old folks' activism?

On my way to the prison a couple of weeks ago, when I came up from the BART, there was an elderly White couple sitting on folding chairs outside the station, facing those of us coming through the turn-styles; he was holding a sign that said "End the death penalty," and they seemed to be chatting idly.

against niceness

At Bible study this week, Harry had pulled together a collection of excerpts from various places to help us think together about the pain in Nepal and in Baltimore.  Harry loves Dr. King.  He had us read this:

No I wanted to say something about the fact that we have lived over these last two or three summers with agony and we have seen our cities going up in flames.  And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view. (Emphasis is mine.)

Militant non-violence?  That's some striking shit.

Militant kindness.

Militant creativity.

Militantly humane.

Militantly authentic.

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I hate when people use military-tinged diction to talk about public schools.  Teachers are "on the front lines."  Ew.  "Veteran" teachers.  WHO IS THE ENEMY IN THIS SLOPPY METAPHOR?

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At AERA, Dave Stovall called for an ethic of self-care among antiracist educators that "engages love when it's no longer nice."  That guy is always dropping lines like that that make me think for several years.

silliness around "youth"

I went to this awesome session at AERA two weeks ago that featured the work of youth activists.  It was very similar to a session I went to last year at AERA, except that this year's room was about five times the size of last year's.  Both years, the session was packed.

The kids were doing some pretty brilliantly innovative work, and they were employing some pretty tired narratives.  One girl, for example, introduced herself with "I don't have a father figure in my life." As if that's the one thing that defines her.  Come on. It made me want to be in a classroom with them without all the other ogling grown-ups -- to push-back on that internalized deficit-thinking and to let her push back on my inexperience with her reality.

I wanted real badly to check in with them on what it was like to have so many adults gushing over them.  Affirming?  Condescending?  Both?

Last year, I got to spend a lot of time with some smart people thinking about what the hell "youth" even means.  I'm grateful for that.

Where I'd start that conversation?  I'd write on the board, "Youth are the future," and ask them what they make of that cliche.

Alas, I quit, so I can't.

What I could do is write it on the board in the classroom I do frequent, one that fills up with students who are, some of them, twice my age.  If because youth are the future is a main thrust of argument as to why they deserve excellent education, where does that leave those of us working toward excellent education for old folks in prison, old folks in prison who are never going to be released, even?

Are people who aren't the future still worthy of our energies?  A lower priority?

We should just do whatever the hell we want to do.

Four times this weekend, people with doctorate degrees said to me some version of, "Oh, you're actually smart!?"

I'd chalk it right up to sexism or ageism playing out the way that racism does when a White person "compliments" a Black person, "Oh, you're articulate!"

But, I don't know.  There's not a shortage of women or young people at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference, so it's not like it would be unexpected for folks there to talk to a smart young woman.  Puzzling.

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And I went to a pretty cool session with lots of time for talk among panelists, among audience members, and across those lines.  The driving question was, "How can we at AERA better engage the public?"

Really good question.  But also carries the embedded assumption that teachers are not Educational Researchers.  Because, like, um, every day public school teachers engage the the public?

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The best part, easily, was getting to spend some QT with my people.  At lunch one day, I got to catch up with a dear teacher-friend who'd shared with me earlier this year her idea for a civil disobedience campaign during the PARCC. ("9th graders spend 6 hours taking the ELA test," she reported, "That's the same amount of hours as the MCAT.")

Her idea (Brilliant!) was this: Read.  Resist the mind-numbing, inhumane, and theoretically unsound assessment of literacy by engaging literacy authentically!

In order to ensure absolute compliance with state standards for test administration, teachers proctoring the PARCC are not permitted to read/grade/anything while students test.  Just supposed to actively monitor.  It's actually against Illinois law for a teacher to read during the test. There's something beautiful about the image of a teacher being arrested for reading.

(A legal provision for "opting out" does not exist in Illinois, but students/parents can refuse testing.  Yeah, that's what it says here.  So kids could read, too!)

She had some titles picked out and everything:
(1) The New Jim Crow
(2) Pedagogy of the Oppressed
(3) Beyond Standardized Truth

Good ones, no?

We were gonna try to use our networks to spread it: #ReadingWhilePARCCed.

She didn't end up doing it for fear that the district would face sanctions, which would end up in her suspension, which would make things difficult for the course-team that she's on since it's mostly made up of new teachers that look to her for guidance.  And the kids would have to take the damn thing again.  So we called off our would-be nationally viral campaign (!).

She told us at lunch: "You know, I did end up reading.  But nobody noticed.  None of the administrators said anything."

I wonder if that woulda put a wrench in our mass-scale civil disobedience plans?  If teachers' work is so invisible that even our civil disobedience goes completely unnoticed...?  I'd like to think that maybe #ing it could help.  But I don't know.

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Teachers should just do whatever the hell they want.  No one's listening to them anyway.

Baby girl, respect is just a minimum.

Really truly collaborating is really challenging,

and when it's done well, it's so cool.  Probably my best thing.  And whenever I'm part of a group that collaborates well and pulls off something awesome, I'm more interested in claiming that collaboration than I am in taking credit for my work.

