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That is one of the most disgusting things I have ever heard of. The dress code seems far too..."
Posted by euterpe42 in Silence Broken: Making Inmates of Students
DemocratsWork posted in You Voted. Now What? A Young Voter's Guide From Grassroots to the Hill
muthu22 posted in Interview with Education Chairman
bobqzzi posted in Raunch Culture
Passing Thoughts
Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative -- they colonise us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of storytelling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.--Arundhati Roy
I know aunts and great-grandparents who through the alchemy of Southern racism, intermarriage, self-hatred and survival managed to live their life passing either as white or just not that Black. I never thought of myself as passing because I had no desire to and and such an attempt would be futile as the deep darkness of my father's skin trumped the coveted lightness of my mother's skin much to an unnamed grandmother's silent disapproval. Swooned over as a baby because I happened to be much lighter than my father's side of the family, I was warned about sitting in the sun to long and getting "too black."
And I got blacker because I liked the sun and it was not until age 12 that I understood what being "too black" meant. Like my father I had tiny eyes and when I smiled my chubby cheeks enveloped my eyes only leaving tiny slits earning me the obviously problematic named "China eyes." I was taught that I should be excited about this because it took me one more step away from blackness.
I used to rock cornrows until I begged my parents to let me get my hair pressed. Kids were making fun of me because I was the only kid without straight hair and mind you this was at the same time I was being called a white kid because liked school. I explicitly remember my grandmother paying to have my hair pressed every three weeks. When I came home, she'd smile, play with my hair and told me how pretty I was. In a too late caveat, she noted that I had "good hair," but straight hair was always the best option even if the pressing process was tedious, smelly and time-consuming.
While I always understood the nuances of race and blackness within the tiny and dysfunctional community of confused Black folks I grew up with, the nuances of race and blackness were a different monster as I began mixing with non-Black Muslim communities. This became another monster because I felt that not only was I being asked to mute some elements of my Blackness, I was also being asked to adopt another identity that, while being foreign to me, was considered coveted and authentic to others.
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Where Have All the Black Soldiers Gone?
In 1966, succinctly explaining one of his reasons for not enlisting in the army, Muhammad Ali said "I ain't got no quarrel with those Vietcong." Today, it seems that many Black youth are singing the same note. As the U.S. disastrously skates through the Iraq War with blinders on, spouting off premature congratulatory sound bytes conveniently planted in White House speeches, the number of Black youth enlistees is dramatically dropping.
Since fiscal year 2000, Defense Department statistics show that the number of young Black enlistees has fallen by more than 58 percent . Additionally, according to data obtained by The Associated Press, "the decline covers all four military services for active duty recruits, and the drop is even more dramatic when National Guard and Reserve recruiting is included."
What are the reasons for these dramatic (yet welcomed by me) drops in enrollment? Mistrust of the Bush administration, and what Boston.com reported as "the notion that black soldiers are being steered to combat jobs, a lingering perception from the Vietnam War," and the general unpopularity among Blacks of the War in Iraq.
"Why would we go over there and help them [Iraqis], when [the U.S. government] can't help us over here?" Nathaniel Daley, a young Black man from Atlantic City, N.J. told Boston.com recently, noting the government's failure in 2005 at providing Hurricane Katrina relief.
The war "is unnecessary," Jackson said. "It's not our war. We got our own war here, just staying alive," he added, noting his hometown of Philadelphia has racked up more than 200 homicides so far this year, most involving young black men.
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Cleansing To Become Change
I have been going through some changes lately -- re-using everything from cereal boxes to my bean thread noodle plastic bags to my alfalfa sprout container. I have even decided to walk as many places as possible. Despite my fear of commitment, I have given up my promiscuous vegan ways for the full on commitment, which includes a break with dairy and the occasional bite of fish. I have also stopped buying crap -- the strategically packaged office supplies that I know I don't actually need and have tried to end my obsession with bags, clutches and the like.
I now want to retake my Shahadah, and spend one full week to reflect away from technological distractions. I lit some Nag Champa incense, made some mint tea, turned on some Gil Scott-Heron and turned off my TV to write this.
