Mr. Johnson’s Head: Anti-Racist Pedagogy and the Insane Clown Posse

“How many times did I walk in and just sit?

And have to listen, and learn all this bullshit?”

                                         -Insane Clown Posse, “How Many Times?”

I met two "Original Juggalos" at the Insane Clown Posse Great Milenko show.  One confessed to me: "I used to be a hater.  Then I listened to the song 'Mr. Johnson's Head.' This song made me take a hard look at myself.  Now I don't hate anybody." 

The mention of the song "Mr. Johnson's Head" was a powerful omen for the start of a school year where, more than ever, I am trying to implement not just content, but teaching practices that help dismantle systems of oppression.   In the song, a student listens to a substitute teacher talk, because Mr. Johnson, the regular history teacher, is absent: "I can hear the teacher talking man, talking about Columbus/ He nothing but an old dead f--- with a compass/ Ran up on a beach and threw everybody off/ And then he claimed discovery and now we all applaud."  Until a few years ago in my 9^th grade Humanities class, we had students engage in a mock debate: “Should we still celebrate Columbus Day?”  We thought we were being very progressive, radical even, in questioning this national holiday and having students argue “both sides.” One day, the parent of a student from an Indigenous group asked if we would also be debating whether or not we should celebrate the Holocaust.  She said that for her daughter, debating the celebration of Columbus Day amounted to the same experience – for Indigenous people, the arrival of Columbus, who “threw everybody off,” signaled the beginning of genocide.

How had I not seen that?  I was supposed to be the teacher, the one with a “critical pedagogy” that, in the words of Ellsworth, “ supported classroom analysis and rejection of oppression, injustice, inequality, silencing of marginalized voices, and authoritarian social structures.” ("Why doesn't this feel empowering?") The narrator of “Mr. Johnson’s Head” feels just as unseen and unheard by the teacher, and by the other students, as my former student must have when we asked her to debate Columbus Day. “ I try to speak my word, it always goes unheard/I could chop my arms off and run around the class/I doubt they’d even notice, but I’d be dying fast,“ he tells us. In Ellsworth’s understanding, the classroom dynamic embodies “a highly complex negotiation of the politics of knowing and being known.” How voyeuristic had the dynamic become, where a student from the Tulalip community was forced to “debate” Columbus Day as the teacher “benignly” looked on and assessed her ability to be rational and disinterested, to produce critical arguments from “both sides?” 

The students tell the sub that Mr. Johnson has already taught the lesson about Columbus, so the substitute begins another: "If you'll turn your textbooks to Chapter Four we'll get started./America's the land of the free, all racists live together in harmony/and we are all treated equal, we all live together in the same wealthy community." The narrator of “Mr Johnson’s Head” tells us that, in contrast to the story of economic opportunity told by the teacher, “I got a couple food stamps folded in my sock.” While it is true that student experience often gives the lie to the content of the curriculum, changing the content is not a sufficient remedy. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks asks “whether or not we subvert the classroom’s politics of domination simply by using different material, or by having a different, more radical standpoint.” She says that “different, more radical subject matter does not create a liberatory pedagogy, that a simple practice like including personal experience may be more constructively challenging than simply changing the curriculum.” (“Building a Teaching Community”)**

Again, the students insist that Mr. Johnson has already taught that lesson about equality. They ask when Mr. Johnson is coming back, and the sub says he doesn't know. But the student secretly knows - he has Mr. Johnson's head in his backpack.  He got sick of the racist curriculum: "I cut the bigot's head off and stuffed it in my bag."  This act of violence is not only reminiscent of Sartre’s defense of Fanon – violence as cathartic and empowering – but highly symbolic of the disembodiment required by traditional critical pedagogy. As Ellsworth points out, “Conventional notions of dialogue and democracy assume rationalized, individualized subjects capable of agreeing on universalizable 'fundamental moral principles' and 'quality of human life' that become self-evident when subjects cease to be self-interested and particularistic about group rights.  Yet social agents are not capable of being fully rational and disinterested; and they are subjects split between conscious and unconscious and among multiple social positionings.  Fundamental moral and political principles are not absolute and universalizable, waiting to be discovered by the disinterested researcher/teacher; they are 'established intersubjectively by subjects capable of interpretation and reflection.”  Mr. Johnson has never attempted to establish any sort of intersubjectivity with his students; he has instead relied on the banking model of education. In his attempts to transfer information to the students, he has seen them as passive objects, dehumanized and stripped of any genuine agency to act upon the objects of their learning. As Freire, quoting Erich Fromm, points out, this relation produces what he calls ‘necrophily.’  The teacher loves control, “and in the act of controlling he kills life.” (Fromm, quoted by Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed)

Mr. Johnson was not interested in the food stamps stuffed into the student’s sock; indeed, he was not interested in his own embodied experience as (presumably) as a white, cisgender, middle class male. He has cut both himself and his students off from their embodied experiences as authentic actors. He seeks only to dominate, to “fill” the students, as Freire says, “by making deposits of information which he considers to constitute true knowledge.” Thus, when the student confesses, “I left his f—ing body in the hallway/And in the morning they opened up the door/And seen his motherf—ing carcass laying on the floor,” we are confronted with an apt visual image of the dismemberment required to participate, either as a teacher or as a student, in a traditional classroom which, according to Freire, replicates the violent necrophilia of the banking model of education, and indoctrinates students “to adapt to the world of oppression” (Pedagogy of the Oppressed 78). When the student cuts off Mr. Johnson’s head and brings it into the classroom with him, he has attempted to resolve “the teacher-student contradiction” which Freire believes is inherent in the banking model of education.  Unfortunately, of course, the school immediately arranges for a substitute who will continue to perpetuate this oppressive model, filling students’ heads with myths of the Founding Fathers even though the student knows “they owned a couple slaves but I guess it doesn’t matter.”

Juggalos are, for the most part, economically disenfranchised and socially marginalized. The references to surreal and supernatural violence in ICP lyrics such as the song “Piggie Pie” - “And then I watch the moon take the form of a devil/and pull it out the sky and beat it with a shovel” – are immediately followed by lyrics that point out real injustices - “People in my city, they fightin’ for their meals/He sleeps on a mattress stuffed with hundred dollar bills.” Unlike the ideal student in Friere’s banking model, the Juggalo student does not accept his own ignorance.  He has discovered a way to “educate the teacher.” Most important, the violent imagery in lyrics about a student cutting a teacher’s head off caused my Juggalo friend to “take a hard look” at his own racism and ultimately to abandon it, in an awakening of conscientizacao. The ability of Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope’s music to unite Juggalos into a Family whose Clown Love transcends race, age and socioeconomic status is truly “wicked voodoo magic.” The Insane Clown Posse and the Juggalos thus “are both Subjects, permanent re-creators of reality.”