gratitude walk

A friend from church posts photos on FB every morning of his "gratitude walk."  Even though it sounds self-explanatory, I keep meaning to ask him what that's all about.

My mood the last month or so has been foul.  I'm going to go to the doctor, but I'm also going to try to do something I know works: remembering to be grateful.

(1) It doesn't matter that my finger is in this photo because it takes me ten minutes to walk to this beach and I do so several times a week.  And it's warm enough to lay in my bathing suit, but there's always a breeze, so I don't get sweaty.  (And I am a sweaty person.)

(2) Most of my time at work is spent with other women that I really like.  And a good enough amount of the time is spent putting on cool/nasty dresses and dickin around.

(3) My new friend Anne is 74, so wise, so funny, and has pink walls in her living room.

(4) I discovered this store in my neighborhood.  It's the Chinese, way better version of The Container Store (or I'm assuming because I've never been there.)  So much symmetry, and so much of things fitting exactly in their right places.  Peace.

(5) Salads in jars.  Put the dressing at the bottom and stuff that won't get soggy on top of it.  Then, when it's time to eat it, shake the shit out of the jar and the dressing gets on all of it.  Game changer for me.  For the last seven years, I've eaten a turkey sandwich, pretzels, and two apples for lunch because they pack easy.  

(6) Jess helping me to figure out what to wear also demonstrates that I am known.  

I really like to feel known.

purposed

“So, just so you know, this is a purposed thing we’re doing.”

That’s the last thing B, my colleague who is incarcerated, said to me last week as we got to the top of the yard – the point where I keep going up the hill and he veers off toward the cellblocks. 

When he started our program in 2009, he told me, he’d brought his written proposal to the chaplain and asked her to pray over it with him. 

Notes from a graduation ceremony in prison

One of the most overwhelming experiences I’ve ever had.  I had to keep telling myself, “I’ll just write about it.  I’ll just write about it.  I’ll just write about it.” As if the capacity to get it all out into language could have anything to do with the capacity to make sense of that experience.

My notes, in italics. 

1.  SEX/VIOLENCE

     -------------------

the comeback underdog

As we waited for the ceremony to begin, J, a man I know who is a writer, came in and sat next to me.  We got to talking about the nature of doing our work in the context of a political landscape where Donald Trump seems to be the current winningest communicator.  J explained to me: Sex and violence are always going to win the attention of the American public.  But we also really love to root for the underdog.  That’s us.  The underdog.  We just gotta communicate that better.  How?

2. LWOP’s circle of influence

In the same conversation, I told J that I was having a hard time wrapping my head around offering GED prep to men who are never going to be released (not all of our students, but some).  I told him that I was rethinking what it meant for education to be instrumental – outside of the economic and political ways we typically think about it.  He insisted that I was wrong, that I wasn’t considering the LWOP’s (Life Without Parole) circle of influence.  Just because he isn’t getting out, doesn’t mean his homies aren’t. Doesn’t mean his kids can’t be moved by his example.  He told me about a guy he knew, LWOP, who was taking college classes and whose son was incarcerated at another institution.  When his son read about his dad’s accomplishments in the prison newspaper, he quit gang-banging and went back to school, too.  Pretty cheesy example, but still.  Yeah, I gotta think about that. 

3. “guys in blue”

A jazz band (made up of musicians who are incarcerated) was playing up at the side of the stage.  A White guy, some prison staff member, walked over to one of the guys and said something to him.  One of the guys in the band came to the microphone on the stage and said, “Guys in blue, we gotta return to our cells for count.”

Somebody was missing, so all of the guys in the prison were being sent back to their cells so that they could be counted and accounted for.

Guys in blue.  Fifty or so of the men in that space were wearing black caps and gowns over their prison blues.  They stripped them to go back to their cells.

M, who was sitting with us, reassured us, “Don’t worry.  We won’t be gone for long.  They’ll probably find him.  If we don’t come back, I’ll see you Thursday.”

“Guys in blue.”  That language.  I’ve only ever heard prison staff refer to the men as “inmates.”  Not sure what to make of the staff member passing off the voice of the command to one of the men.  But not sure what I would have made of the staff member voicing the command himself and using “inmates.”

