Longtime advocate for cultural democracy Arlene Goldbard’s new book is a stirring autobiographical account of her self-education and the “angels” that lit her path. It is also an incisive polemic in defense of the autodidact in our society, and against credentialism and other forms of institutional elitism that have so entrenched class inequality and hegemony in our society.
This is a tale of a working class child of Jewish immigrants, maturing early amid a chaotic home life as an intellectual and artist. Goldbard’s prose is heartbreakingly beautiful throughout. As a ten-year old, she finds out that her forty-seven-year old father has died, as a result of hard work with toxic chemicals and inadequate medical care:
My knees buckled. I flew high above the street. Tiny figures scurried far below. Then I was back in my body, we drove home, and my adult life began.
Goldbard’s stories are stories of working class identity and experience, of shortage and struggle, creativity and making do. And of an inquisitive and hardworking person who knew a good angel when she saw one. Her insights come from her own praxis of life and the inspiration of these angels—the figures she encountered in her life that had a major impact on her development as a thinker, author, artist, and activist.
NYU Press
Part One features Goldbard’s masterful series of eleven portraits of her angels.
The portraits are stunning; gazing out of the pages with warm and piercing eye contact are James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Jane Jacobs, and many other progressive free-thinkers (many of whom, like her, were autodidacts). These are the angels of freedom, referring to the freedom of thought and inquiry that they brought to the world through their creativity and insight, and the freedom they brought to the author.
Each painting is accompanied by an essay explaining where Goldbard was in her life when she first encountered that angel, and their impact on her life choices and her art practice. In this way, we learn about Goldbard’s struggles in the antiwar, civil rights, and progressive arts movements, and for her own liberation against misogyny, classism, antisemitism, and an array of other obstacles which she overcame with grit and alacrity.
Nina Simone’s cover of the Brecht/Weill song “Pirate Jenny,” with its theme of a woman wanting to escape her downtrodden state, inspires Goldbard to escape an oppressive marriage. Writer Paul Goodman’s confidence, despite a lack of institutional credentials, serves as a source of confidence for Goldbard. Lessing’s speculative, radical fiction inspired Goldbard to write her own very good novels (in full disclosure, I have known Goldbard for many years through common friends and common concerns).
Goldbard continually reaffirms the importance of art, not as “window-dressing,” but as a key element in the practice of freedom—both personal and collective. She also gets into the nuts and bolts of strategy and tactics in activism. In the section about John Trudell, in which she talks about her own participation in a campaign to negotiate sustainable logging practices with a timber company:
Don’t let your opponents make the rules, especially if all they need to win is to keep whatever you want from happening, while victory for you requires creating, persuading, and enacting new initiatives. Don’t mistake delaying tactics for deliberation. Don’t deceive yourself that two diametrically opposed interests can come to agreement, no matter how long they try.
It’s not all struggle. Or, rather, the struggle is infused with remarkable people that she met and befriended on the way; dancers, organizers, gray market hustlers in drugs and adult films, bohemian elders—Goldbard was even at the disastrous Altamont concert. She worked for a sectarian group and lived in a rigid commune, as did so many activists in the 1970s; she had to overcome the dogma of the time that art was “frivolous” and not the main avenue of class struggle. She levies an incisive critique of the dogmas of our day, noting their commonality with the “tankie” dogma of the old sectarian Left.
It is a bracing splash of cold water for elitists, calling out oppressive assumptions.
Part Two is a series of chapters asking the question “What Does It Mean to be Educated?” It continues to tell us the story of Goldbard’s life, with face-slappingly infuriating vignettes of her constant encounters with elitism and classism as she continues her journey as an artist, organizer, and advocate for the support of egalitarian community arts. The way she deftly handles these barriers and bad behavior is instructive for the rest of us as we navigate similar terrain.
It is also a bracing splash of cold water for elitists, calling out oppressive assumptions. When credentials from exclusive and increasingly unaffordable universities are required for social advancement or even basic respect in the workplace and the high-art world, hegemony thrives. And the invaluable insights and creativity of autodidacts is thrown away, to the great loss of society as a whole. These essays are further fortified by four brilliant self portraits of the author magically engaging with earth, air, fire, and water.
This book closes with the core problem of massive inequality, of which credentialism is just one important part. At the very end, Goldbard argues, yes, education is vital—but the recent call for “free college for all” is not as important as decent housing, wages, standards of living, democratic rights, dignity, belonging and community for all.
Throughout the book, the personal and the political-economic are infused with each other in creative dialogue. Goldbard chartered her own autonomous course towards becoming the influential figure that she is in the world of community-based cultural advocacy; she encourages us to do the same, both in how we live and read and learn in our lives, and even in how we engage with her book—she tells us to read it in whatever order feels right.
At the end is a lovely set of instructions, teaching the reader how to find and honor their own angels. I am sure there are many who would, in their own book, paint a portrait of Arlene Goldbard as one of their angels of freedom, who helped them to survive, thrive and chart their own life path past the traps of oppression, marginalization and elitism.