1968- Eye Hotel

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Inside, the bureaucrats hide the new and acting president, S. I. Hayakawa, in the bathroom. He must be the puppet! Outside the police line up with their riot gear, batons in their fists. You can hear S. I. speaking from his post over the Big Brother speaker system. This is your acting president. I order you to leave the campus at once. There are no innocent bystanders. I thought if we allowed you to talk you would calm down, but now this problem is escalating. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. His voice gets shrill.

  Down in the field, publisher and physician Dr. Carlton Goodlett’s being carried on the shoulders of his cohort. Looks like two hundred colored people with Goodlett riding on top in a sea of white students, some say six thousand. He’s got his own bullhorn system, and he’s yelling, “We’re not subscribing to violence at this time! If the police feel that their duty is to provoke violence, all hell is going to break loose.” Who’s he talking to? S. I. in the bathroom? Six thousand white students? Tactical squad lined up on the green? They aren’t listening. Police got their orders. They arrest the good doctor and club the non-innocent bystanders. Throw everyone into paddy wagons. Situation explodes. Garbage cans get firebombed. Blow the motherfucker up! Folks go on a rampage, smash the windows of all the parked cars along Nineteenth. Someone climbs up to the wires of the MUNI car and yanks them off. M looks like a giant metal insect with a wagging antenna stalled in traffic. Another group pushes a UPI station wagon into the intersection, releases the brakes, and lets it roll. Folks hysterical and running in every direction.

  Paul’s got his pockets filled with rocks, just in case. He’s in a stand-off with others, between defending himself from and sticking with the crowd. He sees a girl being dragged by her jacket collar into a paddy wagon, and he fingers a jagged stone in the deep of his pocket. He thinks he’s going to save her, but strong arms surround him from behind. He tenses, ready for his own struggle, then he recognizes the voice. “No! Don’t do it!” Chen has got him in one of those kung fu grips. “Run this way,” he commands. They slip away through Quonset huts faking as offices and classrooms. Paul looks back in shock at a charging cavalry of mounted police. Suddenly he sees himself multiplied, monkey orphans let loose, raising havoc. One by one, an invisible daddy cracks his multiplying monkey skulls. Who is free to be free at last?

  2: Language in Reaction

  There exists an unscientific attitude toward language that results in doctrinal disagreements. We must understand that problems are formulated in words, and that a change in the attitude toward language can help us become understanding listeners. Alfred Korzybski said, “A person tends to see the world as conforming to the words he has been taught to use about it.” There is a system of semantic principles to guide us in the everyday thinking, talking, listening, reading, and writing that leads us to our actions. Let’s examine the following story:

  Once upon a time, there were two public institutions of higher learning, separated by a great bay but connected by a great bridge. The differences and the commonalities between the two sites of education were also greatly exaggerated.

  Institution A considered itself a center of research and a factory for knowledge. Its president had said as much, that what the automobile had done for the first half of the twentieth century, the university could do for the latter half. The factory model of the university didn’t go over too well with the students, who protested that they were free individuals who would not be cranked out like cloned widgets on a production line. One of the institution’s most famous students had spoken passionately about how it was time to put one’s body on the gears and wheels to stop the machine. Students didn’t want to be the end product machined from a blueprint they did not believe. The factory model was probably the wrong model to choose, especially since most of the students were the children of middle-class professionals or had those sorts of hopes for their educations.

  While Institution A was located in a nice white neighborhood, the surrounding neighborhoods were communities of colored people, mostly black and yellow. Families from these neighborhoods sent a few students to the university, but other colored students came from across the state. Colored students didn’t want to be factory products either, but they didn’t mince words about the blueprint or being free individuals; they simply wanted to control the production itself. They wanted their own classes, their own professors, their own rules, and more of themselves at the university. They argued that their history of slavery, genocide, and racial prejudice gave moral imperative to their demands, and that a public institution of learning should provide an equal opportunity for education for all citizens, regardless of race, class, or creed. And they were going to get it by any means necessary.

  One day, a famous black author and leader of a black organization came to teach at the university. He aroused a crowd of students into shouting Fuck the Governor! Fuck the Governor! To anyone who wanted to throw bricks into the gears, this was a splendid brick. Institution A decided that this man would not continue to teach at the university. His rally was not the entire reason for his dismissal, but it was a convenient rallying point. The colored students organized a protest against Institution A to push for control of their education. They organized a strike to stop the work of the university since, after all, it was a factory, and they were the worker-products. The colored students were a very small minority on campus, but the white students, the faculty, and even the staff also joined the strike. After fifty-three days of striking and four hundred arrests, including violent encounters with local police, sheriffs, and the National Guard, involving rocks, fruits, mace, tear gas, and billy clubs, Institution A agreed to establish a department of ethnic studies.