4.  “Hopefully, he’s alive.  Don’t forget we are up in here.”

As the last of the men trickled out, one of the family members, a Black woman, stopped the White staff member who’d passed off the command, “Why do they have to leave?” While he was like, “Ma’am, security measures, inmates’ locations, mumble mumble,” she just looked at him.  Then, with him still standing there, she addressed the others sitting near her, a whole bunch of other Black women, “When they find him, hopefully he’s alive.”  She turned away from the staff guy, “Don’t forget we are up in here.”

Sandra Bland had been found dead in her cell less than two weeks before this ceremony.

The White guy stood silent for a couple more awkward seconds, then walked away.

5.  “You’re a brave woman.”

While the men were off being counted, we were encouraged to get some fresh air, have some coffee.  (Oh yeah, the coffee tasted so much like chicken broth.  It was uncanny.)  We milled about.  I noticed one of the guards was pregnant.  One of the visitors, as she walked past her, told her, “You’re a brave woman.”

Yeah.  What?  Need to think more about pregnancy inside a prison.

6.  color guard’s tucked in shirts

The men came back.  The ceremony started with a colors ceremony.  That means the presentation of the US and Californian flags.  Four guys from a Vietnam vets group did it.  All the usual fanfare: the orders, the synchronous marching, holding the US flag a little higher.  And all four of them had tucked their prison shirt into their prison pants.  What.

7.  “forward thinking prison,” “we have a lot in common,” “empower the people that are within our custody to give them the tools”

Lines from the keynote speaker, a local sheriff, patting this prison on the back – and likening it to his own jail.  As if somehow it’s possible to be both an instrument of incarceration and of paternalistic “salvation.”  This “we give the tools” talk is common in most schools, though, and I’m sick of it.  Blahhhhhhhhh.

Another way to think about what happens in education spaces is that authentically humble educators listen, learn, and tap into the “funds of knowledge” that exist in the communities they serve (not my phrase – Moll’s).  Or, like they say in Teaching as a Subversive Activity:

Contrary to conventional school practice, what [educate] means is that we want to elicit from students the meanings that they have already stored up so that they may subject those meanings to a testing and verifying, reordering and reclassifying, modifying and extending process.  In this process, the student is not a passive “recipient;” he (sic) becomes an active producer of knowledge.  The word “educate” is closely related to the word “educe.”  In the oldest pedagogic sense of the term, this meant drawing out of a person something potential or latent. 

8. “then a supporter of mine when I ran for supervisor,” “campaigned on redemption,” “we were part of that five,” “Bobby Kennedy’s daughter”

Speaker moved on from saving the graduates before him to ignoring them for the sake of just straight up bragging about his own self.  How progressive his jail is. (Oxymoron.) Bobby Kennedy’s daughter omgggg sat on the panel that would ultimately decide whether or not his jail gets some big award.

9. “not just a GED, a high school diploma”

At his jail, the “inmates” can earn high school diplomas, not just these piddling GEDs, he says to a gathering of forty or so men who are beaming with the pride of having earned their GEDs.

Dumdum.

10.  “for us to use your time in the most productive way”

For US to use YOUR time.  Good god. 

Maybe it’s because by this point in the talk, he was pissing me off real bad, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to liken this thinking to the thinking of plantation owners who used the labor of the people they enslaved for their purposes.  I mean, the owners’ use of the enslaved people’s time was productive.  They got so so rich.  And they deeply embedded our system of White supremacy such that as a country, we still, apparently, aren’t outraged at theu se of largely Black and Brown (and poor, and addicted, and mentally ill) labor for “our” profit. 

11.  “Somebody get this guy a baby to kiss,” “Hey, they have hearts, too, okay?”

M, my incarcerated colleague’s whispered comments as the speech rolled out on top of us.

12.  letting family in

This was good.  The speaker went on and on about how important it is for the leaders of carceral institutions to be mindful of the effects of incarceration on families.  As he did so, M whispered to me that the warden at this prison had recently announced that this would be the last graduation ceremony to which family members of graduates could be invited.  And that warden is sitting up there on the stage right next to the podium.

