Nikki Giovanni achieved national fame with collections of poetry and essays that bear such titles as Ego Tripping and Other Poems for Young Readers and Racism 101. Lately, though, the poet-in-residence at Virginia Tech might be letting life imitate art too closely.
Giovanni reportedly authored a poem several decades ago entitled “Can you kill a honky,” the latter a code word back in the 70s for white. Decades later, Giovanni has received 21 honorary degrees from colleges and universities. To be sure, Giovanni has won well-earned praise for some truly touching lyrical poetry. Moreover, she has waged a brave, successful personal battle against lung cancer.
Nonetheless, she also gives lectures at Virginia Tech of dubious academic value. For example, she has her students compare the War on Terror to the pre-Civil War Fugitive Slave Law. What do they have in common? Both encourage American citizens to “snitch” on their neighbors, according to Giovanni. Now in her sixties, Giovanni has taught at Virginia Tech since 1987.
Every spring, the tenured professor hits the college lecture circuit. Here she might be well within her First Amendment rights in calling for higher taxes and even in labeling the President of the United States as a terrorist, as she has done at stops on various speaking tours. But even First Amendment absolutists should question whether any university would countenance Giovannian ad-libs offered by speakers who hold diametrically opposite political views.
This year, at Salisbury University in Maryland, the sage of Blacksburg delivered observations that might make the late Ezra Pound look like a mild-mannered political moderate. (Arrested in the 1940s by U. S. forces for the pro-fascist broadcasts that he made during World War II, Pound spent the 1950s as a patient in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D. C.)
Giovanni’s remarks at Salisbury also serve to show the perils of going off-subject by professors who offer observations on issues and events outside their field of expertise:
• U. S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is a “b____” because she opposes affirmative action despite “using it to get where she is today.” Rice’s half-century of achievement speaks for itself as does the impressive paper trail she has left in politics and academia.
• Giovanni would be thrilled, according to an audience report, if someone called to tell her that George W. Bush had been killed. (Apparently, left-wing academics really do think that they can get away with murder, at least vicariously.)
• Giovanni’s solution to crime: Take all blacks out of prison and put all whites behind bars. “Martha Stewart deserved to be in prison because she was exploiting blacks through her corporate connections,” Giovanni concludes.
Then there were the history lessons that the poetess gave her audience:
“Whites killed Malcolm X!” (Police records show otherwise.)
“There was no slavery in Africa before the whites came in and stole people from their villages.” (The slave-trading tribal chiefs whom history indicts will be glad that they got off the hook in this version. But how do you explain the current slavery in African nations such as Sudan, hundreds of years after the practice ended in the United States?)
Then there is Giovanni on hip hop, which she likes, and whites, many of whom she does not. When two black women at the Salisbury U speech took issue with what they saw as negative racial stereotypes perpetuated by the musical genre, Giovanni chastised them and said that all the problems blacks face derive from Caucasians, particularly the wealthy variety.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