That's all I want to say about that.

what if: prisons as health care (and, obvi, if health care were good)

A couple of weeks ago as we were walking into the prison, one of the other volunteers was pointing out to me which buildings housed prisoners on death row.

Someone had shown her earlier that week, a guy who runs an art program exclusively for the guys on death row.  She asked him how working with those men differed, if at all, from working with men in the general population, and she told me a story that he told her.  He'd asked the men he was working with what they missed most about life outside.  One of them responded, "Killing."

I'm not naive enough to think that we're in there working with a bunch of Andy Dufresnes.  Come on, now.

But this, "Killing," struck me.  My first thought was, "Holy shit," and my second thought was, "Wow, are we humans diverse."

My third thought was of something in this book I'm grateful I read a long time ago:

Human beings, for example, come in a variety of heights, and many of those considered "normal" are unable to reach high places such as kitchen shelves without the assistance of physical aids -- chairs and step-stools.  In spite of their inability to do this task without special aids, they are not defined as disabled.  Nor are the roughly 100 million people in the United States who cannot see properly without the aid of eyeglasses.  Why?  Because the dominant group -- like all dominant groups -- has the power to define what is considered normal.  In contrast, people who use wheelchairs, for example, to get from one place to another -- to "reach" places they cannot otherwise go -- do not have the social power to define their condition as within the boundaries of normality, that is, as little more than a manifestation of the simple fact that in the normal course of life, people come in a variety of shapes and sizes and physical and mental conditions. (19, the bolding is mine)

What a privilege to be considered "normal." And not just in relation to dis/ability.  I took these photos at Walgreens the other day -- a classic example of normalizing Whiteness (and objectifying Women of Color).

What we do with people considered not behaviorally "normal," Mr. "Killing" being a very good example of one, is put them in prison.  Obviously, I understand that Mr. Killing is likely a danger to those around him and that it would be irresponsible for those of us with more mental/moral? wherewithal to let him just do his thing.

But again, normal is socially constructed when what's actually normal is variance.  We've (in the United States especially) eschewed the latter notion in favor of demonizing/obsessively punishing deviation from dominant norms.

If Joaquín were here (in my blog, which would be weird), he would argue that Mr. Killing made a choice, and that we all have choices, and that some of us are just bad.  And so when people believe that, that it's possible for a baby to come out bad, then we'll just have to agree to disagree right there.

But if you're with me that all of us are born basically good*, then come with me:

Mr. Killing isn't inherently bad.  He's definitely not "normal" -- My guess is that there's some mental illness going on there, by mainstream standards.  But he's part of the human spectrum.  He is.

So how do we deal with that?

Fourth thought: What if Mr. Killing's mental illness got treated with the loving support and collective persistence with which mine has been treated?  By "normal" standards, obviously, the manifestation of mine -- crying so much all the time -- is a lot less ugly than his -- killing and missing killing.  But what if we suspended our dominant senses of normalcy, took up the reality that variance is what's normal, and took responsibility for this Mr. Killing being a part of our human community?

What if prisons operated under a healing rather than a punitive paradigm?  I'm not talking about "rehabilitation" the way it's traditionally used in conjunction with prisons.  I'm talking about what if prisons were sources of health care**? (And what if the stigma of mental health care were removed to the extent that mental illness might be regarded as urgent and as treatable as, say, cancer?)

I just wonder how that'd be different.

Fifth thought: Architects came up with the principle of "universal design." It's the idea that you build a building so that it's accessible to everyone from the jump; you don't design the building and then add the ramps on.  Educators took up the term to think about designing learning experiences that all kids can access.

I once had a student do a research project on universal design and make this playground.  I wrote about it here.  Note the title of the post.  Hell.

What would a health care system designed under the principles of universal design look like?  Radical given our current state of affairs in the US, sure, but I really don't think I'm asking for too much.

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That train of thought stopped when we got to our classroom and got to work.  But then, at the end of class, one of the incarcerated teachers and I were talking, and he told me that he'd had a really hard week: His best friend of fifteen years had hanged himself.

He'd died of depression.

My friend is sad, but he prefers to use the term "disgusted."  Prison officials knew, he said, that his friend was suicidal, because (1) the friend had attempted suicide before, and (2) my friend had reported his recent behavior to the guards.  Real shitty health care providing, right there.

(I've never wanted to hurt myself, but I have thought that it would be really nice if I could just get some terminal illness so that I could go to bed forever and people would leave me alone.  Or I've thought that I wouldn't really care if the plane I was in crashed.  And when I told my doctor that, she expressed concern and commenced a really thorough treatment plan.)


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Just because I was curious, given how mental illness seems to be all but disregarded as a thing, I looked into how the criminal justice system deals with mental disability.  (And I'm not really certain how the distinction between mental illness and mental disability gets made?) Well it is, by the way, illegal (as of 2002) to execute a prisoner with "mental retardation" -- cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court found.  But different states define "mental retardation" differently, and vary on whether to give the responsibility of deciding whether a person who's been convicted is "mentally retarded" to the judge or the jury.  Oh great.  I'm sure that system is working really well.

