Time to Do Better

My friend Lillian and her friend are starting a website called Time to Do Better, and Lillian asked me to write something about being white. Why is it easier to write when something is "assigned"?

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Without a doubt, I grew up at-risk – of being a racist asshole. If not for a few patient, caring teachers who taught me to take seriously my own humanity and the humanity of others, I would have graduated and gone on to living a comfortable, upper middle-class life, absolutely ignorant to the historical and systemic injustices that afforded me such a privilege.

I’m not being facetious. A favorite thinker of mine, a man whose work one of those humanity-saving teachers asked me to read, is Paulo Freire, a teacher who worked with adult students living in poverty in Brazil. Freire posits that in an oppressive system, both the oppressed and the oppressors are dehumanized. In other words, when we passively accept or actively participate in the dehumanization of others, we make monsters of ourselves. We become less human.

As a white American, I occupy a space in the oppressor class. That doesn’t mean that I’m never presented with obstacles. Living with unearned privilege does not mean living without pain. It just means, for example, that I’m not afraid that I’m going to be killed if I get pulled over for a broken tail light because my reaching for my license and registration is mistaken for my reaching for my gun.

Another one of those teachers who was concerned with my humanity asked me to read the work of literary giant James Baldwin. In the biographical notes that open his collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin explains, “I love America more than any country in the world, and, for exactly this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Word.

The United States became a global superpower largely because folks who came to be known as white people deployed white supremacy for their economic and political gain. America may have been founded on the ideals of liberty and justice for all, but it was also founded on a lack of integrity because they didn’t really mean “all.”

European immigrants with the capital and chutzpa to “own” land used physical and emotional violence to force African and indigenous people to work for free and other, poorer European immigrants to work for very little, harvesting a product that made the “landowners” very wealthy. As the wealth of those who thought that they could also “own” humans accumulated, they became increasingly afraid of losing that wealth and therefore increasingly determined to quash any efforts by the people producing it to claim some of it for themselves. Thus came the campaign to codify “whiteness,” both legally and in the court of public opinion. African and indigenous people – already coping with the trauma of having their homes, languages, and traditional ways of life stolen from them – lost any hope of organizing in solidarity with the poor but now “white” people toiling alongside them who had chosen – out of economic and religious desperation, to be sure, but chosen nonetheless – to come to what we call America. In claiming their “whiteness,” those poor European immigrants, exploited though they may have been, at least had the legal rights to “own” themselves and their children.

And as time went on, “white” folks established a growing number of protections and opportunities for themselves. Like, for example, in 2018, white police officers – the professional descendants of slave patrols – can kill people of color with almost guaranteed impunity.

My own ancestors didn’t think they owned any humans. My dad’s ancestors came from Ireland during the famine about a decade before the American Civil War. My dad actually moved back to Ireland to marry my mom, and there they had Michael, Johnny, and Conor, my three older brothers; they came back to the US in the 1980s and had me and my little brother Neil.

That our ancestors were in Ireland when “whiteness” became a thing doesn’t change the fact that we live now in a country that was built for “white” folks like us.

My brothers and I grew up in a fairly quiet collar suburb on the southwest side of Chicago. We lived frugally, I thought, but all of us kids went to Catholic school and we never let two years go by without a family trip home to Ireland.

The first indication I saw that this country wasn’t built for everyone came when I was in high school. Before my family had moved back to the States, Conor, at nine weeks old, had contracted meningitis, which severely damaged his brain and left him with profound disabilities. As he approached age 21, my parents discovered that unless we were willing to send him off to live in an assisted living facility, he was going to be summarily exited from the public school system with no place to go and no right to any further public services in our state. At the time, Illinois was ranked 51st in the nation for services for adults with disabilities, behind all 50 states and Puerto Rico.

My mom, looking at having to quit the part-time job she went to when he was at school, sought out training in political advocacy so she could learn to lobby our representatives on Conor’s behalf. With her new-found comrades, she also worked to keep closed a state mental institution that was notorious in the disability community for abuse and neglect, and she enlisted 15-year-old me to collect petitions from my friends at school.

Looking back, I can see how daily life with Conor – who needs to be fed and dressed, who wears diapers and doesn’t speak or otherwise communicate but makes seemingly random loud noises, who drools constantly, and who has frequent seizures – instilled in me the understanding that all people’s dignity and humanity must be respected and preserved no matter the efforts involved. If I let my brother sit in his own shitty diaper, for example, what does that say about me, about my dignity and humanity?

