Florsheims and Freedom

Two weeks ago, I flagged a taxi to DC's Union Station from my office near Eastern Market. The past few months, I have made a point of talking with my taxi drivers about Uber, the increasingly popular ride-sharing service that is outlawed in some states and celebrated in others. Since this cab was uber-free, I asked the driver about himself and his day and DC. Luckily, he was eager to share.

As we drove from Eastern Market to Union Station, he explained that driving the cab was mostly his hobby. After working a few decades in a blue collar job, he retired. According to him, as long as he was working, his health prevailed. Half-a-bottle of Crown Royal in the evenings and a bottle of wine with dinner, he drank that daily. His doctors, though they never condoned it, couldn't find much wrong with him.

After he stopped working, that was when time caught up and age started to set-in. Without work, the joints began to hurt and the headaches would rumble and the colds were reluctant to leave. The doctors, finally, could tell him something about his health. They gave him a cane to help him walk and advised him to stay away from the Crown; the wine, of course, was good for digestion.

He told me, however, that he didn't start to recover until he began to work again. The taxi, four hours a day for five days each week, was all he needed to reclaim some of his vitality and to let him drink whiskey on occasion.

When I asked where he was from, he said, "Down there in North Carolina, you know, ways outside of DC."

"Raleigh?" I asked instinctively.

"No, no. Raleigh was the city for us, same with Charlotte. I'm from out in farm country, my family been owning a farm down there for years."

I asked him why he headed up North, up to DC. He said that he didn't at first. Initially content to work in North Carolina, to inherit the family's treasure, he was persuaded by the sharp suits and clean shaves of Yankee-influenced friends. He remembered being sweaty, warm, dirty in his work, and seeing friends return for a short visit -- remembered thinking to himself that he had to head up past Virginia and get him shoes and a suit like that.

He did just that, arrived in DC, laid down roots, and began to work -- eventually buying the suit and kicks he wanted.

Thinking about this taxi driver, his journey from North Carolina to DC, his belief in the power of spirits in recreation and responsibility, comparisons with Wilkerson's Warmth of Other Suns were obvious. These individuals, like this taxi driver whose name regrettably escapes me, didn't know they were making history. They didn't have any awareness of a movement, a mass migration, a shift in the anthropological tectonics of the United States.

They were simple, humble, with a penchant for good times and laughter. They wanted to have something more and that "something" was often more particular than it was abstract. At moments, the Great Migration was more about Florsheims than it was about freedom. As my driver said, moving North was worth it just so he, "wouldn't smell like hog shit."

Underscoring that point, I mentioned to the driver that I was reading Wilkerson's text and talked for a few seconds about the stories it remembers. He was unfazed, unmoved. "Great Migration," as a term, a concept, a huge alteration to the American landscape, wasn't something he knew.

"Migration, huh? Interesting," he paused.

And after a second looked in the rear view mirror and said, "Imma let you out here, son. If we get in the cab line it will only run the meter on you."

Actively Healing and Preventing Soul Wounds

I have discussed the need for self-reflection and self-education before any effective action can be taken to end inequalities in our schools and really our world. Angela Valenzuela’s essay “Uncovering Internalized Oppression” gives insight into how this self-work translates into practical skills within our classrooms.

Inequalities left unaddressed in our schools and society manifest themselves in many ways. Valenzuela focuses on one of these manifestations in which a person of color leaves “soul wounds” on another person of color by inflicting pain onto them through the use of negative stereotypes created by the dominant (white, affluent, male) group.  This is not simply when one child picks on another, it goes much deeper than that simple viewing. It shows that the child has already started to internalize the oppressions that they experience. Unfortunately, most educators do no recognize this soul wounding as any more than kids being kids not getting along. This obliviousness is precisely what Valenzuela hopes to counter in her essay.

Valenzuela calls teachers “first to educate ourselves about internalized racism” requiring us to know how racism exists in society now and historically. It is only after this step that we can even recognize when this playground banter is in reality soul wounding and in reality there is a child unable to deal with the pain they unfairly have because of the oppression imposed by society. 

