Virginia Tech’s Professor of Hate

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.

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

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:

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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:

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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”]

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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:

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

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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.)

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Giovanni 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 rhetorichelped 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 prosperselbowing 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.