In his graceful, unconventional teaching style, Conor taught me how to communicate with people in power as a proxy for him, and even more importantly, he taught me that people in power would, if they could, ignore his rights. Ableism and racism aren’t the same, but understanding the former, I think, increased my chances of being willing to understand the latter.

Eventually I became a teacher, too. But thankfully, I didn’t stop getting taught.

Jamarrio sat in the front row in my third period class. One day early in the year, we were reading from the first chapter of Night, Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, when I noticed Jamarrio throwing his book down and laying his head on the desk. For some lucky reason, instead of telling him, “Head up, hun,” my go-to gentle admonition, I crouched down and whispered, “What’s up?”

“I can’t read this,” he told me. I figured that he was having difficulty reading the text, and I “knew” that I needed to respond in a way that would de-escalate his frustration and prevent the situation from turning into an issue of defiance.

Before I could respond, though, he continued, “These people are going to be killed. They can’t stop it, and no one is going to stand up for them. I’m not reading it.” I was stunned into silence. Not a lack of skill nor discipline, the reason he “couldn’t read” this book was the depth of his empathy for the victims of the Holocaust and his unwillingness to be another complicit witness to their story.

Guiltily, I realized that I had made the racist assumption that as a black teenage boy he must be a struggling reader. I had narrowly avoided reducing him to a negative stereotype; he had saved me from myself by letting me in on his emotional experience, gently teaching me that he was a fully complex human being just like me.

Countless studies demonstrate that the descendants of European immigrants in the US, rich or poor, continue to benefit politically and economically from the idea of whiteness, even when we’re not particularly powerful or wealthy.

There is, after all, lingering political power in being descended from a human legally affirmed as human rather than from a human legally made property. Look at how the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was gutted in 2013, making it demonstrably harder for the descendants of Africans to participate in the US democracy.

There is, after all, lingering economic power in being descended from a human who was allowed to own himself (if not herself) rather than from a human who was legally owned. Look at redlining, the deliberate racial segregation of Chicago starting in the 1930s, which created the ghettoes where the descendants of Africans continue to live without the public resources allocated through the higher property taxes of historically white neighborhoods.

White folks in the US have resources afforded us by the European immigrants who used white supremacy to establish the way we do things in this country, and we bear the pain, whether we feel it or remain numb to it, of having our dehumanization – and the dehumanization of people of color – normalized.

Having power – or not having power – isn’t what makes us human. But having power and using it to dehumanize others, or having power and not using it to defend those without it from dehumanization, makes us monstrous.

trying

Under Drumpf’s administration, I have forgotten what I have to say. It’s like, he makes it too easy:

“Dumb fuck.”

There. Now I feel like I’ve adequately critiqued his foul ass.

I’m also feeling writerly paralyzation because so many other folks are already writing fantastic pieces about what’s going on, and I’ve been feeling like, the best contribution I can make is just to Like and Share.

So I’m sitting down tonight to come up with something because I like how I feel about myself when I’m writing. I like the feeling of trying to wrangle the right words onto the page.

At least a dozen people have told me that I should be writing about the work we’re doing at SQ, but it’s hard for me to get outside of it and see the threads of narratives available for the telling.

In the last year, I’ve edited books for two different friends. They make it look so easy. Five- or six-page Word document? Chapter. Ten chapters in a book. They just do it.

And I’m sitting here feeling like I’ve got nothing to say when I’m pretty sure do.

I’d like to start publishing some stuff online maybe.

There have been several instances in the last few months where I think I’ve smelt a tiny whiff of what it’s like to have my depression lifted off of me. For a long time I’ve been fine, but not able to get excited about anything. The first moment came when I was seeing Hamilton with my Mom in March. As I watched, I kept thinking about a clip from a PBS special about the show where you see Lin-Manuel Miranda bringing his draft to a two other guys, and they’re going through it to edit and build. And I’d get so excited and want to do that.

In no particular order, I want to write about

: How white people need to find a way out of their blind rage at reverse racism without losing face. White people need to figure out ways that help white people better understand historical context and systemic oppression without emasculating them. If that makes sense. White people can get so defensive, and then the conversation feels hopeless because they’re not going to back down because white supremacy intersects powerfully with misogyny and hypermasculinity! We gotta do something about our people for real.

: The implicit pedagogy of Creativity Explored. Our former director called it “non-confrontational advocacy.” We do what we can to bring attention to work created by artists with developmental disabilities and know that when folks experience the beauty of the artwork, they a teensy-bit unlearn ableist and patronizing ideas about folks with developmental disabilities. Sentence too long.

