Category: resistance
Our statements in support of #ScholarStrike
Image description: Gray and white "Scholar Strike for racial justice" banner
Away from email 9/8/2020: In solidarity with the national #ScholarStrike
September 8 and September 9 I will interrupt my normal teaching and administrative duties at Carleton College to participate in the national #ScholarStrike. The strike has been organized by academics across the country as one way to call attention to the ongoing state violence being waged against Black communities and other communities of color in multiple forms, including police brutality; disparities in access to healthcare and health outcomes, most visible these days in the disproportionate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black and Indigenous communities, immigrant communities, and other marginalized communities; and the longstanding educational debt owed to Black children and communities. Demands for justice in Minneapolis and beyond following the police murder of George Floyd have led to renewed calls for racial justice and equity on Carleton's campus this summer–you can view demands by Black students and organizations here and demands by Carleton alumni here.
On Tuesday, I will participate in departmental conversations intended to address the question of how we, as English scholars and teachers, might name and dismantle the way colonialism and imperialism and white supremacy have shaped our aesthetic and cultural values, our canons, our pedagogical tools.
On both days, I will take the time to educate myself further on racial justice and abolition using the collection of teach-in videos created by those participating in the Scholar Strike. Those videos are available to everyone. We cannot change our institutions and our communities without taking the steps to educate ourselves. I plan to tweet out about what I'm learning.
In addition, I will be donating the equivalent of two-days pay to three different organizations recommended by the Carleton Ujamaa Collective : Snap for Freedom, Community Justice Exchange, and the UndocuBlack Network.
Thanks to Anita Chikkatur's work, this away message contains a lot of links which I hope you will use to join me in educating yourself more about these issues that affect deeply members of the Carleton community and communities in Northfield, Twin Cities, Minnesota, and beyond.
Finally, due to my participation, my email response may be delayed. Let me encourage you to follow #SCHOLARSTRIKE on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and to engage with the teach-in occurring on the Scholar Strike YouTube channel.
Scholar Strike is meant to disrupt the everyday routines of academia, and to show solidarity with other workers striking for Black lives, particularly the athletes of the WNBA and NBA. On these two days, in a variety of ways, academic professionals are disrupting the status quo and refusing to stand by while racism and violence devastate Black Americans' lives and communities.
Adriana Estill
I will be refraining today from teaching and administrative duties at Carleton College to participate in the national #ScholarStrike. The strike has been organized by academics across the country as one way to call attention to the ongoing state violence being waged against Black communities and other communities of color in multiple forms, including police brutality; disparities in access to healthcare and health outcomes, most visible these days in the disproportionate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black and Indigneous communities, immigrant communities, and other marginalized communities; and the longstanding educational debt owed to Black children and communities. Demands for justice in Minneapolis and beyond following the police murder of George Floyd have led to renewed calls for racial justice and equity on Carleton's campus this summer–you can view demands by Black students and organizations here and demands by Carleton alumni here.
As an educator and a scholar, I believe that individual learning and change is an important part of working towards changing institutions and societies. Today, as part of taking part in the strike, I will be spending time educating myself more about racial justice and abolition, including learning from the collection of teach-in resources created by those participating nationally in the Scholar Strike as well as reading about what justice might look like in a police/policing-free society.
I will also be donating the equivalent of two-days pay (nationally, it's a two-day strike) to Juxtaposition Arts, which "is a teen-staffed art and design center, gallery, retail shop, and artists' studio space in North Minneapolis."
I've included a lot of links in this away message in case you want to join me in educating yourself more about these issues that affect deeply members of the Carleton community and communities in Northfield, Twin Cities, Minnesota, and beyond. I also encourage you to follow #SCHOLARSTRIKE on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and to engage with the teach-in occurring on the Scholar Strike YouTube channel.
Anita Chikkatur
Author downwithbrownblogPosted on September 8, 2020 September 7, 2020 Categories collective organizing, race, resistanceLeave a comment on Our statements in support of #ScholarStrike
"Privileging the urgency over the process": How (not) to respond to demands for institutional change
Image description: Screenshot of a Zoom call with Adriana, Ainsley, Anita, & Halah
In response to the racially disproportionate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the racial uprisings in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police officers, Black students and organizations at Carleton College issued a call for action to the college to implement anti-racist programs, organizations, and spaces for Black students, faculty, and staff.