13. reduced phone charges by 70%: “Did he just call us poor?”

Speaker brags about his work to reduce the cost of phone calls for prisoners by 70%, so that the system wasn’t getting rich off of “poor families.”  Okay he does have a point there, that’s some useful (if incremental) reform. 

M leaned over to me and said, with a wry smile,“Did he just call us poor?”

14.  Grey Poupon

Speaker said, jokingly, if it was up to him Grey Poupon would be served in jail chow halls.  Huh?

15. “I’m living as a memorial to him,” “I love you guys, and I’m proud of you,” sitting together, “I apologize to everybody”

Cut to the speech by the valedictorian of the daytime GED class.  I was struck particularly by his dedication of this accomplishment to the memory of his victim, for whose lost life he expressed great remorse.  “I’m living as a memorial to him,” he said.  Dang.  I had a hard time moving past that as he went on to congratulate his peers, to apologize to society.

As we listened to his speech, I looked around and realized that almost every guy in the room who is a part of our evening program was sitting within a few feet of us.  We never talked about sitting together, we just were.  Sometimes, it’s hard to feel like much of a coherent community since we only get to meet twice a week, we’re separated into to classrooms, there’s so much work to be done, etc.  Looking around and seeing us all together really made me wonder.

16.  print keyboards

After the ceremony, L, one of our students, came to me to give me some feedback as he knows that we’re in the middle of planning next semester.  We really need typing practice, he told me, and I know we can’t get computers, so is it possible for you to print out a picture of a keyboard so that we can practice with paper copies?  I know it’s not ideal, he said.

Fuck.

17.  team leader

The same guy, L, suggested that we need to offer some student leadership opportunities.  He knows he can motivate some of his classmates to get together and study outside of class, he said, but it would be way easier if he were somehow “officially” endowed by us with some role, like “team leader.”  Genius.

One of the most exciting things about this work, so far, is how much brilliance and how many deep relationships there are for us to build from.  I know that these things exist, too, in every high school classroom (and every other classroom), but there’s something  particularly… something… happening in this peer-led space.

Come. On.

Last week at our planning meeting, the guys were telling me that because of lawsuits, the prison now has to make condoms available to the men.  They said that they started seeing bins of them showing up places, that they're emptying pretty quickly.  Each guy is allowed to have three on him at a time.

BUT

If caught using one of the three condoms he is allowed to have, he receives a 115 (disciplinary write-up).  And if even caught with one of the packets opened, he receives a 115.

Not gonna apologize for watching The Bachelorette.

Kasey and Eric visited!  And you know that they are good friends because we were able to be very real with one another about wanting to make dinner at home and watch the whole season of The Bachelorette.

That's true love. ( I mean, between me and them, not between them.  They wouldn't even let me throw them a surprise wedding.)

Mostly we just laughed so much because of things like the guy saying, "I see the world through the eyes of a child.  I have the heart of the warrior... And a gypsy's soul."  And talked about how much they say "connection."  And giggled about how we could replace connection with erection: Always with the, "My connection with Kaitlyn is so strong right now."

Okay, but.

So at the end of the third episode, which is really the second week they've been there, they're all at the pre-rose-ceremony cocktail party.  (Don't I feel ridiculous for that pre-rose-ceremony thing.  Whatever.  I'll watch shitty + patriarchal and racist TV.  I'm of this world, you know.)

Kupah, one of the three Black guys left after the first week, says to one of the other Black guys left that he hasn't really had any conversations with Kaitlyn, while it seems like other guys have had multiple.   He says, "I don't know what she sees in me," while he makes his eyes big like, "You know what I mean?" and gestures to his face.  It's like, "Checking in, is she into you?  Maybe she's not into Black guys..."

It cuts right to an interview with him where he says, "I don't want to be here any longer than I have to be if, IF, if I'm the minority guy that fills the quota."  He says he want to know if there's a "connection," soon, and if not, he needs to go home.

Makes sense to me.  Except the part about wanting to be there to participate in this horrible, bizarre process.

