30

Ron sometimes does this "That's bad --> That's good --> That's bad --> That's good" story thingie at the beginning of his teachings.  (e.g. He fell off the roof; that's bad.  There was a haystack below; that's good.  There was a spike in the haystack; that's bad.  He missed it; that's good.)

That's how my birthday was last week.

I've been feeling really low lately.  I'm lonely, and I'm sad.  I've been spending most of my non-working time at home in my room with the door closed, mostly sleeping.  It's not a great way to deepen the relationships I've started since coming here.  I didn't have anyone to do anything with, not anyone that wouldn't, though I may really like them, make me feel exhausted.  I had a deep, loud cry that morning.

In the afternoon, I went on a gorgeous, hope restoring hike.  As I started it, I got a promising email about a job I've applied for.

When I got home, some of the crappiness had settled back in, and I had to take a nap.

I got up and made an appointment to quick go over to the shiatsu place and get a massage.  After that, I met Neil and Jarlath for a drink and a burger.  I wore my favorite baggy-ass ripped jeans and a new shirt I found at Goodwill that's an exact copy of a shirt my old principal had that I was jealous of.

When I got home, the sad was back.

Class notes: Series suspended.

Just for a minute.  I've still got the posts saved, and I'm still writing.

Prison politics.  Playing it safe.

"DAAAG THAT'S DEEP"

We meet on Friday mornings to assess student work and plan the next week.  No class on Thursday meant no work for us to do, so we had to time to start the professional reading group we've been wanting to do.

First up: Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  We only got about five pages into the first chapter because we kept stopping to talk and look up words.

axiology: thinking about goodness, value

ontology: thinking about the nature of being

We came up with a whole bunch of examples from history and from our personal lives that helped us understand him better. It was awesome. We haven't at all gotten to a point where we can talk about what it means for our teaching, but we're all bringing our copies back next Friday so we can squeeze in some more reading time.

---

I want to think more about how we did it.

We all sat around two tables pushed together, nine of us.  Each of us had our own copy, and a couple of paragraphs in, one guy got up to get us pens and highlighters. We read aloud slowly, taking turns without any order, and whenever necessary, we interrupted the reader to ask questions, make connections, or emote. Sometimes we went back to re-read a sentence or paragraph.

A few times, one or another of the guys would silently get up to go somewhere and silently come back to the table (e.g., bathroom, talk to someone outside, I don't know).  The person next to him would point to where we were, and he'd get back into it with us.

P kept reading ahead, highlighting animatedly as he read aloud the things he liked: "Oooh, 'The behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior!'"  It was distracting to me and S, so every time he read aloud to himself, we would tell him to shut up and let us get there.  He didn't stop, though.

---

The above is a pretty complete illustration of the academic literacy behaviors that the good teachers I know work at apprenticing their students into:

• read with a pencil or pen or highlighter in hand
• ask questions
• make connections
• note your responses to the text
• stop and go back when you realize you've gotten lost

Together, we constructed comprehension and interpretation of the text, a text worthy of "group work."

We came to the table with an established camaraderie.  Our camaraderie is steeped in a shared commitment to education (others' and our own).  The text at hand is relevant to that commitment. We were each there by choice (and granted, we're all adults).  Each of us had the academic confidence to know that we could make at least some sense of this difficult text.  This was all effortless.

---

At school, I was eventually able to create the conditions for students to read like this, but it was a lot of times really hard work for them and me getting ourselves there.  I've been wondering about that kind of thing for the last couple of years I've spent in prison education: Was it difficult because the behaviors are difficult?  Or do the conditions of "school" make it more difficult than they need to be?

I'm tripping on the extent to which context matters here.  We have so much more freedom in our classroom than a lot of teachers do -- particularly those who teach kids of color living in low-income neighborhoods where surveillance is pervasive.  Mandated curriculum, incessant testing, performance pay, etc.  We in a prison classroom, on the other hand, are free to play with our practice and our theories about how people learn (and others' theories -- like Freire's!).

Prison officials, from my experience, don't much shit whether or not our students earn their GEDs, so they don't interfere with what we do in our classroom.  Ostensibly, school officials do care about student learning, but in their caring, they really fuck it up bad.

In so many ways, school is just like prison, but not in this way, where we teachers have space to think. Barf.

Another new series: Hill is shrill!

