and it has done as much or more to change the complexion of the
natural and social worlds. Literacy, like fire, is a tool that must be
used by intelligence. Literacy is also a capacity: the capacity to be
literate is a human capacity; the capacity exists and it can be used
or it can be denied, refuted, made to atrophy. In persons socially
despised, it is denied. But denial is not enough, because people
insist on meaning. Humankind finds meaning in experiences,
events, objects, communications, relationships, feelings. Literacy
functions as part of the search for meaning; it helps to make that
search possible. Men can deny that women have the capacity to
learn ancient Greek, but some women w ill learn it nevertheless.
Men can deny that poor women or working-class women or prostituted women have the capacity to read or write their own language, but some of those women will read or write their own language anyw ay; they will risk everything to learn it. In the
slaveholding South in the United States, it was forbidden by law
to teach slaves to read or write; but some slaveowners taught, some
slaves learned, some slaves taught themselves, and some slaves
taught other slaves. In Jew ish law, it is forbidden to teach women
Talm ud, but some women learned Talmud anyw ay. People know
that literacy brings dignity and a wider world. People are strongly
motivated to experience the world they live in through language:
spoken, sung, chanted, and written. One must punish people terribly to stop them from wanting to know what reading and writing bring, because people are curious and driven toward both experience and the conceptualization of it. The denial of literacy to any class or category of people is a denial of fundamental humanity.
Humans viewed as animal, not human, are classically denied literacy: slaves in slave-owning societies; women in woman-owning societies; racially degraded groups in racist societies. The male slave is treated as a beast of burden; he cannot be allowed to read or
write. The woman is treated as a beast of breeding; she must not
read or write. When women as a class are denied the right to read
and write, those who learn are shamed by their knowledge: they
are masculine, deviant; they have denied their wombs, their cunts;
in their literacy they repudiate the definition of their kind.
Certain classes of women have been granted some privileges of
literacy—not rights, privileges. The courtesans of ancient Greece
were educated when other women were kept ignorant, but they
were not philosophers, they were whores. Only by accepting their
function as whores could they exercise the privilege of literacy.
Upper-class women are traditionally taught some skills of literacy
(distinctly more circumscribed than the skills taught the males of
their mating class): they can exercise the privilege of literacy if they
accept their decorative function. After all, the man does not want
the breeding, bleeding bitch at the dinner table or the open cunt in
the parlor while he reads his newspaper or smokes his cigar. Language is refinement: proof that he is human, not she.
The increase in illiteracy among the urban poor in the United
States is consonant with a new rise in overt racism and contempt
for the poor. The illiteracy is programmed into the system: an intelligent child can go to school and not be taught how to read or write. When the educational system abandons reading and writing
for particular subgroups, it abandons human dignity for those
groups: it becomes strictly custodial, keeping the animals penned
in; it does not bring human life to human beings.
