Robert O’Meally has an outstanding chapter in History and Memory in African American Culture (Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally, eds., [Oxford, 1994]) called "On Burke and the Vernacular: Ralph Ellison's Boomerang of History.”
The Burke-Ellison relationship is still much too little known despite the excellent book by Brian Crable, Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke: At the Roots of the Racial Divide (University of Virginia, 2012). I was at a Burke conference once where his son (I think Michael) told of sitting on the floor in the Burkes’ New Jersey farmhouse circa 1951 (a teenager, maybe), listening to Ellison on the piano bench reading manuscript chapters of Invisible Man to his mentor, Burke.
O’Meally’s chapter centers on Ellison’s promotion of an African American practice related to history as more than what is written down in books. Various vernaculars—of music, art, gesture, clothing, and speech—contribute to strategies for learning from the past in order to cope with the present. O’Meally begins with this miraculous citation from Ellison’s essay, “Going to the Territory”:
Perhaps if we learn more of what has happened and why it happened, we'll learn more of who we really are. And perhaps if we learn more about our unwritten history, we won't be so vulnerable to the capriciousness of events as we are today. And in the process of becoming more aware of ourselves we will recognize that one of the functions of our vernacular culture is that of preparing for the emergence of the unexpected, whether it takes the form of the disastrous or the marvelous.
Ellison’s essay was first published in 1980. I can’t help hearing the echo in this passage of a now fairly well-known quotation from Ella Baker which I know of as the epigraph to both Barbara Ransby’s biography, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement (2003) and to my teacher Robert Moses’s Radical Equations, which he co-wrote with Charles Cobb (2001). I don’t know when Baker actually spoke these words or whether there might have been some common source for the strikingly similar phrasing and sense:
In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning—getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system. That is easier said than done. But one of the things that has to be faced is, in the process of wanting to change that system, how much have we got to do to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going….I am saying as you must say, too, that in order to see where we are going, we not only must remember where we have been, but we must understand where we have been.
—Ella Baker
As O’Meally describes carefully throughout his essay on the vernacular, the core of the relationship between Burke and Ellison is their shared commitment to action. For both, writing is action; writing does something for the writer, accomplishes some change. But also, writing is preparation for action just as much as the infielder’s or wrestler’s crouch are more than mere formalities. They position you to be able to do things you couldn’t do otherwise, to spring in one direction or another, at one velocity or another, in a way yet to be determined, because future circumstances are always indeterminate.
Bob Moses and Ella Baker were more explicit political actors than Ellison and Burke; they were organizers who created and supported grassroots campaigns and structures over many decades to model and demand change in the larger society. But they took a long view of action and shared Ellison’s and Burke’s understanding of vernacular forms as strategies to prepare for action, strategies that could not be skipped over if you wanted your action to succeed. I interpret Baker’s distinction between remembering where we have been and understanding where we have been as partly a distinction between what can be written down in the history books and what can only be learned from listening to the elders’ oral traditions, hearing how they talk, and watching how they move.
Writing and reading create opportunities for us to tense our muscles in certain ways, or to relax them in other ways, to direct our attention, or to extend our peripheral vision, to sharpen other senses or to become familiar with particular patterns, tones of voice, nuance, that, if we notice them in time, might save us significant pain or bring us significant joy in the future.
Of course, the point of this chapter is that it isn’t only the written word that helps us prepare in this way. All the modes of the vernacular—music, visual arts, food, dance, clothing, and on and on—contribute to our preparation, each with its own special enhancement of our “equipment for living,” as Burke calls it.
Ellison emphasizes the unpredictable, “the unexpected, whether it takes the form of the disastrous or the marvelous.” Creativity is more than an algorithm derived from massive amounts of historical data. “Preparing for the emergence of the unexpected” requires incipient responses, “attitudes” Burke would say, that can become full-blown actions as the ball suddenly comes off the bat. Thinking that history is linear or even a spiral, O’Meally points out, is something Ellison’s Invisible Man warned against: you are “preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.”
