Lessons in Violence and Change
By William Hohenstein
I love to run. I especially love to run in wooded areas along river banks. The rolling hills as I climb and descend, the melody of rippling water, the quiet power of tall trees, the solitude from my daily stresses. If I could, I’d head to my favorite spot right now: the Valley Forge Park trail along the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia.
I competed as a runner throughout high school and college, and continued long runs of six miles or more at least four or five days a week. That is, until June 15, 2018. That day I reached the top of an eastern Pennsylvania hill and then, with tears running down my cheeks, collapsed on the ground. I knew I needed a new hip—the pain from the arthritis was more than I could handle—but my cardiologist thought surgery was too risky. At age 78, this was my last run.
Almost exactly 70 years earlier, an eight-year-old version of me was playing with a friend in an isolated area of a working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia. Four older boys came upon us and forced us to perform oral sex. When it was over, I ran as hard as I could until I collapsed in tears in the middle of a park, only about a mile from the assault; it felt like I had run 10 miles.
I was born in the Frankford section of Philadelphia. It was a hard-scrabble neighborhood with a modest number of African-Americans living among families descending from Ireland, Italy and Germany. There was an indoor basketball facility where I spent a significant part of my youth. It was a “whites only” boys club.
One day, when I was 14, I sat outside this facility talking with a couple of older African-American boys. One was 17, the other was a bit younger. The older boy spent a good 30 minutes giving me his views on white people. I was fascinated by it. He told me I had a “shallow soul”; it touched home. I had been trained all of my life to think of African-American families in a certain way. It had not yet dawned on me that African-American boys might have a few ideas about what white folks were like. I came away from the encounter believing that he had more insight into me than I had into him. It underscored for me how little we often understand about people who are different than us—at great cost.
“I wanted my students to write about issues that touched them personally.”
I spent my professional life as a Sociology teacher. That work, like my running, was fueled by the energy created by the sexual assault. I could explain my theory of teaching using the language of Hegel and Weber, but it would be more accurate to say that it grew from my effort to make sense of the effect the assault had on me. A month before starting my first teaching position, I wrote a short paper describing what I wanted to accomplish in the classroom; it began with a discussion of privacy. I believed then and now that the best work in Sociology was driven by passion.
I wanted my students to write about issues that touched them personally. I taught for 40 years and began every class by telling students they didn’t have to show me their work until the personal had morphed into the sociological. They would have as much privacy as they needed along that journey. I was 30 years into my teaching before telling a couple of senior majors about my own sexual assault. They were the first to ever hear of this event.
Throughout my schooling, from the day of the assault through graduate school, I was disappointed, even depressed, by discussions of gender, race and religious patterns. The cruelties built into these differentiations were always the responsibility of strangers. They were always “out there”—the actions of others. There was never an acknowledgement that this violence also lived in the classroom.
I did not want to spend my life teaching students that the holocaust, gang rapes and lynching of black men were wrong. I would tell my students that these atrocities were extensions of complex social energies living quietly inside everyday actions. I made it clear that I wanted to work on the subtle cruelties that lived in the classroom, in me and in my students. My classrooms were tense. There was anger, there were tears. There was also the laughter that flows from sharing a difficult task with others.
“I wanted to work on the subtle cruelties that lived in the classroom, in me and in my students.”
I wanted the men in my classes to understand the price they pay for the long history of abuse that men have directed at women, and that whites pay a serious penalty for the ongoing exploitation of persons of color. I expected this idea to be easily grasped; it was not. I frequently told a story of the nun who taught the eighth-grade boys in our parish school. Classrooms at that time were segregated by gender, but the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was considering the possibility of requiring that boys and girls learn together.
Our nun told us that they were never going to force her to teach girls who were consistently given a back seat in the educational process. The ironic twist is that, had the school put its top ten students in an all-star class, eight of them would have been girls. Were the academically inclined boys hurt by the discrimination directed at girls? Yes. Most of the boys in that eighth-grade class cared nothing for school. More than half of them dropped out before finishing high school.
As a boy, I would have loved to be in a class with persons who cared about learning. The nun’s rejection of the girls limited my education. But that was not something you could explain then: The idea that the people who appeared to benefit from discrimination were also seriously hurt by it has always been a hard sell.
By the time I started reading social theory seriously, I was well prepared to hear Hegel’s notion that the Bondsman knew more about the Lord than the Lord knew about the Bondsman. However, I wasn’t sure what this meant to my classroom. Up until I stepped into the classroom as a teacher for the first time in 1969, I had never really held any kind of authority. But I was completely ingrained with the negative ramifications of Max Weber’s description of our journey to a highly rationalized existence. But I understood that women and persons of color weren’t going to stand idly by in the face of prejudices that filled their lives. Anyone who lived through the ‘60s knew that changes were coming.