So when he gets a chance, he straight up asks her.  "Do we have a connection[/erection]?" As soon as he says it, her eyes widen, then narrow, and her mouth gets small.  "Do you think you've even put yourself out there?" Rhetorical question.  She's pissed.  She complains that she felt like he didn't even notice her on their group date that day.

Um, it's a fucking group date.  You're the only woman, and you're with a group of ostensibly straight dudes.  And you're on The Bachelorette.  And you're thinking that it's possible for any of them not to have noticed you?  Dumdum.

She's like, "You were so into boxing" (which is the date she took them on).  He's like, not really, but we were being trained by Leila Ali.  I mean, that's kinda cool.  The Leila Ali thing seemed lost on Kaitlyn.

She says she didn't know that he wasn't into boxing, and she swears that she would have never made him do that if she thought it would make him uncomfortable.

I call bullshit on that since all of the dates involve the guys making idiots of themselves, mostly by reappropriating various cultural practices from People of Color (e.g. a rap battle, Mariachi singing, sumo wrestling.)  -- That way, the jokes gets to be both on the guys who are inevitably shitty at what they're being asked to do and on People of Color for their weird ways.  Hilarious!

He says that this is the most fulfilling interaction with her, and he seems genuinely relieved to know that she's noticing him.  She's pissed, though. Arms crossed, leans back, crosses legs, and sits motionless.  Lips pouted out.  

He's trying to smooth over the situation, and he really seems like he thinks they've worked out that yes, she dates Black guys.  He says, "There are things that are unfortunate. There are some things that I have to think about.  I don't want to be here because I look good on the roster of men that you still keep around."  

Her jaw clenches. No blinking.

He's leaning forward, talking with his hands in a way that makes him look extremely eager to chalk this all up as a misunderstanding. Finally, he's like, "Why am I here?"

Shrug, eye-roll, shakes head, while she sputters something defensive about how I did like you.  And there's "nothing more to it." (She shoulda said, "I don't even see color!")

He's frustratingly forgiving: "No, I appreciate that.  I just, I didn't come here to waste anybody's time.  I mean, I totally didn't."  He tells her that when I saw her last season, he thought she was "a real person, like 100." (Hello, Black Language.)  

She interrupts, maybe not understanding that he's in the middle of complimenting her. "You thought?  Or you still think?"  She tells him that he "came out of the gates questioning" her.  Honestly, she tells him, "I felt a connection until right now."  She shifts head on her shoulders in a "na-na-na-na-poo-poo" way as she avoids eye contact with him until "right now." "I didn't know you questioned me so much." Calm, cold.  Stark contrast with his animated movements.  He's been working the facial expression: showing sincerity, surprise, vulnerability, concentration.  He's listening.  

He tells her he thinks it would be dope ( <-- a="" about="" alled="" and="" asks="" bl="" can="" do.="" e="" ended="" fist-bump="" he="" him="" href="http://democracychronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/obama-fist-bump.jpg" if="" it.="" more="" nbsp="" needs="" or="" pound="" she="" target="_blank" tells="" they="" think="" time="" to="" together.="" up="">by mainstream media

, traditionally in BL it's giving daps.)

He leaves her alone to think about it.  She vents to the camera, "Kupah has some questions, and he kinda questioned me, and it set me off."  Why does she think that she is above being asked questions?  He's not accusing her of anything, just asking if she likes him maybe a little.  But because he's asking it in the context of knowing that the show gets heat for not casting enough People of Color, it's perceived as an attack.  Classic example of White fragility.  (Of course, she's not necessarily conscious of this context, or of how it's informing his frustration or her response; doesn't make it less true.)

Cut to an interview with one of the other guys, a White guy.  He's explaining it to us: "When Kupah speaks, he sometimes doesn't filter." (Classic denigration of a BL speaker.)

Cut to Kupah processing the conversation.  He's telling the other guys how it went down: "She wasn't looking at me, like, she was looking down, which sucks, man.  I flew, like, 3,000 miles."  As he's talking, we get to see that she's overhearing.  When he gets to the part about her not looking at him, she gets up with purpose and strides over to him.  "You don't have a quiet voice, I'll tell you that." (White person dismaying that Black people are so loud? Check.) She walks up, arms swinging, grinning, "Can I talk to you for a second?"  Kupah and all the other guys are like, "Wah?"