Over 2000 college alumni signed an open letter to the college both in support of the student demands and with their own demand for the college to develop a 10-year plan for racial equity and equality. This letter was officially made public through a Twitter campaign on Monday, August 10, 2020.
Within a few hours, Carleton College sent out a response to this open letter. Many of the alumni who signed the letter, especially the nine organizers, were disappointed by the response.
We wanted to provide a space for some of those alumni to talk through why this response was so disappointing and we wanted to do it as a conversation. And that is how we arrived at our first ever video-podcast-blog post, featuring Ainsley LeSure (Class of 2005) and Halah Mohammed (Class of 2014) who took the time to chat with us and provide their wisdom and insights. You can check out the conversation here.
We want to say a huge thank you to Ainsley and Halah for joining us. We had a lot of fun and learned a lot as we close-read the response and worked through how it missed the mark and what could have been done differently.
We hope you take the time to listen to the conversation, especially if you thought the Carleton response was fine. You'll get insight into how our readings of institutional messaging can be shaped by past relationships, current conditions of trust, and, of course, deep, sustained attention to language.
Author downwithbrownblogPosted on August 19, 2020 August 20, 2020 Categories collective organizing, institutional politics, race, resistance, theories of changeTags alumni, responding to changeLeave a comment on "Privileging the urgency over the process": How (not) to respond to demands for institutional change
Diversity Rhetoric Obscures Structural Inequities
Image source. Students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed at a 2011 campus protest.
After we published our post last week, an article by Cathryn Bailey came across our laptops that echoed some of our arguments about how the work that faculty do and the positions we hold at colleges tends to make us less able and willing to see ourselves as workers. Bailey takes this structural critique and argues that "It has perhaps never before been more obvious that the fissures that underlie the academic labor crisis are connected to broader concerns about diversity, inclusion, and social justice."
Bailey makes a strong case for why the academic labor crisis and universities' inability to make progress on social justice stem from the same structures that focus on individual efforts and rewards rather than on institutional change.
We highlight here some of the passages we found particularly insightful.
"It is perhaps when the class politics underlying academic employment are most naked that institutional propaganda about individual behavior, often couched in terms of civility, is most prevalent. Employment pressure, for example, makes faculty members ever more reluctant to speak openly about supposedly controversial matters or issues that test the bounds of 'civility.'"
"Rhetoric swings predictably between the 'we' and the singular 'you,' which helps disguise the systemic nature of the problems. 'Our' campus community is set forth as a beacon of tolerance and multiculturalism. A communal 'we' takes credit for the mythic image of the university viewbook as an inviting Benetton ad. Yet when faculty members or students raise complaints—even those that point to long-standing patterns of discrimination or abuse—they are likely to be framed and handled merely in the very particular terms of individual rights and victimization."
"At other times, administrators who sing the praises of diversity goals, initiatives, and strategic objectives frame structural inequities as being only about particular individuals. A quite specific complaint by a faculty member of color—for example, that his diversity-focused sabbatical proposal has been unfairly dismissed—may be met with feel-good assurances from a dean or vice provost echoing the institutional diversity statement. Such polite responses effectively close down discussion. What response is available when the dean warmly replies that 'the University of X values everyone'? Institutional accountability becomes clouded over in a puff of rhetorical rainbow smoke that disguises the constraints faced by actual individuals, especially those from marginalized groups, who are struggling to thrive. In its attempt to sidestep blame, avoid controversy, and appease aggrieved constituents, the administration's 'civil' and 'reasonable' conduct upholds the status quo's inequities."