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* Over the last couple of years, Ron has helped me to revise this "everyone's born good" thesis of mine, to one more nuanced: He says, "We're all more sacred than we realize, more broken than we realize, and more salvageable than we realize.  In that order."  So that complicated my point here a bit.

** And oh don't I know how shitty mental health care (and diagnosis) is and has always been.  

"My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?": Jesus keeps it real.

I really love Holy Week.  So much.  As a kid, I was in the choir at St. Albert's, and Holy Week was so intense.  There were certain colors we had to wear, weird prayers/songs/psalms in the misselette that we had to do that we only ever did on Holy Thursday, or Good Friday, etc. I specifically remember a big-ass fire lit in the middle of the nave on Holy Saturday.  And once on Good Friday, when the mass started at 3, the priest came up the nave in silence and laid himself prostrate, arms out to the sides, behind the altar and at the foot of the crucifix.

The choir director also put on an elaborate passion play that I was in every year.  (I loved that choir director, and she died several years ago.  Here's the new janky version of St. Albert's passion play.) I was just a kid in the crowd for most of the play, but I also got to play an angel several years in a row.  (1) I had the biggest crush on the guy who played Jesus.  (2) We got to wear these white leotards with flowy white skirts and do this silent and beautiful dance to "This is Holy Ground" with all of the lights in the church turned out except for the black lights shining on us.

The acute somberness of it all freaked me out in the best way possible.

I'm saying that facetiously, but also seriously.  I'm grateful that my catastrophically boring experience of religion during my upbringing did not ruin my capacity to really feel Holy Week.


Some favorite readings --

On Holy Thursday, Jesus acts like a straight-up human: "[H]e fell with his fact to the ground and prayed, 'My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.'" (NIV Matthew 26:39)  He knows what's coming, and he's like, "Ohmygoodness, is there any way you could make it so that I don't have to do this?"



On Good Friday:

Before the cross is anything else, it is a catastrophe. It is the unjust and violent lynching of an innocent man. It is the murder of God. Jesus is sacrificed by the Father only in this sense: The Father sent his Son into our system of violent power (civilization) to reveal how utterly sinful it is — so sinful that it will murder the Innocent One. God did not will the murder of his Son, he simply knew it would occur.

Also, Jesus acts super human (not super-human) again on Friday, when he can't help but scream out, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" It's not easy for him to "just trust that God has a plan" for him, that "everything happens for a reason."  He's like, "Holy fuck, why are you letting this happen!?" (It's also a beautiful echo of the tortured and desperate faith expressed in Psalm 22.)




On Holy Saturday:

There are some things we can know on this Saturday. Jesus is dead, to begin with, dead and buried. He said the world was upside-down and needed a revolution to turn it right-way-round and so he was executed for disturbing the peace. He came and said love was greater than power, and so power killed him.

... 

Why should we expect that tomorrow will be any different? 

Seriously, just look around. Does it look like the meek are inheriting the earth? Does it look like those who hunger and thirst for justice are being filled? Does it look like the merciful are being shown mercy? 

Jesus was meek and merciful and hungry for justice and look where that got him. They killed him. We killed him. Power won. 

...

“But in fact,” St. Paul says, everything changes on Sunday. Come Sunday power loses. Come Sunday, love wins, the meek shall inherit, the merciful will receive mercy and no one will ever go hungry for justice again. Come Sunday, everything changes.
If there ever is a Sunday. 

On Easter Sunday:

Sundays have always been important to Black people. Sunday was the only day that slaves were given a break from their unpaid labor to praise God and openly dream of deliverance. Sunday was the only day that shines became pastors, maids became deaconesses, “boys” and “aunties” became “Mr.” and “Mrs.” But Easter Sunday took things to another level. Men and boys rocking pastel colored suits, little girls wearing shiny shoes and white gloves, and church mothers with huge ornate hats proved that White supremacy had not stolen our joy or stripped our style. Easter Sunday was a sartorial testimony to the beauty and power of Black culture.  

...  

Easter calls us to remember the plight of the prisoner. Because of his political activism and message of social justice, Jesus was declared an enemy of the Roman State and sentenced to the death penalty. His crucifixion was a State execution that was both “cruel” and “unusual.” His most important followers, Peter and Paul, were prisoners who died in custody. The story of Jesus is a reminder to challenge state authority, question unjust laws, and offer humanizing mercy to the prisoner. 

The holiday is a testimony to the power of actionable love. Most of us confess love for someone or something: our partners, our friends, our families, our community. But the story of Easter is a reminder that this love is best actualized through the choices we make and the sacrifices we offer. Love of the poor should translate into humane public policy. Love of the Black community should be reflected in investment, both by the State and other Black people. Love of women should lead to the elimination of rape culture. Love must become a verb.

I also really loved the way Tóibín took up Holy Week in this book.  All playful/for-real jabs at hypermasculinity aside, the book takes up Mary's horror in devastatingly beautiful ways:

"[I]f you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it.  It was not worth it" (80).

And while we're giving Irish men the mic, this, too.

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured. 

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home. 

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme. 

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells. 

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky 

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.