Relatavism?

Last year at Willard’s spaghetti dinner, he was telling us about how different student activism was at U of I during the sixties.  Shit’s different when there’s a draft, he explained, when young [White] people’s lives are actually in danger.

When I was watching Selma, in the throes of #BlackLivesMatter, I was awestruck by the brilliant, disciplined, strategic coordination of those activists.  I’m still wondering how those strategies must be transformed in our current contexts, especially in the places where racism is no longer de jure but is certainly de facto.  (But then again, people putting their bodies in front of BART trains takes a page straight from that Civil Rights book.  I wonder if it’s always going to come down to throwing your body out in front of the bullshit.)  It’s not as easy to deconstruct our White supremacist ideology as it is to call for an end to Jim Crow laws.  And who in the hell would call the work of our elders “easy”? (And who in the hell would call the abolition of current draconian immigration laws "easy"?  For fuck's sake.)

Following the Oklahoma stuff last week, I was both encouraged to see a university administrator take racism seriously, but also concerned that the president’s call for “zero tolerance for racism in our nation” indicates a seriously incomplete understanding of how seriously fundamental racism is “in our nation.”  Does he mean that we should have no tolerance for White folks using the n-word?  That’s good and easy to point at and publicly deplore -- but holy hell, not enough.  What’s dude gonna do about the fact that Black students make up only 5% of his campus' population?

I’ve got to (I get to) do some writing about our work at the prison this afternoon, and especially having just helped to write about it for an audience I don’t care for, I’m feeling excited about writing about it for real -- not as a bad-ass “prison education program” (i.e. lower rate of recidivism = save states and feds money) but as a bad-ass learning community, full stop.

But: Why do I think it will be possible to co-create and collaboratively sustain this community in a prison when I’ve very nearly given up on the possibility of doing so in a public school? As we move forward, I’ll be interested to learn whether (a) this is because I don’t understand the prison as well as I understand the public school, or (b) because it’s easier to resist oppressive systems when they make themselves obvious -- as prisons do relative to schools. (Or [c] some other lesson I have no idea I'm about to learn.)