David Stovall: You Cannot Destroy Me

Last week I sat down with my dear friend, mentor, scholar and activist David Stovall. David Stovall, Ph.D. is Professor of African-American Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His scholarship investigates three areas 1) Critical Race Theory, 2) the relationship between housing and education, and 3) the intersection of race, place and school. Dave and I discussed ancestral wisdom, the deep need to revisit history, re-imaging education, and the destiny of humanity. 

Dave: I had a prof in grad school who said “the more technologically sound a society is, the easier it is to destroy it.” And I was like, makes perfect sense. So for me that’s always been kind of a lynch pin. To what extent do I want to participate in that and lean on that in terms of sustenance? That’s always been my take. 

Irina: Right now so many of us are online. Obviously that’s not available to everyone - folks who are incarcerated, don’t have access to the internet, etc. At the same time, so many folks are finding their way back to gardening, cooking, sewing - sewing masks - things that folks hadn’t been doing because they didn’t have the time or the necessity. Thinking of that quote, do you think this moment is affecting that calibration for us? 

Dave: Yeah, I think in a lot of ways folks are really understanding what that shift means. A deeper recognition of history. What I’ve been hearing from friends that are male identified who did not understand the labor of housework are now like “shit, this is really real.” In terms of now understanding what we should have time for in terms of creative arts, looking after folks, checking in with folks. People who did those things like gardening, sewing, knitting, cooking were either thought to be domestic or simple and now you really understand how much of a key that is to sustenance. Folks have done this since time immemorial. It’s a way that has returned us to a lot of ancestral wisdom. The thing will me is, to what extent will people pay attention to that. 

Irina: What is some of the ancestral wisdom that’s been speaking to you in this moment? 

Dave: I always love to tell this story. I used to deliver pastries for my aunt and my grandmother. I used to deliver them to all these different spaces, they were largely on the same street. There was never any exchange of money. It was like, deliver a pie, get a saw; deliver a cake, get a spice rack. It was all these things because when Black folks came to Chi in particular during the two large migrations a lot of folks didn’t have money, but they had what they knew how to do. People figured out how to exchange that type of work for sustenance. That type of exchange that I think is really important. 

Irene [my partner] found this picture of Promontory Point right off Hyde Park: a whole pack of coyotes started to reclaim space, there were no longer humans on their stuff. They were like “we’re good, we’re about to do our thing like we know how to do it.” It makes me pay attention to that ancestral wisdom. The earth is reminding us of how it should be. Dolphins coming back to Venice. Folks haven’t seen a Dolphin in Venice for so long. What does it mean to return? Really take into account what has been destroyed on the planet and the planet taking it back. If you mess with something for so long, it’s going to respond. 

The Earth has been alerting us to something we have not been paying attention to in the name of false progress. You’re not advancing anything if you’re killing something at the same time. The planet is reminding us of those truths. We’re being forced to understand those truths. You can’t repetitively harm a living thing and expect it not to respond. You can’t do all that poisoning and polluting of the planet and expect there to not be repercussions. Something that has evolved and moved over hundreds of millions of years. Now you harm it in all these different ways with pollutants and all these other extractions and you expect for it not to respond. Indigenous traditions have reminded us of this constantly. You cannot do harm to this place and then expect things to be good. 

Irina: Right and same thing with people. 

Dave: Exactly. That’s always been my thing with “traditional education.” You can’t expect a young person to sit in their dehumanization and not respond. The thing that we often ask young folks to do is suffer through this “education experience” which has very little education happenings. You can’t expect a young person to do this. And then as an adult, now you’re being compensated to make sure that young folks suffer through it. It’s a cascading level of bullshit. 

Irina: That cascading level of bullshit, now it’s even more so. So many young people are choosing not to participate in what was previously deemed as traditional education. What have you heard from teachers? 

Dave: I have two former students who are now teachers at Little Village School for Social Justice and for them the shift to eLearning has been kind of a wash. They really have to keep in contact and keep relationships with their students and figure out what form of communication works for them. eLearning is barely working. You have to have really motivated students, and even they get disaffected for being in this space absent of people for a long time. It’s been tough. For folks who are teaching at the grade school level, especially for teaching with little ones it’s been a wash. 

Irina:  How do you envision the return? Re-acclimation? Re-integration? 

Dave: It has the potential to be worse because of the integrations of eLearning and people who don’t have access. Or it can really have - and I’ve been saying this on a couple of public panels and podcasts - or there’s the opportunity to really rethink things. To rethink standardized testing. To get rid of standardized tests. To get rid of these tests that don’t tell us anything. It’s time to rethink how to cultivate teachers. There’s this very narrow window for this stuff to happen, but late stage capitalism makes all these pivots. Some of these things have been laid bare and there’s no running from them. So when people come back they have this opportunity to say “we should have never had this shit in the first place and we need to do something different.” I think about that with regard to the elimination of high stakes testing, with the elimination of grades. Rethinking the possibility of K-12 classroom teaching. 

Irina: What do you think are some first steps for teachers coming back to demand these things? 

Dave: Mobilizing. There’s always been this understanding that tests don’t do shit. There’s a history of teachers rising up against tests and this is a prime opportunity. This stuff has been used to extract and sort. It’s not any measure of learning. Testing is largely to how well you can demonstrate proximity to whiteness. Especially when it comes to humanities and “logic” aint’ got shit with your capacity to learn, but it does demonstrate your proximity to whiteness.

Irina: What do you think are some of the leverage points around that? 

Dave: One of the leverage points is to say - we’ve gone four or five months without tests and no one is worse off. The other leverage point is to say that saying these are accurate forms of assessment is just wrong. What these things are are contractual relationships. High stakes testing is a contractual relationship between a school district and the private company. The third leverage point is money. You paying these fools for what? You’re really paying these fools because some lobbyist  got cozy with you and now you signed some 75 year contract. So nah, you don’t have to engage with it. 

Irina: What time do you think it is on the clock of the world? 

Dave: The world’s clock says “look, you can not destroy me and not expect catastrophic results.” This is where Fenon becomes prophetic. When he says “each generation will fulfill their destiny or betray it.” The clock of the world is like, “look this thing could end really quick for humans.” All the other beings on the planet will be ok, it’s human beings that will be fucked. Human kind has a choice, get it right or perish as dummies. The comedian George Carlin said it best “look, the environmental movement is people saving humans”.  The planet will be ok with or without us--the planet can self-correct--humans have the most problems with self-correction. The world clock is saying “the time is now.”