It is not only our job to help our students deal with their soul wounds on an individual level because then we leave them living in a world where the cycle of soul wounding continues. This is not the life I want for my students. To avoid this cycle, we must actively pursue ways to change policies that force our students to reject their culture because the dominant one is superior. These policies are not hard to find once you have done the self-work to recognize them and many can be addressed in ones own individual school.

Valenzuela gives an honest example of soul wounding where she now wishes a teacher had stepped in to stop what was occurring. It was she and a friend, Norma who inflicted pain onto another girl named Jovita. They ridiculed Jovita’s clothing, makeup, and even her accent. Ridiculing that ultimately led to a physical altercation. After Valenzuela’s own study of racism, sexism, and classism, she was able to reflect on the experience in the following way:

“Jovita seemed to symbolize all that Norma wanted to expunge from her own sense of self. While Mexican Americans like Norma and me also spoke Spanish at home and English at school, we regularly distinguished between ourselves, as Mexican Americans, and Mexican immigrants…we tended to view the less Anglicized immigrants among us as inferior distant cousins or to ignore their existence altogether.”

That is exactly the type of experience I desperately want my students to avoid. I strive to give my students a different experience in my classroom. However, you cannot passively wait for situations to arise to intervene.  While recognizing and addressing an issue in the moment is important, we want to be more proactive and stop the soul wounding before they even occur.

Last year I spent the first semester passively waiting for situations that I knew would occur. I had equipped myself with all sorts of ways to handle these inevitable situations. For example, I had a plan for when I heard a student use the word “gay”. I had a plan for when I heard one female criticize another. I had a plan for when I heard a child use the “n” word. I had lots of plans. At the end of the semester I had rarely come across instances to put my plans in action. I knew from talking to other teachers and students that this soul wounding behavior was occurring. “If only they would do it in front of me, then I can put my plan in action and address the situation effectively,” I thought.  This was the wrong approach.

It was at this point of self-reflection over my teaching and my classroom that often occurs that I decided that I needed a more active approach if I hope to make any difference. I began probing students through conversations filled with many questions of why to lead them to a place where we could address the soul wounding and internalized oppression I knew existed. I made sure those conversations happened. They were planned AND executed.

Hearing a TED talk and reading a book by Bettina Love, made me realize that media negatively affected our students even more than I had once thought. I also now realized the benefit of media when used effectively in the classrooms. This time I did not take my new knowledge and stash it away into some arsenal of ways to handle situations that might occur. I designed a lesson over media literacy for my students where we analyzed what messages the media was sending us from all types of music and pictures, both positive and negative, and the forces behind these messages. We brainstormed ways to create positive messages in our world and get rid of negative ones. During this one lesson, I got to use my arsenal of planned attacks more than I did the entire first semester.

This is not a testament to some intrinsic characteristic that I possess that makes me able to do these things in my classroom. That lesson, my conversations, and the other active approaches I took to addressing my students’ internalized oppression were the product of self-work, education, and reflection. Thankfully, things we are all capable of doing!

In my last post, I challenged you to self-reflect and self-educate on the inequalities facing our students. While an extremely important first step, this by itself is not enough. You must take your newfound knowledge and do something ACTIVE with it. Do not fall into the trap of passivity that I did, though, because the oppression that our students are experiencing is not passive. Their pain is active and desperately needing to be addressed and that is our charge as educators.

***I encourage you to share in the comment section below your own experiences with soul wounding to give more insight into the issue. Educators, please share ways that you have addressed racism, sexism, classism, and any other discrimination in your own classroom.***

-Ariel

Feel free to leave a comment if you would like to know more about other active approaches I took in my classroom and the ways I have attempted to approach the discriminatory policies at my school.

Resources:

Angela Valenzuela- http://www.edb.utexas.edu/education/departments/eda/faculty-profile/?id_pk=68D680E8-C1BA-DA9F-63276258082AA3DF

Bettina Love- http://www.bettinalove.com/

Everyday Antiracism- http://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Antiracism-Getting-About-School/dp/1595580549

Race Trumps Social Class! -Shelda Raymonvil

My previous posts focused on the benefits of organized activities in relation to social class and how concerted cultivation is ideal for future success when navigating institutions. I now come to the point in the text where Lareau addresses the intersection of race and class.