  Establishment of the department came with some fanfare and a budget just substantial enough to create a sensation of power and competition, creating political fissures between black, brown, yellow, and red students and faculty, throwing into contest what had once been idealized as a rainbow of colored solidarity. The radical white students who had wanted to throw their bodies against the gears and the black leader who could rally thousands of students to yell Fuck the Governor! had fallen away, leaving the work of education to the bureaucrats and the folks who needed the jobs. Despite these difficulties, Institution A survived this period of turmoil.

  On the other side of the bay, Institution B considered itself a teaching college, a middling institution in a tiered system that kept the research factory on top and the two-year technical college on the bottom. Institution B was the meat in the sandwich positioned to provide the middle management, midlevel professionals, the credentialed workers of the great society. This was part of the Master Plan. The idea that there was a master plan planned by masters outside the college didn’t go over too well with the students, who protested that the plan was really much broader and began in grammar school when children were placed on tracks that headed to one of the three tiered educational institutions, to a possible fourth (prison) or fifth institution (military), or to none at all. If Institution A invoked the automobile, Institution B invoked the train. The Master Plan was a great train system chugging students along predetermined tracks. The train model was probably the wrong model to choose, especially since many of the students were the children of laborers who laid tracks, built cars, loaded cargo, harvested or cooked food, cleaned compartments, and mined the fuel.

  While Institution B was located in a nice white neighborhood, the surrounding neighborhoods were communities of working-class white and colored people—black, yellow, and brown. Working young adults from these neighborhoods attended the college, and more came from across the state. Colored students didn’t want to be part of any master plan either, especially if being colored might put you on a particular train from the very beginning. And they weren’t interested in sharing; sharing had only gotten them nine hundred black students in eighteen thousand. They wanted to make their own plans. They wanted their own rules, their own classes, their own professors, and more of themselves at the college. They argued that
their history of slavery, genocide, and racial prejudice gave moral imperative to their demands, and that a public institution of learning should provide an equal opportunity for education for all citizens, regardless of race, class, or creed. And they were going to get it by any means necessary.

  One day, a black instructor at Institution B, who was also a leader of a black organization, gave a speech. He said that Institution B was a nigger-producing factory and called upon students to Pick up the Gun! to defend themselves against a cracker administration. While this may have been a passionate cry to revolution, Institution B decided that he should be fired from teaching at the college. His speech was not the entire reason for his dismissal, but it was a rallying point, and eventually the colored students organized a protest against Institution B to push for control of their education. They organized a strike to stop the work of the college since, after all, it was a train station, and they were the worker-passengers. The colored students were a very small minority on campus, but the white students and the faculty also joined the strike. After 137 days on strike and nine hundred arrests, including violent encounters with local and mounted police and tactical squads involving rocks, bombs, arson, and billy clubs, Institution B agreed to establish a department of ethnic studies.

  Establishment of the department came with some fanfare and a budget just substantial enough to create a sensation of power and competition, creating political fissures between black, brown, and yellow, throwing into contest what had once been idealized as a rainbow of colored solidarity. The radical white students who had opposed the Master Plan and the black teacher who rallied students to Pick up the Gun! had fallen away, leaving the work of education to the bureaucrats and the folks who needed the jobs. Despite these difficulties, Institution B survived this period of turmoil.

  These are textbook cases with semantic morals. In both cases, students got what they wanted: a department of ethnic studies. But it wasn’t about what they wanted—it was about how they went about getting it. In this sense, it was all about words.

  Reread the stories about Institutions A and B. Instead of worrying about whether colored students had equal access to higher education, ask yourself the following questions:

  1.What is the significance of comparing Institution A to a factory or Institution B to a train station, and how do these comparisons influence the actions of the students?

  2.What do you think about the provocative comments made by the black leaders to students at both institutions?

  3.Is it possible or reasonable for students to go on strike?

  4.Why does the narrator use the word black instead of Negro?

  5.Considering the disagreements between the students and the institutions, was the violence incurred necessary?

  6.Was the conflict between the students and institutions a war of words?

  Jazz was our acting president’s great passion. In his twenty-part jazz seminar, he spoke about the sources and characteristics of jazz, from the blues, through bebop, boogie-woogie, and gospel, to the California-New Orleans revival. Everyone had forgotten that he played the harmonica.

  They only remember that he hoisted himself onto the back of a truck parked at the gateway of our once peaceful college and tore out the wires to a sound system. The truck was being used as a stage for ranting and epithets. Free speech, his tam-o’-shanter! He surprised them by climbing onto that truck, yelling, “Don’t touch me! I’m the president of the college!” He jumped up and down and mimicked their ridiculous chants: On strike! Shut it down! On strike! Shut it down! He had a plan to beautify the campus, plant flowerbeds and pipe in swinging music on the intercom. He might have piped in his entire twenty-part jazz seminar, complete with musical examples. Instead we got this mindless ranting.

