Local Racism, Global Politics, and a National Audience

Posted: April 8th, 2009 | Filed under: Cybernetics on the Prairie |

[a version of this article was originally published in the Public-I, an independent Urbana newspaper.]

Imagine if the University of Illinois sponsored a frank and contentious discussion about race, education, war, and the responsibility of globally-minded activists toward injustices in their own backyard. Imagine if among the participants were local citizens, and not only academic workers or students. Now imagine such an event broadcast on national television, during primetime, for ninety minutes. This all happened, forty years ago.
On February 18, 1968, a short-lived experimental television program called the Public Broadcasting Laboratory came to Urbana-Champaign. The producers chose the South Lounge of the Illini Union to host a nationally broadcast discussion about “campus unrest.” The event came on the heels of a controversial campus recruiting tour by the Dow Corporation, producers of Napalm gas. At University of Wisconsin, protests against Dow led to bloodshed. At Illinois, a peaceful student sit-in blocked access for job-seeking students, sparking controversy and eventually several disciplinary suspensions.

Perhaps it was Illinois’ comparatively peaceful record of protest that led PBL to choose this campus as a site to assemble a panel of experts from around the nation. Gathered in the South Lounge that night were the presidents of Antioch College and San Francisco State University, student leaders from Berkeley and Tougaloo State, some Illinois administrators, at least 70 students from campus, and a scattering of Illinois faculty.

Significantly, also in attendance was community activist John Lee Johnson. Thanks to him, the event didn’t go quite as planned; as a result the nation witnessed an audience wrestle with some very tough questions. The young Johnson, just 27 at the time, waited about ten minutes through initial discussions about Vietnam, student activism, and education, then shouted his first question, “What about all the psychological napalm whites drop on blacks every day?”

The show’s transcript then reveals a lively and confusing attempt to deal with the University’s dependence on a race divide in order to function as a space, and an economy. Project 500, the school’s first attempt at integration, wouldn’t happen for several months, yet one was likely to find faces of color in service positions across the campus.

For even the most active anti-war protesters on campus, involvement in a climate of racism, even dependence on racism, was unavoidable - if invisible, until Johnson turned on the light. Without Johnson’s intervention, the evening’s conversation might have stuck to traditional arguments about the effectiveness of certain protest tactics, or about whether the rights of potential Dow employees were violated by the sit-in. Such arguments quickly resolve into clear sides for debate, positions easily identified, credited, discredited. Universities and television networks easily incorporate such conversations into programming. Each side simply gets their ten minutes, and then the topic is considered covered.

But the conversation that night in the Union reads instead as refreshingly confused. Positions slide and morph, people argue and miss each other, emotions ran high. After an hour or more, even Johnson and the small group of black students rose and left, Johnson parting with the explanation, “We can’t make any sense of this.”

National television viewers witnessed the complexity of a community grappling to understand its own racism, not as a taint to be identified and removed through corrected speech, not as a guilt to be absolved, but as an inextricable part of everyday reality, something to be worked against on multiple levels, alone and in groups, informally and formally, as teachers and students and administrators. Racism so deep that it takes time to even see, and longer than a lifetime to change.

Rare as such an event is even off-camera, for it to happen in front of cameras is still unheard of. Since I wasn’t even born in 1968, let alone present for the changes taking place in this city, I can hardly speculate as to the broad impact of that evening’s conversation. I find it instructive, however, to look at the subsequent paths of those in attendance.

John Lee Johnson, hopefully known already to this paper’s readers, went on to a lifetime of service to Champaign-Urbana. As Champaign’s first black Councilman, he fought for better public housing and more equitable elementary education. He worked through government, media, churches, whatever platform he needed. Johnson seemed to never stop working to improve the lives of people of color in Champaign-Urbana in palpable ways. That night in the Union probably registered barely a blip for Johnson over a lifetime of encounters with sympathetic allies in the University who were oblivious to their own racisms.

One of the few professors in attendance that night was a relatively new researcher, an Austrian named Heinz von Foerster. After Johnson made his exit, von Foerster found the microphone and analyzed the evening’s fraught conversation in terms of his own area of expertise - cognition, consciousness, and information. Von Foerster was a leader in the new field of Cybernetics, a way of looking at the world in terms of systems, information flow, feedback loops. For von Foerster, the failure to see or understand racism would almost certainly be understood as a problem in information flow. Heinz kept extensive notes on that evening’s discussion. He saved every newspaper article on it he could find, and sent copies to the leaders involved. He corresponded with the show’s producers, thanking them for the event.

Later that Spring, Heinz began to plan the first of many experimental courses in “Heuristics,” or the science of identifying and solving problems. These freeform and largely student-run classes grew to be a popular and controversial staple of campus counterculture. As shelters for debate and discussion of the most pressing political concerns, von Foerster’s courses remained admittedly safe within the walls of academic speculation. But they catalyzed campus through the publication of hand-made zines and catalogs, the organization of disinformation campaigns  within official campus administrative routines, and sponsorship of radicalized visiting speakers.

Though there’s no record of such curricular experimentation for Heinz before that Spring, we can’t say for certain  that  Johnson’s intervention directly sparked such a path. But when disparate worlds touch as they did that night on Public Broadcasting Laboratory, opposite Bonanza on channel 15 and Smothers Brothers on channel 3, we would do well to examine how different forms of political action reflect not only differing ways of looking at a problem, but distinct positions of privilege, different audiences, opportunities, and access points.

This all gets me thinking about what it means to act from and into one’s immediate world, compared to acting into worlds where one has no knowledge or perceived influence. Work against injustice is often delegated according to our spheres of perceived influence - “work where you can.” Access to privileged spaces affords unique influence - “With great power comes great responsibility,” we’re assured in the superhero stories. But some have no choice but to work in spaces wherein they hold no sway. I’m also reminded of those prophets and peacemakers who didn’t just work despite weakness, but from weakness, and in it. Their dependencies on others were their strength.

I have a proposition, a project in mind. New York’s WNET still holds a recording of that night’s conversation in the Union, locked away under expired broadcasting rights. What if we found a way to rebroadcast that program, forty years later, then held a broadcast conversation in response? How different would the world today look from that evening’s picture? If you’re interested, let me know - maybe you were even there? Let’s get complicated again, confront the messy facts of our complicities in racist spaces. Let’s find a conversation that’s hard for any newspaper to sum up.

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