Photo courtesy: www.childrensdefense.planyourlegacy.org

Lareau's main focus throughout the text is on social class in relation to navigating institutions. Therefore, she studies families living in the middle class, working class, and poor class. Each class is represented by both African American families and white families and she notes similarities in child upbringing within each social class, regardless of race. She also note that the parents of the middle-class African American children kept an eye out for racial problems that their children may face. This awareness proved to be valuable when a white child told one of the Black middle class boys that he could only be a garbage man when he grows up. As stated by Lareau: 

"Although they [the middle class Black families] moved heavily within white worlds, parents sought to avoid having their children be the only Black child at an event. In addition, parents sought to have their children develop a positive self-image that specifically included their racial identity. Thus, for example, they attended all-Black middle-class Baptist churches every Sunday."

Even though the daily routines, language and discipline, location of schools, and strategies used to intervene in institutions were similar and almost identical among the white and Black middle class families, their race still mattered. It is noted that as the children age, the importance of race in their daily lives is likely to increase. Thus, African Americans are more likely to deal with racism, especially in employment settings, than whites.

Lareau also pointed out that race mattered less in children's daily lives than did their social class. Lareau observed that Black and white middle class children often fought with their siblings and talked back to their parents (when I first read this statement I reflected on the things my parents would've done if I dared talk back to them when I was younger!). She noted that those behaviors were not tolerated in working-class and poor class families, Black or white. She also stated that:

"Alexander, the middle-class Black boy had much more in common with white middle-class Garrett then he did with less-privileged Black boys, such as Tyrec and Harold."

Although Lareau emphasizes the fact that race was not a powerful factor throughout her study, I still believe that race trumps social class to some degree. Even though Alexander was raised in a middle-class household, he will still face challenges that come with being Black in America, even if he becomes successful down the road. On the contrary, I will say that Alexander's challenges will not be as hard as for Tyrec and Harold, who were raised in the working and poor class, respectively. Tyrec and Harold were not exposed to the same privileges as Alexander and will have a tough time navigating institutions, and in that case, social class does trump race. So what do you say? How heavy a load does race have in a child's life versus an adult's life? Does child vs. adult even matter? Do you think that race trumps social class or that social class trumps race? Please share your thoughts and comments below! 

-Shelda Raymonvil

In the Game of Equal Education Nice Guys Cause Students to Finish Last

I said in my last post that the essays comprising Everyday Antiracism challenge educators to take action against inequality in their classrooms. I have learned over the last two years that preceding any actions taken in the classroom should come deep introspection and personal grappling with inequalities we have or have not faced in our own lives, as well as our own contributions to these inequalities.  “Nice is Not Enough: Defining Caring for Students of Color” by Sonia Nieto gets at the heart of the personal development that needs to happen. Nieto has encountered many teachers, usually white, who feel that being a “nice guy” is all that it takes to meet the needs of our students of color. But as I have learned and Nieto points out, our personal attitudes, feelings of guilt, and being nice are NOT enough to rid our classrooms or education system of racism.  A teacher in the essay describes the problems associated with just being a nice teacher:

"We have plenty of warm friendly teachers who tell the kids nicely to forget their Spanish and ask mommy and daddy to speak to then in English at home; who give them easier tasks so they won’t feel badly when the work becomes difficult; who never learn about what life is like at home or what they eat or what music they like or what stories they have been told or what their history is. Instead, we smile and give them a hug and tell them to eat our food and listen to our stories and dance to our music. We teach them with our words and why it’s so hard for them."