But I think it’s much more interesting to think about the pedagogy of the studio, the teachers’ approach to the artists they work with. The lack of curriculum. The variance between giving artists direct guidance, images to draw or paint, and giving artists the paint they need to create basically the exact same piece that they’ve been making for thirty years. Artists are encouraged as they develop their practice, and artists are supported if they decide not to “get better.” Teachers do what they can to make sure that artists can make informed choices and then follow the artists’ lead.  

Makes me think about how my Mom would always say that they needed to stop plotting to make Conor smarter in his annual IEP meetings. Like, he’s fine the way he is. Let’s just make sure he’s experiencing pleasure – delicious food, sunny days, loud music.

: I’m teaching a class at Mills, Introduction to the Humanities, and we just read Whiteness as Property and the first chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We’ve been talking about what it means to be human (and the students, graciously, are not rolling their eyes the way I kind of am at myself.) What struck me most this time around was the question of whether our humanity is innately individual or innately connected. I’m just now realizing that I think it’s the latter.

And for some silly reason, I’ve been thinking about how much I like the word “folks,” and how there’s not really such thing as a singular folk. Maybe there is, but it’s a horrible word.

Okay now, I’m going to go watch a few episodes of Insecure.

This is a real-life dystopian novel.

Instead of going to the Women's March, I went on a long hike with Jody, which feels like a more authentic choice for me. I very much value the protests and protestors and protesting going on, but I always feel kinda funny with the chanting and things like such as. Like a poser. A one-on-one prison abolition strategizing session is a more me kind of civic engagement.

I was telling Jody how I think education needs a public intellectual to come out with a New Jim Crow typa book that raises the level of the national conversation on education the way Michelle Alexander did criminal justice, and Jody said I should write it then.

That kind of writing sounds SO HARD, so I don't know about that, but I do have a lot to say about schools and prisons and the ways they operate together, and I really want to get into the habit of working out my thinking again.

So what you're likely to see here, Mom, in the coming weeks is lot of "Here's what I did today" drivel just so that I can get into the habit of writing regularly. I'm not so depressed at the moment, and when I'm depressed seems to be when the juices are really flowing.

For instance, here's something that happened today: Just now as I was arriving home from Bible study, I had to leave the car on the street because our landlord (and Andrew's new BFF) is charging his electric car in the driveway. And I thought to myself, "Well this is a funny place to be in life."

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Lately, I'm really into engaging white people on Facebook.

I'm tired now, and going to pour another glass of wine, but what I'd like to write in the next couple of days is what I would like to say in response to my cousin's abrasive libertarian posts.

It takes a lot of practice, arguing with white people does, because they hit you with this "common sense" (read: status quo white supremacist thinking) that you have to unravel on the spot. 

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.

There's no such thing as "reverse racism."

I can't handle it. Motherfuckers, it doesn't exist. Yes, there can be prejudice harbored by a person of color and directed towards a white person, but prejudice is different from racism. Racism involves both prejudice and power. It's a systematic privileging of some and disadvantaging of others. I like the way that Beverly Tatum explains it in her first chapter of Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? She uses this anecdote:

"I once asked a White teacher what it would mean to her if a student or a parent of color accused her of being racist. She said she would feel as though she had been punched in the stomach or called a "low-life scum." She is not alone in this feeling. The word racist holds a lot of emotional power. For many White people, to be called racist is the ultimate insult. The idea that this term might only be applied to Whites becomes highly problematic for after all, can't people of color be "low-life scum" too?

Then she goes on to discuss the problems that come with throwing around the word racist to mean all sorts of things other than what it is, which is systematic "prejudice plus power."

I know lots of white people -- and not-white people actually, not to say it's White and Other -- who equate racism with "mean," and so are sure that they're not racist. They're good people. But they are racist. If you participate, whether actively or complacently, in a system that advantages some and disadvantages others based on their perceived races, then you're racist. If you actively work against that system, then you're anti-racist. There's no neutral. That doesn't mean that all racists are jerks, but it does mean that we're dealing with a lot more racists than we want to acknowledge.