Kaitlyn: "I can tell you're upset, so I wanna..." 

Kupah: "I'm not upset," 

Kaitlyn: "You're clearly upset."

She pulls him into a private room and tells him that he's gotta go home.  In a bold move, he takes a breath, looks at her, and says, "I don't want to go."  

Ka: "It's week one, and we're already in this position. Like, this is bad."  

Ku: "I don't think it's bad."  

Ka: "No I'm telling you it's bad."

Ku:  "I mean, I hear you, but I don't think it's bad.  I think that people need to figure things out.  I'd rather have this conversation with you now than have it in two months."

Now this is interesting.  As a woman who has a hard time holding boundaries with men, I admire her.  She's like, "Nah, I'm in charge of me."  But not really.  Because he's trying, it seems, to work out whether or not she's up for an interracial relationship, something worth talking about, and she doesn't get it.  She's definitely not comfortable with a Black man doing anything but flattering her.

Eventually, he acquiesces, and we get back to Kaitlyn's interview: "This is the first week, and it's the time to be positive, and get to know each other, and see the good, and the fact that Kupah just kept questioning me, and arguing with me... So I had to send him home."  

Kept questioning?  Kept arguing?  He asked if you had a "connection" or not.  And then he tried to explain why it mattered to him to know that, and you flipped your shit.  White folks have such a hard time listening to people of color express their experiences with racism.  She feels attacked, but objectively, she hasn't been. (I think the ol' "foot on my neck" metaphor is helpful here.  White supremacy keeps a foot on the neck of People of Color, and when People of Color are like, "Ouch," White supremacy is like, "Stop attacking me!")

Whenever somebody gets sent home, they interview them out in the driveway, and they say things like, "Dang it!" and "Best of luck!" So cut to Kupah in the driveway getting interviewed, and he's pissed.  "You already know I'm not a part of this thing, man.  I'm not about this thing.  This is bullshit."  He's shaking his head.  He's clearly talking directly to the crew, "I think that your process works for some people, like Jared and Cupcake, you know what I'm saying? But not me. So come on, man!"  That "You know what I'm saying?" Jared and Cupcake.  Two White-ass White guys.  This show is inherently racist, and he's looking for affirmation that he's not crazy for noting that a Black guy is not going to "win" the Bachelorette.  No such affirmation comes.  He "uggghhh"s loudly.

Cut back to Kaitlyn being interviewed.  She's turned around, though, biting her nails and looking out the windows, going, "Ohmygod! Ohmygod!"  Hands up in front of her face like she's scared, peeking out, eyes wide.

Kupah: "Just ask me the questions, and let me go home.  Please, please give me that.  Just ask me the questions, and let me go home."  His hands are out in supplication. "What? I'm upset that I didn't get a rose.  I'm upset she sent me home."  His eyes are rolling, and he's letting this all out like, "ohmygod what do I have to sayyyyyyyyyy to get you to leave me aloneeeeee!?"

Kaitlyn: Flashes a look of terror/rage at the crew, and says, "If he touches..." as she gets up and runs out to the driveway.

This shit is so hard to watch.  At this point, Kasey, Eric, and I are sitting at the kitchen table, stunned.  "A thesis could be written about this episode," Eric says.  

Kupah's intensely engaged with someone from the crew:  "I lose immediately.  Immediately, I lose.  I lose."  I want to know what he said before that, because I don't think he's talking about losing on this fucked up game show.  Not when he's in the middle of filming a situation that he has to know can and will be edited and framed for a White supremacist audience that fears for the safety of a pretty, innocent White woman involved with a scary, violent, hypersexual Black man (He kept on talking about how hot she is...).

The episode ends there, not as they usually do with a rose ceremony, thereby further heightening the drama of the moment.

The next episode opens with his loud "ugggghhh" from the last one.  Primitive dude, huh? (WTF.)