I'm seeing a lot of dumdum shit from progressive White guys in the last couple of days since Hillary Clinton secured the Democratic nomination. It occurred to me that this election might create an opportunity for feminists/womanists/women from the future to educate misogynist progressives (ha).  I'm going to (try to remember to) keep a running list here of the "teachable moments" I encounter.  Sometimes I get so astounded by something shitty said to me that I forget to throw a little knowledge  back at the shit-sayer.

(Note: A lot of times, I'm going to say "we," "us," "girls," and "women" knowing full well that I cannot and do not speak for all women, particularly not women of color, women with disabilities, queer women, transwomen, poor women, immigrant women, incarcerated women, etc.)

(1) Don't tell us that Hillary's nomination is an important thing for women and girls (and trans folk, but I'm not seeing trans folk come up in the rhetoric at all.  [Shocker.])  First, don't tell us anything about what's good for us. Further, it's a great thing for men and boys, too. Figure out why.

(2) Related to (1), but definitely it's own thing:  Especially because Hillary is a White woman, you should learn something about the history of feminism because saying something is important for women and girls is just a super White thing to say.

(3) Code words!  There are so many code words!  For today, I'll do shrill. A personal example: When Rachel and I first started teaching, she was advised by a dude teacher that she should raise her voice when necessary to assert her authority in a class where she had some rowdiness.  Yeah right.  When a dude raises his voice, it's most of the time commanding.  When a White woman raises her voice, it's most of the time received as either ridiculous or annoying or both, but definitely not authoritative.  Y'all get to raise your voice, and we don't.  Don't call us shrill.

(4) Don't ask us to teach you this stuff.  Do your own work because you're exhausting me.  And insulting, but the insulting is kinda whatever.  It's just tiring to talk you through things from step one. Read something.

Notes from No Class #2

Prison was real prison-rific tonight.  When class was supposed to start, there was an  forty-five alarm, which means that the men have to stop right where they are and get on the ground.  And then once the alarm was over, there was a yard recall, which means that everybody goes back to their cells.  And then they said that Education could stay open, so those men were allowed to come down.  And then right as we settled into our groups, there was another alarm, and an officer came and said that all of the volunteers had to leave.

Try again tomorrow.

still lifes (lives?)

On the captain's porch, there's an office divided by clear walls into many offices, and I was in one of those sub-offices.  On the wall, there's taped a file folder with clip art of an adorable little cat and a dainty little butterfly, and in between the two, "CONFIRMED PRE-PAROLE LIST."  On the window-wall, one of those clingie sticker things is a fun little cartoon bulky white guy in stripes breaking apart rocks with a pick.  Cute little drops of sweat coming off his face.

--

Above the door of one the offices in the administration building hangs a wooden sign, like the kind you'd get at Cracker Barrel, welcoming, "Come On In!"  Just inside the office, there's an old-school pencil sharpener still attached to the wall.  Just outside, a sign on the wall reminds, "Understanding Disability is an ATTITUDE."

Notes from Class Entry #1 (of many, hopefully)

Anticipating Week 1.

This week we’ll begin our second semester under our reorganized approach.  Considering outer space from various angles, we’ll puzzle over the question, “What’s out there?”

Last week was a work week.  We talked about what went well last semester and what we’d like to do differently this semester.  We chose a pre-test, settled on rosters and writing groups, put together the readers.  We finalized lesson plans for the first two weeks of class.  We made a big calendar for the wall detailing the study opportunities available on days we don’t have class.  

We made table tents so the students will know where to sit when they come in on the first day.  We tweaked our system for taking attendance and collecting homework.  We organized the supply closet.  

C bit the cords off of the two computer keyboards he managed to get us on the sly; having cords attached could get us into trouble because the cord comes with the possibility of accessing a CPU.  And, obviously, we don’t have scissors, hence the biting.  

We made plans for how we want to use our newly approved study hall time, at one point using a March Madness style bracket to decide which book we’d read in the new book club.  (Fahrenheit 451. Not my pick.)  We met with the math coordinator for the college program to talk about possible collaborations.

I wrote letters of support for the inside teachers with upcoming dates with the parole board.  The inside teachers wrote survey questions for collecting information from our students that might be useful in grant writing for my salary.