Author downwithbrownblogPosted on July 29, 2020 July 27, 2020 Categories collective organizing, institutional politics, power and privilege, race, resistanceTags limits of diversity rhetoricLeave a comment on Diversity Rhetoric Obscures Structural Inequities
Labor, not love or loyalty: Our relationship to our employer
"If ever there were a time to remember that professors are workers and that universities are workplaces, that time would be now. Administrators believe your job is worth dying for as they cynically use the bodies of employees to pad their bottom line." Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Last fall, as part of her sabbatical, Anita had the chance to enroll in a course called "Working Class History" through the New Brookwood Labor College. The New Brookwood Labor College "strives to address racial, economic, and social imbalances of power by educating workers into their class." During the first class, Anita and her classmates, most of whom were union members or union organizers, discussed what "working class" meant. They talked about how class definitions were not about how much income you earn, but about how you earn your income. It's about workers who work for someone else. It's about you creating profits for others. It's about the exploitation of your labor, in the Marxist sense, and not just about how you are treated by your boss. A nice boss is still a boss.
Anita thought about this first class discussion this summer as we entered a phase of the fall planning at Carleton where there seemed to be a lot of decisions being made that had implications for faculty and staff health and safety without the full participation of faculty and staff. While we are concerned about the staff at Carleton and their ability to prioritize their health and safety and still keep their jobs, we will focus in this post on faculty because we feel like we can speak from/to that position since we occupy it.
Recent conversations among the faculty about the fall planning process have included more direct discussions about faculty positionality as workers. While these discussions come out of particular frustrations about the process of decision-making this spring and summer about fall term planning, we were struck by how it was the first time the two of us have been part of discussions at the college where faculty members are identifying themselves explicitly as "workers" and administrators as "bosses."
There's definitely something about working at a private SLAC that insulates faculty from thinking of ourselves as workers. This post reflects our attempt to work through what these factors are. But first, as we thought about all the reasons for why faculty generally do not foreground their positionality as workers, we thought it might be useful to reflect briefly on what has influenced the two of us to see ourselves that way.
For Anita, a huge influence on her thinking about labor and economic justice was the fact that both of her parents were part of unions during their time living in New York City; her dad is still a member of the TWU Local 100, New York City's public transit union and her mom was a member of District Council 37, New York City's biggest public employee union. She remembers going to union rallies with her parents. While as a teenager she could not have articulated well why she thought collective organizing and bargaining was beneficial, she vaguely understood that, for example, she and her brother had access to a fuller range of healthcare benefits, including access to braces and glasses, because of her parents' unions.
Adriana thinks she was probably influenced by her parents' labor precarity in her 20s (both lost their jobs during the economic downturn in the early 1990s) and by her general attention to the structures of academia in the last ten years. In working through the way race matters in academia, she has read broadly in Critical University Studies, an area of inquiry that, in analyzing and critiquing the neoliberal turn of universities, stresses the importance of thinking about the condition of adjuncts and what that says about universities.
Our top six list of why faculty at a SLAC don't easily think of themselves as workers
Universities have large populations of adjuncts and grad students who face precarious work conditions in academia, and both groups have been doing incredible labor organizing in the past few years (see, for example, the COLA campaign at the UC schools). The situation is different at Carleton: as an undergraduate-only college, we have no grad students and we tend to have far fewer adjuncts than large research universities do. From her time on the committee that is concerned with faculty equity issues, Anita recalls a conversation with non-tenure track faculty with long-term contracts talking about how they were mostly satisfied with their labor conditions. In addition, as a private school, our salaries are not publicly available which makes it difficult to know about disparities in pay and benefits across ranks of faculty, let alone the differences between staff, faculty, and administrators. Comparisons with visibly unequal institutions that are more clearly exploiting their grad students and adjunct faculty helps to produce a sense that we work at a relatively equitable institution where we don't need to advocate for ourselves.
Small colleges in small communities tend to promote the idea that our participation in the lie life of the college makes us a family member rather than a worker.* There's a certain level of "sociality" expected from faculty that often includes evening and weekend social events. We have had many discussions about the social demands of our jobs as professors, which includes both the relationship-building work that we see both as necessary in certain contexts and as unnecessary remnants of a bygone era where all the professors were married men who lived within walking distance of the college with wives did not work outside the home who welcomed students in their homes with elaborate home-cooked meals [or at least that's what Anita was once told by an older alumnae in response to the fact that she did not live in Northfield].
The actual degree of sociality required to create learning environments that are humane and safe enough for students to take risks is debatable. But we see many colleagues (and ourselves, well, at least Adriana!) baking brownies to bring into classes, holding office hours in the evenings or weekends, hosting department events at our homes, inviting students over for dinner… And students are told and sold on the promise that being a student at an elite, small, liberal arts college means they get these kinds of relationships–family-like–with us. Faculty are not just purveyors of content expertise, but facilitators of individual growth and communal care and consideration.
