Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:236 Feminist Studies 42, no. 1. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Lisa Rofel and Jeremy Tai A Conversation with Ericka Huggins This interview with Ericka Huggins, a former member of the Black Panther Party, was conducted in May 2015 by Lisa Rofel, a member of the Feminist Studies editorial collective.1 This interview is abridged for purposes of space. Huggins requested that we not review parts of her life that have been well documented elsewhere. One of the most detailed and illuminating previous interviews, conducted by Fiona Thompson, can be found in the Oral History Archives at the University of California Berkeley. Additionally, Huggins coauthored an essay with Angela D. LeBlanc-Ernest about the Black Panther Party’s Oakland community school, where she had been a long-time leader, “Revolutionary Women, Revolutionary Education: The Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School,” in Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, ed., Dayo Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard (2009). The question that prompted this first response was about the use of academic language in teaching and writing. Ericka Huggins: I’m not allergic to the language. However, there’s a way to use just enough that people know where you’re coming from. I went into education because I grew up in Washington, DC, where access to quality education was a joke. That’s why I wanted to become a teacher.... I lived in Southeast DC, where, if you were black or brown, you just weren’t going to have access to books even, and much less teachers who really cared about you. I don’t have a grudge. 1. The interview was transcribed and edited by Jeremy Tai, an assistant professor of anthropology at McGill University. Lisa Rofel and Jeremy Tai 237 I moved to Pennsylvania to go to college to become a teacher, and I saw the same thing in the rural village where I tutored English and writing. That wasn’t DC: that was rural Pennsylvania. And then I went to New York. Same thing. Later, when I joined the Black Panther Party, in California, I realized that some of the young party members could not read. They were great minds, yet they had not been taught. I was nineteen. Tommy Smith was a brilliant seventeen year old. One day when we were reading Mao Zedong’s Red Book, I found out how he couldn’t read. He could memorize everything. He admitted this to me quietly. So I taught him how to read. Huey [Newton] made statements that were so simple. Huey did not learn how to read until he was sixteen. He thought there was no reason for [reading], it was bullshit. Until one day a teacher said to Huey, “You’re not going to become anything. You know, you should just take up a trade.” His brother taught him to read. This is still said to people today. Look at the books Huey wrote. What if he had believed that he didn’t have any intellectual capacity? What if he believed that? What if I had believed that? I think as we get entrenched in the academy, we [forget] our original, inspired purpose. Lisa Rofel: You used two terms I wanted to ask you to say a little more about. One was transformative education. The other is revolutionary thinking. So if you could talk about those two terms. EH: I don’t believe that human beings in a classroom at any age—I don’t care what age they are, three years old, five years—I don’t believe they are empty vessels, and I am going to walk in there, like, you know, knower of the universe and drop gems into that vessel. No need to intend to think of myself as knowing everything. I don’t. So transformative learning for me is that which occurs in a learning environment where the facilitator of the learning—me as an example or you as an example—is learning as much as the students. So I am facilitating that learning. Okay, they came there because they wanted to know about how the Black Panther Party provided strategies for organizing the people...