Last night, the teachers would have walked students through the reader and all of the resources in it, and they would have started our warm-up writing assignment, the classic RAFT.  Choose one of each:

ROLE: astronaut, alien, Pluto, black hole

AUDIENCE: earthlings, aliens

FORM of writing: letter, movie trailer, election speech, play, poem

TONE: condescending, fearful, aggressive, comical, doomsday, apologetic

Tomorrow night, we’ll share first drafts in the writing groups and offer feedback.  Homework: Revise!

Gotta make time.

I keep trying to make time for, and keep failing to make time for, writing up some of the stories of what's happening at the prison.  I'm keeping a list of topics.

• 1,000 mile club
• Pit watching
• X-ray vs. treating on paper
• Police are bad
• More detail
• "I'm a dinosaur."/"The worst thing we had to deal with was racism."
• "Sometimes doing the right thing ain't the right thing."
• "Signed, Every female in the world."
• Dave Eggers guy
• "I'm like Zuckerberg"
• "I beat him on paper because of The BEAT"
• Responding to writing vs. person
• "I want to be a sociologist."
• ADA
• Two soups
• Body receipt
• Lactation station
• Talented men
• Smell flowers
• "Bernie Sanders said I can spell my name however I want to."

enhancing stuff

After watching this piece about California's draconian "sentence enhancement" policies, I went to the GED site to see about getting the test in Spanish.

two new things

Brittney Cooper is my favorite news commentator.

She spoke at the Y a few weeks ago, and they taped it, so I watched it.

Two (of the) things I learned from her:

(1) The sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline.  I knew that many, many people who are incarcerated -- especially women --- are survivors of sexual abuse, but I'd never heard that term before, and I think it's a brilliant way of naming that reality.  Naming is so important.

(2) The critique of intersectionality coming from scholars arguing for assemblage as a more helpful construct.  I don't exactly understand the distinction, but now I want to.

Also, at 59:30, she gets asked about the 2016 election, and the way she responds is so YEAH YEAH EXACTLY YEAH.

T-O-M-A-S-Z-K-I-E-W-I-C-Z

Pronounced TOM-uh-SKEV-itch.

Mrs. Tomaskiewicz was my third grade teacher.  I remembered the other day that she used to say to us, whenever we boasted about some accomplishment, "Do you want a parade or a party?"

That was kind of mean because we were only nine and we were proud of ourselves.

---

When I wrote the pronunciation, I noticed that it was the opposite of iambic (as in Shakespeare's iambic pentameter -- five iambs in a row: "From FORTH the FAtal LOINS of THESE two FOE").  I looked it up and when the stressed syllable comes before the unstressed syllable, it's called a trochee (adj trochaic): "DID he WHO made THE lamb MAKE thee?" The poetic norm is trochaic tetrameter, four trochees in a row,  as we see above.  In the case of Tomaskiewicz, we have trochaic dimeter.

---

She had a greenhouse in her classroom where we kept the paper towels, and she always had a desk in her seating chart that was left empty but had a name-tag on it for Jesus.

Navigating all that unpacking and complicating and problemetizing.

Walking down the hallway at Mills yesterday, I heard just these words from a conversation two women were having:

"...notion that how we position the concept..."

I immediately texted the words to myself so that I could remember them because I thought they were so funny.  I love graduate school jargon.

Just now though, it's making me think of the Bechdel test for movies, TV, etc.:

(1) Does it have two named female characters?
(2) Do they talk to each other?
(3) ...About anything other than a man?

Clicking the link above will take you to a sad long list of all the movies that fail the test.  More movies need to feature women talking about the notions of how we position concepts.  I'd go to those movies.

I really appreciate stuff like this.

I imagine the meeting in which they discuss the design of the container, and some kind soul was like, "You know what would be so helpful?"

I wonder if it costs them more to print.  Or maybe it's a marketing ploy to lure in saps like me.  

It's not a homeless problem.

It's a greed problem.

What are we going to do about all these homeless people?

What are we going to do all about all of these wealthy people who don't recognize and rail against the absurdity of walking by someone laying on the sidewalk?

Radical motherhood.

When Dad was here last Sunday, he and I went with Anne to see Spotlight, the movie about The Boston Globe’s investigative reporting on rampant sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests – and the deliberate cover-up by powerful Catholic officials.

