Another Odd Twist To The Vatech/cho Background

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The stuff in http://www.vdare.com/asp/printPage.a...2_giovanni.htm
April 22, 2007

Cho’s Professor Nikki Giovanni: Teaching Hate At Virginia Tech
By Steve Sailer

Ever since South Korean immigrant Cho Seung-hui gunned down 32 people at Virginia Tech, there has been much comment that the university should have realized just from his two hate-filled and inept plays that the senior English major was a dangerous creep who needed to be taken away.

For a playwrighting class, Cho penned Mr. Brownstone and Richard McBeef (which, despite the Macbethian title, is a Hamlet-knock off about a young hero's lethal conflict with the new stepfather who murdered his real father).

Richard McBeef includes such sterling dialogue as:

"I hate him. Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die. Kill Dick."

Many have asked: "How could the English Department not recognize the horrific implications of these works?"

No one who wonders that, however, is familiar with the poetic oeuvre of one of Cho's own teachers, Virginia Tech's Distinguished Professor of English and Black Studies, Nikki Giovanni (for her website, click here).

Among the most celebrated figures of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and recipient of 21 honorary degrees, Giovanni has published poems strikingly similar to Cho's plays in both vileness and incompetence. For example:

The True Import of Present Dialog, Black vs. Negro, by Nikki Giovanni

Ni**er
Can you kill
Can you kill
Can a ni**er kill
Can a ni**er kill a honkie
Can a ni**er kill the Man
Can you kill ni**er
Huh? Ni**er can you
kill
Do you know how to draw blood
Can you poison
Can you stab-a-Jew
Can you kill huh? Ni**er
Can you kill
Can you run a protestant down with your
‘68 El Dorado
(that’s all they’re good for anyway)
Can you kill
Can you piss on a blond head
Can you cut it off
Can you kill
A ni**er can die
We ain’t got to prove we can die
We got to prove we can kill
[More]

Ironically, the author of these lines was asked to deliver the closing remarks at Virginia Tech's convocation memorializing the 32 slaughtered by Cho. For some reason, Giovanni didn't read The True Import.

The above poem is not an isolated example. Cho's old professor has had, for example, a Molotov cocktail obsession:

Also a company called Revolution has just issued
A special kit for little boys
Called Burn Baby
I’m told it has full instructions on how to siphon gas
And fill a bottle

And, then there's this:

and it occurred to me
maybe i shouldn't write
at all
but clean my gun
and check my kerosene supply

She switched themes from kill-the-honkies to confessional self-obsession as the market for up-against-the-wall poetry dried up at the end of the 1960s, and now laughs off questions about her Cho-like early work.

Still, in 1997 the poetess had "Thug Life" tattooed on her arm to honor slain gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur, who was gunned down in a long-running fatal feud with other rappers. Wikipedia explains, with deadpan irony:

"She has stated that she would 'rather be with the thugs than the people who are complaining about them.' She also tours nationwide and frequently speaks out against hate-motivated violence."

Giovanni also writes prose:

RACISM 101; Giovanni, Nikki; $20.00; This book indicts higher education for the inequities it perpetuates, contemplates the legacy of the 60's, provides a survival guide for black students on predominately white campuses, and denounces Spike Lee while offering her own ideas for a film about Malcolm X. [From a list of "Books On The African American LGB Experience"]

She also has composed bon mots, such as:

"A white face goes with a white mind. Occasionally a black face goes with a white mind. Very seldom a white face will have a black mind."

And then there's her insight, "The honkie's whole sex thing is tied up to land."

As an anonymous commenter rhetorically asked on my blog:

"I wonder how many times Cho heard the phrase 'white privilege' while he was in college?"

(Click here to see how often the term appears in the Virginia Tech website.)