The arbitrary cruelty and violence that Africans have faced at the hands of Europeans has certainly taught that historical progress is no sure bet. Learning to prepare for the arbitrary, the contingent, the spiteful, the perverted whims or greed or violence of others must be very different from learning to prepare for living in some sensible, collaborative order. But it is the first type of learning that African Americans have been obliged to acquire. There is an aspect to all learning that is a continuation of the past, but O’Meally makes the point that “U.S. black vernacular forms, as conservative as they can be, also are fueled by an aggressive impulse to change, not only ‘to make it new’ but to make what they do uncopyably different…Perhaps in part it is this impulse for survival by means of creating cultural forms that ‘the white boys can’t steal’ that accounts for so much of the African American’s sustained centuries of creativity on these shores.”
Our work in the Algebra Project, following the Black freedom fighters Bob Moses, and Ella Baker, is to try to understand how a vernacular mathematics can develop among young people. Their stances, their muscular and aesthetic postures, change daily in response to innovations in dance, music, language, fashion, styles of all sorts. But in relation to mathematics, young people of all cultures and races have mostly been taught to be stiff, awkard, and inflexible. We math teachers hear over and over that our students (and their parents) just want us to show them exactly what the problem is going to look like on the test and to show them exactly the “steps” they need to solve the problem. It is thought to be some new-fangled, fancified invention with no connection to “the real world” when a teacher either poses a problem that can’t be solved with some short list of “steps” or refuses to reveal the “steps” and wants the students to discover mathematical truths for themselves. They—the students and their parents—are left unprepared for mathematical living. They don’t know how to get into a crouch to prepare for mathematics coming their way and they have very little equipment for dealing with anything even remotely unexpected when it has to do with numbers.
I think it is mostly sad when good-hearted teachers say something like, “I always try to rephrase math problems in terms of money, because my students ‘get’ money and so it makes the math easier” (I confess I do this myself sometimes). We intend to relate math to “real life,” and try to “meet the students where they are” which is unobjectionable as far as it goes. But the mathematical operations our students do with money are very limited in variety, more and more limited, in fact, as they make almost all purchases now electronically, not even counting actual cash or coin. We decide in effect to exchange a hardball mathematical question for a softball or even a bean bag, as though we were playing catch with a three-year-old—patronizingly trading the question that is giving them trouble for a question in terms of money, which we think they “understand.” One of Bob Moses’s favorite questions for 6th through 9th graders to grapple with is “Why is it true that a - b = a + (-b)?” He was not interested in translating this question into terms of money (though he would certainly have been interested to hear how a student might try such a translation). Bob only posed this question after the students had gone through months of experiences, discussions, representations of their experience, and so on till they finally arrived at an abstraction like the one above. The idea was that they created mathematics from their experience as opposed to having mathematics converted into some practice of repetition of what is already (supposedly) given and known, such as how money works.
Math is a creative human activity for dealing with what life throws at us, not different in kind from art, dance, carpentry, cooking, or any other thing people do to thrive. There are vernacular forms of math, just as their are vernacular forms of those other kinds of human activity. Ellison defines the vernacular as “a dynamic process in which the most refined styles from the past are continually merged with the play-it-by-eye-and-by-ear improvisations which we invent in our efforts to control our environment and entertain ourselves.” It isn’t a question of “what’s in the textbook” or “the teacher’s way” vs. “a different way to solve the problem”. We are talking about something much different from a problem set. We are talking about where math comes from and what it is for—partly to “control our environment” and partly to “entertain ourselves.” Many powerful and beautiful mathematical insights have been written down in textbooks, that is true. But they are far from the last word and they can be rediscovered or reinvented in the right circumstances, and the way they apply to “the real world” certainly exceeds anyone’s imagination because the future is so unpredictable. A vernacular mathematics in Ellison’s sense of vernacular merges the most refined styles of mathematics with the improvisations we need for our lives today in the here and now. So it is not a question of textbooks vs. some other thing, just as jazz improvisation is not contrary to written music or classical theory but incorporates and extends their principles for the musicians’ purposes.
The relation of oral history and teaching to written history and book learning is related to this question of the vernacular, but isn’t a straightforward parallel. We’ll leave that for another day.