In that cloud of context, we drove home, and Anne ran some ideas by me for the prayer she was writing for that week’s coming Bible study.  Harry had invited Jeralynn Brown Blueford, whose son was killed by the police, to speak with us as we looked at the Biblical connections to Black Lives Matter.  (Ultimately, I wasn’t able to be there.  Ricky said it drew in a lot of people.  We’re looking for some place to resonate our griefs off of one another, I suppose.  And this badass mother – who could stand up and lead in that group.  Dang…)

Having lost a son herself, Anne wondered how she could both express solidarity with the mothers of so many sons murdered by the police but in no way claim to “understand what that feels like.”

Dad said (and Anne didn’t hear, so we didn't go on about it) that he could really see the connection there to Mary, another mother who lost a son.  

Such a good point, Dad.

Mary’s son was also executed within an unjust criminal justice system. The Sadducees, Jewish leaders themselves, often get blamed for Jesus’ death, but it seems to me to be more like men (ahem) scrambling for some semblance of power under the crushing weight of the self-evidently more (much more) powerful and oppressive Roman Empire.

(Police today are for sure a horrific part of the problem [and I’m afraid that this analogy might be anti-Semitic because of my pronounced ignorance about Jewish history], but White Supremacy has been the name of the game for a lot longer than the NYPD, and etc.  [As the Roman claim for dominion was certainly not Jewish-only antagonism.] Our country came to be under conditions not possible if not for those White guys’ already undeniable commitment to White supremacy.  It’s how we do.)

AND Mary was no naïve, whimpering victim.  No no.  Mary was our comrade.  Even at the very beginning of her pregnancy with Jesus, she boldly claimed that our God is a God who cares for the poor, the downtrodden.  She sings out: Our God is not a God who feels the need to assert that “Blue lives matter!”  Duh, they matter, but God’s immediate concern is not for those with the power to execute at will with impunity.  (God seeks and waits for them, gives unearned grace, and will rejoice at their turn toward God, but) God calls us to make the oppressors see that the lives of the oppressed matter (, too.).

And Mary said:  

“My soul glorifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed,
for the Mighty One has done great things for me—
holy is his name.
His mercy extends to those who fear him,
from generation to generation.
He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
remembering to be merciful
to Abraham and his descendants forever,
just as he promised our ancestors.”

I got an email from a dear friend recently who made a self-deprecating joke about her plan to be “a stay-at-home mom” next year.  Nuh-uh.

I like the model of motherhood that Mary offers us.  Mother as freedom fighter.  Motherhood as a liberation movement.  A couple days later I saw this piece on the shackling of pregnant women in prison – a piece published by MomsRising (!).

I’ve thought a lot about how God created us to be in family to help us to understand better, to give us some framework, for understanding God’s relationship with us.  God mothers us all.  (And God values the work associated with motherhood.  We're the ones who think it feminine and thus base or undignified or disempowering.)

Thinking about motherhood this way brought me back to one of the most compelling for me scenes in the passion.  Here’s John’s:

When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, “Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” 

Comrades, here you are. 

My child, here is my child.   Go out, as you are called to do, and help to restore God’s order, God’s (social) justice.

Black lives matter to God.

God cares about all of us as, for example, we care about one another in our family relationships. 

God worries about the way that we’ve designed “race” as a powerful construct by which we move away from God’s justice, by which we forget or ignore that God calls us all God’s children.  All lives matter.

God worries especially about those of God’s children who are poor, who are murdered, who are silenced.

And God calls those of us who are squandering, who are murdering, who are silencing, to remember that God worries about us, too.  God will rejoice when we give up our shit, nurture our create-ivity, and sing together.  Yeah duh all lives matter. Seriously duuuhhhhhhh.

God mothers us all.  God watches Black people getting gunned-down again and again (and again and again).

AND, WITH SCREAMING URGENCY:

Black lives matter to God.

Just like in Toy Story.

My printer has low toner, and every time I ask it to print something, it tells me so in its little screen's 1990s font.

The exclamation point comes up over the printer icon on the dock on the bottom of my desktop.

Clicking the printer icon opens a little window at the corner that tells me that the laptop is "Searching for the printer."

After about five minutes, it prints.