Giovanni is one of those sub-doggerel "poets" who has such Important Things to say that she can't be bothered to take the time to say them well. As she herself admitted to Brian Lamb on C-SPAN's Booknotes, "I'm not a very good rhymer." When she tries, it comes out like Cole Porter gone gaga:

if it's gum we can chew it
I hope it's love so we can do it

Perhaps her best-known poem is Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why), a slab of Afrocentrist drivel from 1973:

I was born in the Congo.
I walked to the Fertile Crescent and built the sphinx.
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star that only glows every one hundred years falls into the center giving divine perfect light.
I am bad.

Indeed.

Of course, Professor Giovanni, an elderly lady of 63, is not personally a danger to other people, no matter how bloodthirsty some of her poems are.

(What impact she has had over the years on earnest, impressionable young people might be a different question, however.)

Instead, she is a minimally talented self-promoter who has exploited various ideological fads over the decades, such as black radicalism, feminism, and Afrocentrism, to secure herself a comfy sinecure at Virginia Tech and to spend her spare time traveling around to hear herself be praised. Her own website lovingly lists 124 "Awards and Honors" she has garnered.

Giovanni's fee for a personal appearance runs from $5,000 to $10,000. That's pocket lint compared to the $40,000+ demanded by Maya Angelou (who is ensconced down the road from public Virginia Tech at posh private Wake Forest), but it's a living.

Giovanni [email her] is a small town version of New York City charlatan Al Sharpton, You might think that the ringmaster of the 1987 Tawana Brawley hoax whose racist rhetoric helped incite the Crown Heights pogrom of 1991 and the Freddie's Fashion Mart mass murder of 1995 might, like Don Imus, have talked himself out of a job by now.

And, yet, Sharpton not only endures, but prospers—elbowing his way back into the spotlights as the moral arbiter at the center of the recent Imus brouhaha.

Being a race hustler apparently means never having to say you're sorry.

[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.com features his daily blog.]



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Will they get mad if I quote it here? I guess a moderator can always get rid of the quote if they gripe.
 
I am sure there are many fine students and professors at VT, but Giovanni is one sick puppy. Appears that Cho wasn't the only one and if she was a mentor to him, big surprise he was a wacko.

Interesting that an English major would walk across campus to the Engineering classes to start shooting. If he felt rage at his own situation wouldn't you think he would strike out against those he interacted with daily like within the English Dept.? The fact that he strikes at almost the polar opposite part of academics looks more like his studies taught him that he was good and others not like him were bad.

I just don't believe much in coincidence and there seems to be more cropping up at VT. Anti-depressant drugs, loner, wacko English mentor, gun free zone.

Interesting that most shootings are at large campus public schools. I am not aware of any except the Amish shootings that were at small, private schools, let alone at military academies. Glad my kids went to small Catholic schools and military academy. We switched to that after the oldest was faced with violent attacks in the 5th grade and the public principal did nothing and had no concern for her safety. Private schools generally do not tolerate any level of repeated bad behavior. We sacrificed a lot of "things" to pay for private tuitions for the last 16 years, but after events like VT (among several other factors) I am glad we did.

I guess I am trying to say bad things don;t "just happen." There is some string of factors, decisions and events that lead up to the final outburst of evil. We have become trained to ignore those decisions and factors and pretend it comes out of nowhere. I believe most gun owners/shooters have a much better level of awareness to see these things happening. Watch your six!
 
It was only a matter of time before someone deranged took the academic glorifications of class warfare to heart.
 
This reminds me for some reason of the old Ben Stiller Show on Fox. They did a big faux MTV segment on a rapper who'd recorded a song called "Kill Doug Shathkey," and his neighbor's name was...Doug Shathkey. And the rapper was talking about how the whole song was a hypothetical, that he didn't really mean to kill Dough Shathkey, and how it was just a reflection of real life expressed in song. The "Martha Quinn" character, played by Janine Garafalo, appeared to take his counter-argument seriously.

Ever see "Open Range" with Robert Duvall and Kevin Costner? There's a segment where the villain tells them a story about how some free grazers passing through were attacked and killed. It was supposed to be a story, but later they run into someone clearly meaning to do them harm.

