c in mind.

In an article we're not reading, B.F. Skinner has written:

No account of what is happening inside the human body, no matter how complete, will explain the origins of human behaviour. What happens inside the body is not a beginning. By looking at how a clock is built, we can explain why it keeps good time, but not why keeping time is important, or how the clock came to be built that way. We must ask the same questions about a person. Why do people do what they do, and why do the bodies that do it have the structures they have? We can trace a small part of human behaviour, and a much larger part of the behaviour of other species, to natural selection and the evolution of the species, but the greater part of human behaviour must be traced to contingencies of reinforcement, especially to the very complex social contingencies we call cultures. Only when we take those histories into account can we explain why people behave as they do. ("The Origins of Cognitive Thought," emphasis added)

If, then, we do not believe in racial identity as a social construction and we ought to give up the idea of racial identity altogether--we should, like the inauthentic Jew, deny that there are such things as Jews, or blacks, or whites.
Walter Benn Michaels, "Autobiography of an Ex-White Man"

Do you think that Crash challenges or upholds concepts of racial identity? Give specific examples that support your claim.

Spoiler warning in effect

Since I don't feel like we've quite sufficiently discussed Passing, I want to open this thread as an opportunity to do so. I'm going to offer hints as to my reading(s), and though that certainly doesn't mean that you can't or won't offer compelling arguments for your readings, it may help you get a handle on what you have to say.

So the first question we need to answer is what are the possibilities for the end of the novel. Let me list them:
(1a) Clare jumped (a form of suicide)
(1b) Clare lost her balance and fell (an accidental death)

Read closely the scene where Clare and Irene meet at the Drayton. What precisely reveals Clare's identity to Irene? Why is the particular form the revelation takes significant? What is the significance?

If Clare is the figure for the "menace of impermanence" (101) to Irene's life, what steps does Irene take to establish permanence?

And what does this desire for permanence reveal about the structure of Passing's culture?