  One of his colleagues yelled out his name, attaching it to General Tojo. He peered through those thick black horn-rims into the crowd. A sansei student had a sign with his caricature that said, “Tojo is alive and well and living under Mt. Tam O’Shanter.” He had spent his life’s work in general semantics, articulating a theory of language to fight precisely this sort of fascism. He fired that colleague Chen on the spot. Later he had to capitulate. He told Chen he had meant to say “Shame on you!” but after all, didn’t he understand his fury?

  Someone had ripped his tam-o’-shanter from his head. He saw it spinning in the air, tossed from hand to hand. This was typical of the disrespect he had to contend with. As he said, the leadership of the SDS and the BSU had shown themselves to be a gang of goons, gangsters, conmen, neo-Nazis, and common thieves. And he was Tojo?

  This was precisely the sort of semantic error he tried to point out in his comments to the faculty senate when he said, “I wish to comment on the intellectually slovenly habit, now popular among whites as well as blacks, of denouncing as racist those who oppose or are critical of any Negro tactic or demand. If we are to call our college racist, then what term do we have left for the government of Rhodesia?” He must have heard someone yell out, “Racist! Racist!” He continued, “Black students are again disrupting the campus. A significant number of whites, including faculty members, condone and even defend this maneuver. In other words, there are many whites who do not apply to blacks the same standards of morality and behavior as they apply to whites. This is an attitude of moral condescension that every self-respecting Negro has a right to resent, and does resent.”

  As a self-respecting minority himself, he felt he could speak for the Negro. And this was not the first time. In one of his many books, he devoted an entire chapter to the subject: “The Self-Image and Intercultural Understanding, or How to be Sane though Negro.” The tenants of this chapter were simple. If the Negro has a self-concept of I am a Negro accompanied by a sense of inferiority, he will act obsequiously, and the white person he encounters may act with superiority. If the Negro has a self-concept of I am a Negro accompanied by a sense of defensiveness, he will act counter-defensively, and the white person may act offensively. If the Negro has a self-concept of I am a Negro as a simple statement of fact, then he will act naturally, and the white person may act naturally too. Therefore, the power to determine the outcome of a meeting lies with the Negro. Now the Negro might say that he is acting naturally, but how do you know you are acting naturally? The secret to acting naturally is exemplified in the famous person, a movie star or prime minister, who forgets he is famous and acts naturally. To act naturally, you have to forget that you are Negro. Why shouldn’t this be possible—our acting president himself was able to forget he was Japanese. White people are ignorant and require psychotherapy to get over their obsession with skin color; so, the Negro must act as the white person’s psychotherapist. Granted, this will be accepted in small steps, but the basis for happiness is minimum expectations. In the long struggle for equal rights and opportunities, because of the strong moral sense of the nation as well as economic and practical necessity, segregation must eventually end. This is the self-fulfilling prophecy of political democracy, and communication is the first step.

  However, psychotherapy at the impasse of the current breakdown in communications was no longer possible. Didn’t the faculty realize, as our acting president did, that the SDS had assumed tactics similar to those of the Nazis of the thirties, intending to disrupt democratic institutions and bring down the political structure? He characterized the BSU leadership as actuated by self-hatred, strutting about self-consciously behind dark glasses, playing Black Panther, stalking in gangs, scaring little girls. This behavior, he said, would have been simply pathetic if knuckleheaded whites didn’t take them seriously. He never took them seriously. He recognized the primitive and animistic notions embedded in their language that prevented them from comprehending civilized paths to a democratic society. This was what he had characterized as the “Jim Crowing of the mind.” Segregation was not a physical condition but a mental condition. He knew they were all flying high as kites on dope.

  He only took this job on the condition he be allowed t
o call in the police. He testified to Congress that to restore proper order during campus unrest, troops should be sent in early, and lots of them. He personally addressed the police himself as they entered the campus, advising them to ignore the students’ bad words and to smile. Bad words, he said to them, can’t harm you, and shouting them allows the students to blow off steam. Cursing has a therapeutic effect. However, if arrests were necessary, they would not be made in vain, for he would offer no amnesty to students. He further offered his knowledge of general semantics, saying some people, as the result of a childhood experience, cannot help being frightened by the mere sight of a policeman. Similarly, some people automatically become hostile at the words un-American, Nazi, or Communist. This is the unfortunate business of being blinded by prejudice and living in the delusional world of abstractions.

  Ten thousand letters came to his desk supporting his decisive actions. The governor himself saw him on television and announced to his cohort, “I think we’ve found our man.” Our acting president was not only exhilarated by this response, but also by the confrontation itself. It was a rollercoaster he rode with the excitement of a child born again.