The Costner character says, "oftentimes, a man will tell you his intentions without telling you."

Like when I worked at a health food store and was asked, "does this 'clean your system'?" and I responded by saying, "It is illegal for me to tell you that this will mask marijuana in a drug test." People broadcast their intentions, sure as shooting. No pun intended. Cho was broadcasting his intentions, but people these days just don't take these kind of things seriously. Ever wonder why? Here's a good example.

In my junior year in college, I was taking a certain English class, where for some reason the subject came up in conversation about death, suicide, and martyrdom. I think the subject really was Romeo and Juliet, but the point is that I said, "everyone, at some time in his life, has picked up a long knife to slice some ham, and wonders what would happen if he just plunged the knife into his neck...and everyone who's been to a high place has wondered what it'd be like to jump." My point was not that everyone has suicidal urges, but that everyone, at some point, wonders what it would be like.

Two weeks later, during a lecture in the same class, I, seated in the back of the class, pulled out my pocketknife and proceeeded to clean my fingernails with it. The next day I was confronted about it and forced to go into counseling over the issue. In retrospect, it's a good thing, because had I BEEN homicidal or suicidal, this might have helped. But in truth, there are many more cases like mine, where a misunderstanding leads people to cry wolf. And as a result? Nobody believes you when you tell someone that a particular person should be watched.

I don't know what the solution is, but obviously the status quo is not working. The state of Israel allows teachers to carry weapons. One legally carried firearm in this instance could have drastically reduced the body count. I don't see how hiding under tables and desks can save your life. Yesterday I viewed the Columbine video from the library and this was made clear.

I don't know how I'd react in such a situation, but I do know that having a firearm to protect myself would give me a better option than ducking behind a desk and hiding.
 
Two weeks later, during a lecture in the same class, I, seated in the back of the class, pulled out my pocketknife and proceeeded to clean my fingernails with it. The next day I was confronted about it and forced to go into counseling over the issue.
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maybe it was the black trenchcoat, nail polish, and combat boots that threw everyone off? :neener:

Nah, just kidding, Great first post.
 
Interesting that an English major would walk across campus to the Engineering classes to start shooting. If he felt rage at his own situation wouldn't you think he would strike out against those he interacted with daily like within the English Dept.? The fact that he strikes at almost the polar opposite part of academics looks more like his studies taught him that he was good and others not like him were bad.
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Don't spend much time trying to impart logic to irrational behavior.
 
I watched that invocation and that so called poet almost made me hurl.
What a charlatan!
Now that I've read some of her so called work, I'm reaching for my large bottle of extra strength Rolaids.
 
Oh, I dunno. Seemed like sort of a pep rally, and the crowd seemed to like it. You do have to have some tolerance for platitudes, but that is usually what you will get in such a context.

Transcript of Nikki Giovanni's Convocation address
Delivered April 17, 2007



Professor Nikki Giovanni speaks

at Convocation, April 17, 2007.
We are Virginia Tech.

We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.

We are Virginia Tech.

We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.

We are Virginia Tech.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

We are Virginia Tech.

The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness.

We are the Hokies.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We are Virginia Tech.
 
So are we concluding that it was a substandard English professor that is responsible for this shooting? Have we also decided that this conclusion is actually less ridiculous than blaming the guns?

Perhaps we should have a government run academic screening board that reviews student produced writing and checks it for subversive ideas or indications of an unhealthy mind. Sounds like a brave new world of fluffy happy safety for everyone.
 
should be no surprise that folks are getting an illiberal education in our institutions of higher learning.

yesterday's vietnam-era hippies are today's college profs.

welcome to the hegemony of the left.
 
So are we concluding that it was a substandard English professor that is responsible for this shooting? Have we also decided that this conclusion is actually less ridiculous than blaming the guns?
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Thank you for saying so concisely what I was thinking, c_yeager.
 
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