The five-minute wait is hilarious to me.  It's like the printer is saying, "No seriously, my toner is low.  You need to change the toner."  And I'm like, "I mean, I will soon, but it costs $50, and I know you can still print things."  It waits as if to tell me, "Nope."  But I tell it that I know that whatever it's printed last still came out black, not gray, so there's definitely enough toner for it to print out this letter of recommendation for E.  So I'm like, "I know you're bluffing"  And the printer's like, "No I'm not."  And it tries to wait me out, arms crossed over its chest, face frozen in a "I told you so" expression.

And then it's like, so begrudgingly, "Fiiiiiiiiiiiiine," and I can tell it's still mad, but I don't really care because I won. 

An official said to one of my incarcerated colleagues at a hearing about his suitability for parole:

"You need to focus less on helping other people and more on helping yourself."

strange dream

I dreamt last night that J at the prison gave me a book that was a compilation of fourteen narratives of crimes committed by men from this particular prison, past and present.

I sat down and read the whole thing that afternoon, and just a few minutes after I'd closed it up, I got a phone call from someone saying his name was Kelle [pronounced Kelly] Jackson and that he had served ten to fifteen years at this particular prison.  He said that when he'd been there, conditions had been horrible and that he'd heard that it had since become an easy place to do time.  He wondered if the state was going to give him some money to compensate for the time he had to do at this prison before it got better.

As I listened, my heart and mind raced because his name was really familiar.  I flipped the book open to the table of contents, dragged my finger down the whole first page, flipped to the second, and there was his name at the top: John "Kelle" Jackson.  (Later in the dream, I kept confusing Jackson with Johnson when I was telling the story to a few different people -- J and M from the prison, a few people who were at the party going on in the backyard of the house I grew up in while I sat reading in the front room [pronounced frunchroom].  I had to keep correcting myself.)

I said to Kelle Jackson, into the receiver of the non-cordless house phone, "Are you kidding me?  The violent crimes you committed, and you think you deserve compensation from the state?"  He corrected me.  He hadn't committed crimes plural, just one crime.  Later in the dream when I told the story to J and M, they confirmed what he's said, reminding me of the key points of the Kelle Johnson chapter I'd read earlier that day.

these obscene questions

Here's the thing.  Here's what it comes down to:

A White man does not get to call "obscene" an account, authored by a Black woman, of the emotional fallout of the ubiquity of sexual violence against girls and women.

A White man does not get to call a Black woman's hurt "obscene."

It's obscene for a man to censor women's unceasing trauma because that trauma is "obscene."  That trauma is perpetrated and perpetuated by men empowered by the very White supremacist patriarchy that also empowers this particular censoring White man.

did you hurt a woman today
i have to ask these obscene questions
the authorities require me to
establishimmediate cause
every three minutes
every five minute
severy ten minutes
every day.
-- Ntzoke Shange, from "with no immediate cause" 

blindspots

The other day, I was inside working with my incarcerated colleagues to set up our classroom, organize, finalize, etc.

I was making a sign for our wall, and I got up to walk over to the supply closet, absent-mindedly saying to myself, "Scissors.. scissors.. scissors."

One of the guys laughed at me, "Ellen, we ain't go no scissors."

Another jumped on, "Yeah, somebody pass me the knife!"

More totally justified laughing at my expense.

the cruelty of the vague no

While most likely obvious to many many people, in my recent learnings about setting up boundaries, I've come to an epiphany:

If the answer is "no," just say so.  Hedging the no-ness of the answer theoretically makes it "nicer," but really it just extends my anxiety and extends the waiting and/or confusion and/or humiliation of the receiver of the "no."

---

Exhibit A:
There was this woman who started working at the bridal shop months ago now.  After a few weeks, the folks in charge determined that she wasn't going to be a good fit.  No one was assigned responsibility for firing her, though, so no one let her know that she was fired.  She kept calling to ask when she was supposed to come in, and we kept telling her that she needed to talk to this person, to that person, to this other person, to that other person.  Finally, she was told, "There's not going to be a full-time job here for you," which was even then a vague firing since there was still the specter of a part-time job, a specter everyone knew wouldn't come alive since she had been clear from the beginning that she needed full-time work.

How shitty of us -- and I'm very much rolled in to that "us."  It must have been so maddening to not really know whether or not she should/could look for or accept another job.  And I imagine I'd be like, "Listen, I don't give a fuck either way.  Just tell me so I know."