Being nice is not going to confront the racist structures and institutions holding our students back. Being nice is not going to provide equal opportunities to ALL children. Nieto proposes that to move beyond “being nice” we must struggle about the hard realities of inequality facing our students, and the role that the institutions and WE play in perpetuating that inequality. This means confronting our own privilege and realizing all of the messages we have absorbed, even unconsciously, by racist media. Nieto’s action step for educators is to educate themselves on the challenges faced by students of color by reading things like minority students’ coming of age stories, etc. We want to truly understand our students’ need, and I guarantee it isn’t just niceness. This reflection SHOULD NOT be personally comfortable, but it is the only way we can get to a place personally that allows us to be ready to take actions that truly provide our students with the equal opportunities they deserve.

Arthur Chu’s article “Who Died and Made You Khaleesi? Privilege, White Saviors, and the Elusive Male Feminist Who Doesn’t Suck” describes the difficulty in avoiding hypocrisy as advocates for social justice (he does this with a discussion of media, such as Game of Thrones, Pocahontas, and Avatar). As teachers, I would say that we are social justice advocates, and Nieto has already pointed out at least one place of hypocrisy for many teachers. Settling for “being nice” and advocating for equal opportunity for all children is hypocritical. Chu recognizes that many white people working for social justice are “good guys”.  However, many have not done the self-work that it takes to act in un-oppressive ways for those they want to serve. He describes the problem as such:

 “People of privilege making an effort to be better people face a difficult quandary. You get inundated by all these examples and studies and historical anecdotes and moral arguments about the tremendous destructiveness and evil of the sexist or racist system you grew up in. You really want to not be a horrible person. (because you are a “nice guy”)

At the same time, being used to being deferred to and having your opinion listened to and having your feelings matter is very pleasant. Actually giving that up and stepping aside to become the unimportant one for once is very unpleasant, even painful. When you’re used to being in charge you perceive any balancing of the scales as an attack, any leveling of the playing field as something being stolen from you.”

“Leveling of the playing field” is what we are actually trying to achieve in our classrooms, right? If we want all students to have a fair shot and equal opportunity, then we must be willing to feel uncomfortable and face the unpleasantness that is reality. Chu describes how this type of introspection should feel:

“Becoming one of the good guys should hurt. It should be painful. It should involve seeing uncomfortable and ugly things about yourself that you’d rather not see. It should involve changing your behavior in ways that you’d honestly rather not do.”

“Your motivation to try to fix the world should not be the prestige, or the money, or the sense of satisfaction…It should be because the state of the world makes you feel sick and you want to stop being sick.”

When I think of the racism, patriarchy, and the many other discriminations facing my students it does make me sick, as it should. Those issues bring about a side of me, usually suppressed by my Southern upbringing, which is not so polite. It has been a journey to get this place, though. A journey brought on by teaching students who had a whole system against them and desperately wanting to meet the needs of my students and knowing that I was doing so inadequately. So, I read and I read some more. I read about many of the obstacles facing my students, both in their modern and historical context. I reflected on my life and my privilege, as well as the hurdles put in my way. I am still reflecting and reading. I am a work in progress and that will never change, or I sure hope not! I will continue to work on myself because I know it is a necessity not only for my work, but for my world. It is the first step in knowing the best and most effective actions to lead myself, my students, and my society to a more equal world.

Get uncomfortable. Confront privilege. Wrestle with hard questions and issues. Educate yourself. Experience the pain. Avoid hypocrisy. Stop being just “nice”. Do these things for YOURself, YOUR students, and YOUR world.

-Ariel Stevenson

Leave a comment!
 Please share with us and other readers your own experience in the classroom or in life in general when you realized you needed to do some deep reflection and self work. Include what led you to do that work. I look forward to reading all of your insights!

Resources:

Arthur Chu’s “Who Died and Made You Khaleesi? Privilege, White Saviors, and the Elusive Male Feminist Who Doesn’t Suck”:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/24/who-died-and-made-you-khaleesi-privilege-white-saviors-and-the-elusive-male-feminist-who-doesn-t-suck.html

Sonia Nieto:

http://www.sonianieto.com/

Buy Everyday Antiracism: 

http://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Antiracism-Getting-About-School/dp/1595580549/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1404219367&sr=8-1&keywords=everyday+antiracism