No, I have not surrendered to the desperately sought after and the highly commercialized uber-conscious, esoteric, cafe-revolutionary lifestyle. I haven't surrendered at all; rather I have been brought back to life by two Mahatma Gandhi quotes I'd never really taken the time to understand. The first is "Be the change you want to see in the world" and the second is "Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
I've been trying to trick myself in happiness and hopeful thinking -- smiling when I wanted to cry. I'm only able to muster a collection of carefully calculated movements and muscle contractions resulting in an anxious and crooked smile. In my unrelenting cynicism, I had written Gandhi words off as cliche and unrealistic. How do you tell a homeless family who moves from shelter to hotel each week to find happiness in practicing what they preach? How do you tell them to be the change they want to see, when every door seems shut and the change they want to see requires the radical restructuring of the very system so many praise? I reached a bit deeper to see that what is being asked of us is to find a space harmony that can empower us to heal, renew and move forward.
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Painting Dialogue
Much of what we hear about the Arab-Israeli conflict is concerned with air strikes and battles on the ground. However, there are discursive battles fought not with bullets and rocks, but with words and images that often carry just as much strength. Right here in the Bay Area there was a struggle over the images in a large mural in a parking lot on the corner of 24th and Capp streets in San Francisco.
This summer 200 residents of San Francisco's Mission District painted a mural designed by local artist Eric Norberg under the auspices of HOMEY-Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth . HOMEY "is a grassroots organization that serves low-income Latino youth ages of 13 to 24 in the San Francisco Mission District." HOMEY is made up of young people "in gangs, those formerly incarcerated, young people at risk of incarceration, and isolated and disenfranchised youth who are equally at risk of unhealthy behaviors like violence and criminal activity."
The mural, "Solidarity: Breaking Down Barriers" focused on the theme of breaking down physical and social walls. One panel of the 117-foot wide and 10-foot tall mural depicted Palestinians breaking through an Israel shaped crack in the Israeli security barrier, or what some call the Apartheid wall.
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Critical Literacy and Resurrection
In Animal Farm by George Orwell, Squealer, a clever demagogue and propagandizing pig says to the other animals, "I could show you the secret documents, if you were able to read." He was referring to the speculative (and non-existent) secret document that blamed Snowball, another leading pig exiled from the farm, for all of the bad things that that were happening. Squealer mocks the other animals because he knows his ability to read and write will give him an advantage over the other animals who are still struggling to make out the first four letters of the alphabet. The animals can't read because no sustainable efforts were taken to teach them, which reveals the farm and our world's "economy of illiteracy."
A cautionary tale about dystopia, Animal Farm is also a cautionary tale about the ways illiteracy and unquestioned reliance on the good intentions of our leaders can lead us astray. When critical literacy -- the ability and processes of not only reading the text, but the intentions, implications and contexts of the text -- are so important, why are typical educational benchmarks solely consumed with basic literacy and phonics? If we're aiming towards creating educational democracy, and a truly educated populace, shouldn't our goal be to arm young people with the skills and experience to make deep analytic decisions as well as connections? Shouldn't we give our youth the tools to know when they are being deceived and to know that what is written is not always reflective of reality, but more reflective of desires and historical context?
I am not even going to lie; I have been illiterate most of my life, and probably still am in many ways. I was always at the top of my class, skipped a grade, and recognized for academic achievement, but the one skill that I lacked was the ability to read beyond the written word and decipher the world the writer desired to create. I was the smartest kid and the dumbest kid all at once.
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Making Black Girls "Ladylike"
I have been convinced that many large public schools function like factory systems. You pop in one student and with the appropriate manipulations, the necessary conveyor belt rides and some pedagogical alchemy and you get the school product: a depoliticized consumer who is more prepared to select the next game system to buy then to think critically about the social context that shapes his financially struggling neighborhood. John Dewey alludes to it, and Paulo Freire explicitly discusses it.
Sure, there is something more nuanced going on here with respect to student agency and the specificity of the school site etc., but follow my logic, even if incredulously so. Maybe, these are just the cliff note ramblings of Marxist critique or the strategic staging for the theatrical introduction of radical pedagogy, but ramblings and stagings that should not be so hastily abandoned.
Humor me for a moment, if we think about this factory model of education seriously, is it possible that schools are a site of (re)production? Do schools try to make certain type of students? What are the implications of this process? A new Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GenderPAC) report found that teachers tend to view the behavior of black girls as not "ladylike" and therefore focus disciplinary action on encouraging behaviors like passivity, deference, and bodily control at the expense of curiosity, outspokenness, and assertiveness.
Based on two years' observation at a Texas middle school, the Ohio University study found that teachers' class-and-race-based assumptions of black femininity made them more likely to discourage behaviors and characteristics that lead to class involvement and educational success.