Like this schumck, responsible for a lot of McCain's campaign ads:

Good advertising men are almost always mischiefmakers at heart, the sort who don't mind a little confrontation and who revel in a bit of controversy. And so Davis is wistful at the missed opportunities of the McCain campaign. "I made a list once, which no one will ever see, of all the reasons that my hands were tied on this campaign," he says. "And I've never had a list this long." One of his biggest struggles, Davis says, was to come up with negative spots against a historic, groundbreaking candidate without stepping on taboos. "One of the big hands that I felt was tied behind my back was [that] so many things — like [Obama's record on] crime — you would logically do were perceived as 'Oh, we can't do that. That was playing the race card,' " he says, adding that the campaign created a whole series of crime attacks against Obama that were never aired. "Reverend Wright? 'Oh, can't do that; they'll say we are playing the race card.' [William] Ayers? For the longest time, 'Oh, can't do that. We're playing the race card.' "

Davis says that concern about race played a major role in the entire aesthetic of McCain's ads. The photographs of Obama that the ads used, for instance, which often showed Obama elongated and smiling, were carefully selected, he recalls. "We chose them with only one thing in mind, and that is to not make them bad pictures because bad pictures would be seen as racist," Davis says. "How many shots in their ads did they use a John McCain [photo] looking decent and smiling?" He says the campaign also agonized over the music in the ads, paying special care not to play drum-heavy tracks that could be seen as an African tribal reference. "We were held to a totally different standard," he says.

Geez, excuse Barack Obama for having dark skin!? God forbid we have to give attention to whether or not we're indulging in the stereotypes that contribute to the socially unjust achievement gap in our public schools, to the disproportionate number of black and Latino men in our prisons, to the despicable degree of correlation between race and income levels in our country. I mean, if Obama could have just been white then Fred Davis, could have chosen from all of the cool drum music that that beautiful "country" of Africa has to offer! It would have been so much more convenient! Give me a fucking break.

It's like he wants to say, "We couldn't even talk about how a black President would let all those black people commit all the crimes they're predisposed to do with impunity! Unfair! We have to act like that's not true, but he's black!"

I do realize that jumping to that conclusion is probably just as problematic as the racial stereotypes that I'm guessing he'd like to trade on. (And I could probably come up with some more problematic assumptions about what's on that lengthy list of his.) That said, I really wish that our racists could own their racism, know that we're not calling them "low-life scum," and move into some productive, action-oriented learning about how people of color are treated by our world and how we can create a world that serves all of us more fairly. Like, immediately I'd like that to happen. I'm not known for patience.

"But without heads!"

While perusing the racks (That's what she said.) at GAP on Friday afternoon, Alex pointed out to me that these two mannequins are dressed exactly the way Jess and I dress. Jess is on the right; I'm on the left. It's sort of uncanny, actually.

How much more yuppie can we get.

White people talking about race? Weird.

During the school day today I had to have private conversations with two different white students who were really worked up, borderline angry, at how "the African Americans" were responding to Obama's election.

"How come if a black person is elected, they can make a big deal about it, but if I made a big deal about a white person being elected, that would be racist?" one of them asked me.

"How come right after they announced his victory, the TV stations only interviewed African-American people? Why can't white people have an opinion?" the other student asked.

In each case, I talked to the student about how it was okay for them to feel frustrated at what feels like a pressure for white people to not talk about race as a way of avoiding the "racist" label. I get that. These kids go to a school with a fairly diverse student population, and they don't want to act like everyone's the same. And they shouldn't. That's not the way anti-racism works. Anti-racism isn't colorblind, and it's not non-confrontational. These kids' ideas were racist, but these are not "bad" kids. Racism and big-jerk-ness are not the same. Their awareness of an oppressive forced silence is legitimate, even if their notions of "reverse racism" are not. And yet their lack of knowledge about the ways that racism works, and their lack of satisfactory vocabulary for describing their hurt feelings, led them to say things that made them, for sure, look like big jerks.

I finished the school day with the hopeful thought that Obama's election may really serve as a catalyst for many more honest, personal, and productive discussions of race and racism like the ones I had with these students.

Here in Champaign County,

we operate on an eye-for-an-eye justice system. (Or ear-for-an-ear, I guess, in this case?)

An Illinois judge has sentenced a man to listen to 20 hours of classical music as punishment for playing hip-hop music too loudly out of his car stereo. The judge offered to reduce Andrew Vactor's $150 fine down to $35 if Vactor agreed to spend 20 hours listening to works by Brahms, Beethoven, Chopin and other classical composers.

Champaign County Municipal Court Judge Susan Fornof-Lippencott claimed that her decision did not imply that listening to classical music qualilfies as punishment, but by making Vactor to listen to music he might not prefer, he would feel the same way the public did when he blasted rap music from his car stereo.

Um, what. Say it ain't so.

why is this not a more popular song

and why, when I dance like that now, do people think I look stupid? I look good.

This is a good song because it's a break-up song, and it's like, "Eh, ain't no thing." And I like that. No remorse.

why is this a song

"Be more constructive with your feedback, please!"

Why is the intersection of White people and hip hop so funny? "Did Steve tell you that perchance? Steve!"