We were too cowardly to fire her, so we let her wait around by the phone for weeks.  Shitty.

Exhibit B:
I know this dude who I find fairly attractive and cool and could be interested in dating.  And whenever we spent time together, I got the sense that he was interested, too, since he was real touchy-feely all the time.  Finally (after a few beers), I got the courage to ask him what was going on between us, and his eyes got wide while he nodded his head back and forth, "Umm... I don't know what you're talking about."

I call bullshit.

A few days later, we talked, and I told him that if he wasn't interested, he needed to stop touching me because it was very confusing and even kinda hurtful.  He went into a long-winded explanation of his interest/non-interest with lots of tangents and illustrations.  I left so confused, and a little humiliated, but mostly proud of myself for voicing my "what the fuck" and setting a clear boundary in the midst of his hazy talk talk talk.

---

In the first example, I was participating in the "I feel bad firing her" thing that kinda made me feel better than I thought being direct would have, but actually just made it so that my anxiety flared up a few times a week whenever she called.

In the second example, though it took me a while to realize, he wanted to be nice and not say outright that he's not interested, but really it just made me feel kinda skeezy.  In the end, it really wasn't that serious to me whether or not he was interested, and it was kind of embarrassing for him to so obviously tread so softly on my poor little feelings.

---

My mom told me this new thing she's doing wherein when someone asks her to do something or if she wants to go somewhere, and she doesn't, she just sorta tilts her head to the side and says, "Uh, no that doesn't work for me."  And that's it.  No explanation.  Just nope.

When someone says "nope" to me -- in all kinds of contexts -- it doesn't usually hurt.  Mostly it feels like, "K. Got it."  And then I don't really think about it again.  Because whatever.

That's the way to do it.

7 x 70

I was struck particularly, yesterday as I rode the bus to work, by the difficulty of finding something new to say about "Martin's dream and look at us now... no better," etc.  And yet it's worth saying every year.  Worth it, but it feels fucking futile.

Reports of police murders of unarmed People of Color keep coming and keep being infuriating.  And we should keep marching.

Mass shootings keep on happening.  And every time we say, "What's it going to take?," and "Something has to be done," and we keep pointing out, and we should, how coverage of White shooters leans toward mental illness and coverage of violence committed by People of Color condemns "terrorists" and "thugs."  I'd love to hear someone on the news call for moderate White people to speak out against White supremacist extremists; but we always hear how moderate Muslims need to take a stand.  And we should keep being pissed and saying so.

Though it usually doesn't get much new coverage, men perpetrate violence against women at outrageous rates.  And actually, not often enough do we make a big ol' deal about that -- which is why this interview about the rape of a woman by a bunch of teens in a playground is so gratifying.

CNN newscaster: She was drunk, combative, and bit a police officer.  What would you say about that? 

Badass: I would say that that's typical.  That individuals often talk about the woman.  We rarely talk about the individuals who actually committed the rape.  Those are the individuals we should be focused on right now... We need to focus on those five individuals who committed this heinous crime.  And what were the bad decisions that they made all throughout the day?  Had they been drinking?  Had they been smoking?  What would put something in someone's mind to make them think that that was okay?

So mundane and so exhausting and then so fucked up for being mundane and exhausting.

(And I want to be really clear that as a White person, I by no means claim the kind of exhaustion that I might be party to had I not this White body that keeps me safe from the same kinds of danger that I'm railing against.  I'm in no danger of being gunned down by a police officer who thinks I'm dangerous just by the look of me.  What a privilege.)

I sat on the bus wondering what was the point of it all, and I was struck with remembering the time when one of the apostles is sick and tired of being sick and tired and asks Jesus, "How many times am I supposed to forgive these fools? Seven times?"  And Jesus says, "Seven times seventy times."  -- Which I have to believe is a Biblical way of saying what I might call "a thousand billion trillion million times." Because it seems like he's saying so many times.  And it's 986 people that were killed by the police last year.  And that's more than 490.

How many times do we have to notice on Dr. King Day that White (patriarchal, homophobic, capitalist) supremacy has what seems like an impossibly firm hold on our lives? A thousand billion trillion million times.

for now

I've got two draft posts -- one on my trip home and one the warden's office (also a trip) -- but can't find the time to work on them.

In the meantime, check out the award I received last night from one of my incarcerated colleagues!