Max Weber warned us that facing traditional institutionalized cruelties would bring both hoped-for benefits and also new problems. A woman would have more choices about deciding how to live her life, but amid this change, the social frame that had infused her life with meaning would be disintegrating. The core institutions that gave substance to her material and spiritual life would be exposed for what they had always been. The pretense that institutions cared about the individuals they served would be stripped away; just ask 90 percent of college-based women who reported a sexual assault. They quickly learned that the institution’s first responsibility was to protect itself.
I wanted to find a way as a teacher to transfer some of the authority I was given to women, Jews and students of color. I wanted to give women a place to teach what they knew about misogyny, persons of color to teach about racism, and Jewish students to teach about anti-Semitism. This effort to hand over my authority turned out to be even more complicated than I anticipated.
“My classrooms were tense. There was anger, there were tears. There was also laughter”.
During my fourth year of teaching, a Jewish upperclassman asked me to do a project with him. Each Saturday of the semester I was to take a bus from Philadelphia to Atlantic City, walk the boardwalk for 30 minutes and then go home. From the moment I left campus until I returned, I was to wear a yarmulke. When I returned, I was to write about my trip, while my student, who was also my teacher, would write a paper off of my report and bring it into the classroom.
On my very first trip, an elderly Jewish woman, upon seeing the skull cap, sat down beside me and began to tell me her life’s story. She spoke the entire length of the trip and shared many details of her life. Even today, I can list the names of her children and grandchildren and where they were living at the time. I never revealed to her that I was not Jewish.
This omission led to a serious controversy. Was my action in not informing her of my identity itself an act of anti-Semitism? The charge was that I was more committed to the abstract belief in the value of these teaching projects than I was to the rights of the woman who had put so much trust in me. My failure to be upfront with her was seen as a lack of respect for her as a Jewish woman. The classroom arguments swirling around this question were complicated and passionate. Through the years, I did hundreds of these projects with women, gays, Jews and persons of color. Some were controversial, but almost all brought important questions into the classroom.
We think abstractly—that flows from how we use language to communicate. There is a certain violence and detachment built into all abstractions. We can debate whether I fall into the category of masochist, but I did not want my female students teaching me about femaleness as an abstraction. I wanted them teaching me about themselves.
A woman gave me her high school and college diaries. Throughout the years I possessed them, I copied by hand every thought she had committed to writing. I don’t have to search for her voice in my head; it is present in every serious conversation I have with myself. Now, even at 80, I continue to write out the complicated emails I receive from my former students.
Not all learning is verbal. One group of women protesting the behavior of the men in a class discussing Freud’s essay on Dora asked me to offer a class on theory with all participants required to wear a skirt and heels. The men, including me, were to wear a jacket, tie, clean white shirt, a skirt, heels and pantyhose. That class was repeated 19 times with other groups of women. Whatever insights about gender roles my students gained, I can’t overstate its impact on me: There is nothing like working on the Self Consciousness section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind while struggling not to slouch and making sure my legs were properly positioned. This particular part of my work ended in 1999. But every time I pick up that book, which is always by my side, the text gets filtered through the memory of trying to treat the skirt with respect.
I don’t think any of this work would have happened had I not been sexually assaulted. But whenever I was asked to explain why I sought to have students teach me about the discriminations that they had faced, my response was always to lean on Hegel and Weber for an answer. While I sought to create an environment where students could confront the institutionalized violence that often unconsciously influenced their lives, I failed to reveal my most personal and painful experience until 30 years into a 40-year teaching career.
That inability opened a serious question about the legitimacy of my classroom work. Was it less an exploration into the deeper questions we carry about institutionalized violence and more of a search for personal therapy? I am now 80 and the question still lives in me. Indeed, it still eats away at me. But that question points to a problem that goes well beyond my own search for peace. One of the reasons women are silent about the assaults they experience is that they understand how their victimhood invalidates their art and scholarship. Their silence carries the violence forward both personally and socially, but it also protects their life’s work from being reduced to their victimhood.
It’s impossible to measure how many miles I ran over the course of my life. A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand? More? I will never know. But as important as it was to manage the days and years of stress—and to experience those fleeting moments of joy and release—I could never run far enough to escape what happened to me. Perhaps if I had the courage to speak about the assault years sooner, I could have found relief from that painful memory, but also give more students the courage to speak openly about the violence in their lives. Maybe then there would have been less need for me—and so many others—to run.
William Hohenstein is currently a Professor Emeritus in Sociology at Haverford College.