Sadly, reports like these never seem to surprise me and now I have converted that management of surprise into excavating for deeper ideas and questions. This study makes me laugh, in a serious way of course, at how so many folks want to latch on to this idea of a "culture of poverty" of "hip-hop" or whatever to blame for the academic achievement of Black students, but what about the cultures of gendered muteness, and racialized womanhood rearing that explicitly train young Black women in behaviors that militate against their "educational success"?
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"Tomboys" who "wanted to be raped," and are often killed
South Africa is home to one of the world's most progressive and inclusive constitutions with an unmatched commitment to the human rights of the LGBT community. The nation is also one of only five countries to legalize same-sex marriages. But, South Africa is also home to lesbian killings, rapes and tortures -- all acts that organize themselves around not only a climate of homophobia and heteronormitivity, but misogyny, government inaction and myopic notions of what constitutes blackness.
What is written in beautifully engineered constitutional texts is not articulated on the ground and Black lesbians walking throughout South Africa confront that dangerous knowing everyday. And some don't live to face the hostility of another day.
This past Sunday in Soweto Meadowlands, Sizakele Sigasa, an outreach coordinator at Positive Women's Network and an LGBT rights activist, and her friend Salome were tortured and brutally murdered. Sizakele was found with her hands tied together by her underpants and her ankles tied together by her shoelaces. There were three bullet holes in her head and three in her collarbone
This past June, Simangele Nhlapho, a member of a support group for women living with HIV, was likewise found dead -- with her two year old daughter. Both her and her daughter were raped and killed. Earlier in April, Madoe Mafubedu, a 16-year old girl living openly as a lesbian was raped and repeatedly stabbed to death.
I wish the stories ended there.
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You Got my Back?: Coalition Building between Black Americans and Palestinians
I was born a Black womanand now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?
It is time to make our way home.
--an excerpt from Moving Towards Home , June Jordan
June 2007 marks the 40th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. May 2007 marks the 59th anniversary of the Nakba ("the catastrophe"), which saw the mass deportation of a million Palestinians from their cities and villages, massacres of civilians, and the razing to the ground of hundred of Palestinian villages in order to create the exclusive Jewish state of Israel. While many Jewish Israelis (and Jews throughout the diaspora) celebrate the Nakba as their independence, Palestinians and concerned people throughout the world mark this date the as the beginning of a disastrous chain of events that have made Palestinians sojourners in their own land.
On the 15th of May 2007, 22 Black American professors, writers, religious figures, and other leaders issued a call to Black America to join in the June 10 March and rally, and break the silence on the injustices faced by the Palestinian people. The open letter addresses the similarities between the struggles of Black Americans and Palestinians, the dangers of censorship and the need for greater collaboration between Black Americans and Palestinians. While this letter is both important and timely, it does not address the hurdles to coalition building.
We can talk until we are blue in the face about the similarities between Apartheid South Africa and the State of Israel, or about how both Palestinians and Black Americans are forced to inhabit the margins of society. However, such comparisons, which often linger at the level of abstraction, cannot alone build coalitions. Jordan Flaherty, a Hurricane Katrina survivor makes an excellent point when she writes:
I I think that, if we are truly serious about a collaboration between Black America and advocates for a free Palestine, then pro-Palestinian groups in America need to make a serious commitment to being an outspoken ally on issues important to progressive Black folks. Ultimately, this is the work of coalition building. I believe it is important that advocates for Palestinian human rights are not just asking for support, but also offering it.
In talking about being against Israeli Apartheid, we should be also talking about apartheid in the US. We should talk about the ways in which funding is cut for social programs in the US while funding is increased for the Israeli military. We should talk about how Black people from New Orleans were dispersed throughout the US post-Katrina and are fighting for their "Right of Return." We should talk about how Arabs in the US are recently facing some of the racial profiling that Black folks here have always experienced. We should talk about how the Bush administration shows its contempt for democracy at home by disenfranchising Black people, and how it shows its contempt for democracy in Palestine by refusing to speak to the elected Palestinian government.
And, in speaking about these issues, we should not just be paying lip service, but actually commit to working on this with our organizations. [...] They should come out to protests and other events initiated by the Black community - not to recruit, but to show principled support.
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Kameelah Rasheed was raised on a harmonious, yet eclectic mix of Islam and old Gil Scott-Heron records. You can usually spot her in hijab and high-top Converse photographing, working with youth, writing, knitting or organizing an event. Currently, she is a Ed.M. candidate and teaches 12th grade Humanities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read more of Kameelah's writing on her blog, KameelahWrites.