Kupah's pleas for the crew to get what they need from him and let him go are interspersed with various White guys calmly assessing the situation:

Ku: "I'm upset right now. You should know that."

WG: "Kupah's been having a hard time with the process." 

Ku: "Are you kidding me?"

WG:  "Kupah just needs to walk away."

Ku: "Just ask me the questions and let me go."

WG:  "Kupah just needs to let it go."

Ku: "I go home in three days.  Now I'm the Black dude who's a sucker."

It's so fucked up.  So hard to watch.  And the gaze of the show is urging us to conclude, like the rest of the cast, that Kupah is just so out of control wink wink angry Black man wink wink.  

Kaitlyn comes out into the driveway (presumably just after her, "If he touches..." Now what in the fuck indication has he given that he's going to hurt someone? Scary Black man.) She's walking gingerly, holding up the edge of her glimmering evening gown. 

Under his breath, he says, "Oh my god.  What the fuck."

Kaitlyn storms up: "I'm sorry, but I can hear you screaming from inside, and I just want to know what's going on."  

He's got one hand in his pocket, the other holding his drink. His head is down, and his ear is up so he can listen to her without looking at her.  

Ku: Takes a breath.  "Just give me a second.  I didn't know you were coming."

Ka: "Well ,I was in there doing an interview, and I could hear you yelling."

Ku: "Yeah, I was yelling.  I'm sorry about that."  

Ka: "No, don't put on a different act. What was that about?"

Ku: "It's not a different act."

Ka: "This is not right.  Don't get in other people's faces. I don't know what's going on, but I heard you yelling."

Now she's talking with her hands.  He's motionless.  I'm like, "Oh my gosh how the fuck is he being so fucking tactful right now."

Ka: "Just accept this because now you're creating this, this uncomfortable situation.  And nothing is going to change right now. Nothing."  Real condescending-like.  As if it seems to her that this Black man doesn't know that he's supposed to take his nationally-televised humiliation (not for being sent home, but for being made into a caricature) the way she wants him to. 

He's swaying a bit, looking away, like this can't last forever.  Then he stops moving, locks eyes with her, and goes, "I won't yell anymore.  I promise."

Then he smiles like this.  (It's a two-part smile.)

She sighs an "Okay," and walks away.  Immediately he whips his head to the left like this:

That's the best part.

The camera's on him, and he goes, "We're gonna whisper now! Whiiisper! Whisssper!"  Clearly, he's flipped to like, Ohhmygod this shit is ridiculous."  He says some other mostly intelligible, sexist shit, then he gets into the back of a minivan with his drink still in hand.

Cut to final interview with Kaitlyn on the subject.  She was angry, and then even more angry, she said.  And now she's sad.  And this morning she was happy because she has such a good group of guys.  But "when people walk out of here insulting me or questioning my intentions," that really kills her. (He never insulted her or questioned her intentions.  He did ask if she felt a connection with him.  Real stupid Bachelorette-y question, but neither an insult nor a dig at her intentions.)  

She's crying: "Sometimes you learn a lot about a person in thirty seconds.  That's the scary part about this, you know, like, that just came out of nowhere."

"Scary," that's the clincher for me.  That was "scary."  She had reason to be afraid.  Because a Black man made mention of the fact that it's possible that he was chosen for the cast in order to appease the critics who have been pointing out for years the lack of People of Color on the show.

--- 

THIS IS WHAT ANTI-BLACK RACISM LOOKS LIKE TODAY.  Soooo much of the time.  Nobody says the n-word.  Nobody even says, "race."

But there's not a whole lot different, ideologically-speaking, from the way that Kupah's story was told to the way that Emmett Till's story was told among White folks in Mississippi fifty years ago.  Black man is dangerous.  Black man wants to have sex with White woman.  White woman is scared.  Black man must be put in his place.  I certainly don't take lightly the differences in the ways that this ideology played out in practice in Kupah's case versus Emmett Till's case.  I'm just saying that we're not living in a fucking post-racial society.

---

Okay, I've just been wanting to tell someone about that.  I can't believe how much time I spent writing this.

I'm only watching Star Trek from now on.