Lack of Liberal Arts Training and Police Brutality: Racism in the Liberal Arts, Part 4
There are many people, even within the academy, who argue that liberal arts degrees are unnecessary expenditures for the university and wasted investments for students. But each night when I turn on the news and see another Black man wrongfully arrested, harassed, or even killed by the police, I see that these programs are not promoted enough!
One of the key concepts of any freshman composition or speech communications class is that students must learn the audiences that he/she will be speaking/writing to. Learning the audience or at least what the audience knows about a topic and what the audience expects from the speaker leads to more effective communication. The writer/speaker knows where to begin with his/her semantic choices, the speaker can gauge whether or not this audience will be openly receptive/indifferent/hostile to the ideas he/she may be putting forth, and the writer can put forth ideas with underlying assumption about the audience’s knowledge of a topic. Here’s what that boils down to: I would not go into a Catholic Church and explain why fifth graders need sex education in the same way that I would in an association of biology teachers. My language would be different. My attire would reflect the environment. I would assume that the Catholic Church audience is going to be hostile to what I have to say and more than likely, has already received some erroneous information from other community sources. I would have to speak to that wrongful information and also to the family values that come with the church. If I am in a Deep South Catholic church full of uber-Conservative African American or Hispanic grandmothers for Sunday morning mass, I may want to open my speech with fervent prayer for protection!
In these classes, students are taught that different situations call for different styles of writing. That is why they are taught rhetorical styles or strategies. If you have been to college, you know those freshman papers: narration/description, process analysis, comparison-contrast, definition, exemplification, argumentation, and mixed-method.
There are several others, but if you are reading this article, you are probably traumatized by now. Since writing is a process and a way to think critically through situations, students who obtain liberal arts degrees write throughout their undergraduate and graduate careers, increasingly sharpening and honing their skills to speak to an increasingly educated and sophisticated audience. All the while, they are encouraged to learn and adjust to their respective audiences. After all, the English audience is not the psychology audience is not the music audience, and etcetera.
Now, here’s where this article finally addresses the reason why you clicked on it. When I began to research into the training that the average, local policeman (not state troopers) receives, I noticed something: they never have to learn their audiences. And I thought, “That’s really dangerous.” Police walk around with the power of death on their hips and in their hands, they receive roughly six months of training, and they never have to learn the audience that they are supposed to serve and protect? They never learn about the humanities of the human beings that they police? See, that’s the dangerous part. The average cop is a young man, maybe in his late adolescence. He has had at least 18 years of inculcation by popular media/popular culture and possibly his local culture that tells him that people of color, women, and poor white people are not human. Then, after only SIX MONTHS of tactical training with some legal stuff thrown in the mix, he is given military grade weapons and the power to determine whether someone lives or dies and put on the streets. In what other profession would that be acceptable? I teach freshman composition and I went to school for over a decade. Yet, conservative commentators tell me that my job is irrelevant. They scream that the police are some of our most important up-keepers of society, but they only go to school for six months with no training on how to speak to their audience and no psychological de-escalation tactics?
In his article, “Is Majoring in Liberal Arts a Mistakes for Students” by Vinod Khosla, included in the freshman Patterns for College Writing: A Rhetorical Reader, argues that liberal arts majors are a mistake for all but the most elite students. In fact he says, that college graduates obtain jobs that they feel they do not need their degrees in order to fill: “Their degree is not relevant to adding value to an employer (though that is not the only purpose of a degree).” Since those of us in liberal arts are not traditionally seen as part of the degree-to-job assembly line, we are seen as irrelevant by our peers and society at large. But, what if knowing relevant history saves a life?
That could have been the case in Charleston, South Carolina. Let me ask you a question, reader? How many of us have heard of the country, Rhodesia? Can you even find it on a map? Do you know what its flag looks like? If you simply cannot, don’t feel bad. It was a colonized country in South Africa that was liberated from European control in 1979. It is now Zimbabwe. Yet, this is the flag that Dylan Roof, who was born a full 15 years after the last Rhodesian flag was flown, had sewn on his jacket when he walked into historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and fatally shot nine people during Bible study. What if someone around Dylan had known what that flag meant and alerted authorities weeks BEFORE this happened? He was arrested several times for minor offenses before this one. What if those law enforcement officers had simply recognized this flag and acted upon that recognition? Would those nine people still be alive today?
Furthermore, we are dealing with a police force that has been given military-style weapons and almost no military-style MP training. And this has been the case ever since President Reagan declared his “War on Drugs.” We are now facing a situation in which enemy combatants literally have more rights than American citizens.
I cannot disagree with Kholsa enough when he writes that history and philosophy are irrelevant, because science majors can learn to think critically just as well. When are police officers stopping to apply the scientific method? Did they apply the scientific method BEFORE they put a knee on George Floyd’s neck, or after they realized he was already dead? Was there any careful, measured, scientific thinking applied and thought-through before the force crashed through Breonna Taylor’s apartment? No. And wouldn’t it be dangerous to ask police officers to apply science to people who were used as scientific experiments in the first place, because they were seen as non-humans with no histories by philosophers?
So, while people continue to scream that subjects like history and liberal arts do not matter on the job market, they need to stop and critically think. When it comes to the police and people of color and women (yes, I have seen a policeman stomp a white woman in the ground), the liberal arts not only matter, they may just save lives. If we want to see an IMMEDIATE change in the way policing is done in our country, we should demand that local police obtain a liberal arts degree: history, literature, gender/ethnic studies, political science, psychology, sociology, a foreign language, music…that forces them to recognize and learn something about the humanities of the audiences that they are supposed to serve and protect. It will not solve all of the problems that we see on the nightly news, but when many people know better, they in fact tend to do better. And this applies to our officers, too.
This comes directly from my English professor binder. If you like it or have comments, feel free.