Of course, this is all still labor. Just because this work is affective and relational does not make it leisure, or our "own." But because it is affective work, both the institution and its workers can forget to "count it." Care work is historically undervalued and unpaid in a capitalist society, and in our case, this kind of work can be viewed as personal and individual, rather than being a part of the structural conditions under which we labor.
*lie was a typo… or maybe a Freudian slip. We've corrected it but left the original so that both lie and life can live on here.
Because we are a small workplace, there is a kind of personalization where we fail to see structures because we are thinking about the particular individuals who occupy the positions of hierarchy. The fact that we get to address the Dean of the College or the President by their first name hints at a particular kind of intimacy (going back to that "family" rhetoric) that often obscures the hierarchical structure of decision-making.
The personalization of the structure also means that we can mistake the moments where we are seen and helped as individuals as indications that labor conditions are good. What we mean is that personal relationships and their relative health can make us overlook structural problems, perhaps because we don't experience a problem or because we trust that the particular individuals in positions of power are doing their best.
Carleton has norms of departmental and faculty autonomy for curricular issues. What this means is that, even though there are pressures for pre-tenure faculty to conform to certain departmental and college norms, we do not generally have to get approval for our syllabi and pedagogical styles. Most recently, as the college delayed informing faculty about what our fall term would look like, faculty felt strongly that they should have autonomy to choose their mode of teaching (e.g online, in-person, hybrid). The administration has allowed faculty this autonomy.
This arena of autonomy can obscure or overshadow the moments when we have less input into decisions. We've both been in conversations where concerns about decision-making structures and processes get short circuited by the line "but at least we got to choose our teaching mode." In other words, this particular area of autonomy and control can make us feel like we employ ourselves and we have choices and autonomy about our laboring conditions, even though there are many other decisions being made–not by faculty– that will impact our teaching contexts.
Related to the promotion of our small, elite SLAC as a family, there is an incredible amount of messaging at Carleton about how "special" the college is. While we tend to think of this kind of marketing as being aimed at students, it is, of course, being consumed by faculty as well. And we get our own booster speeches at the top of every faculty meeting. We are told how especially dedicated and wonderful we are, how we are one of the "top" undergraduate teaching institutions, and how our work and dedication to our students and the college is much appreciated. Having colleagues in all kinds of institutions, including ones that have far fewer resources such as community colleges and tribal colleges, the two of us don't really believe the hype. Are Carleton faculty dedicated? Yes, and so are all of our friends and colleagues who are teachers. But at Carleton, we also have access to an incredible level of human and materials resources.
This pervasive discourse of how "special" Carleton elevates our labor to something remarkable and essential, which serves to slow or stall critiques of working conditions because "critique" is made to look interruptive, rude, or antagonistic. Within this framework, recognizing our labor and collective organizing to better our working conditions is an affront to the institution who values us and our specialness. Institutions demand loyalty and pretend to give "love and appreciation" as a way to obscure the fact that we are laborers, laboring for an institution with entrenched hierarchies of who holds decision-making power, especially over financial matters.
Lastly, our own sense of our identities as being highly educated and credentialed can get in the way of seeing ourselves as workers. PhDs can feel like credentials that set us apart from other workers. For faculty who come from working class or lower middle class backgrounds, becoming a professor offered social mobility and stability. At a college like this, the PhD serves to make us "special workers" deserving of special benefits.
An example. Both of us remember how ten or so years ago the faculty had discussions about whether the "tuition benefit" (basically, certain college employees can get financial support from the college to pay for their children's college tuition) should be expanded to all staff, including hourly paid staff. While many faculty spoke in support of the proposition, we can remember some faculty members talking about how their PhDs made them "nationally competitive" and therefore the tuition benefit would attract the "best faculty"–as opposed to thinking of the tuition benefit as a benefit that should be available to all children, regardless of how and how much their parents happened to get paid by the college. In the end, tuition benefits are still only accessible to faculty and certain groups of staff.
These differences in salary, benefits, and status, along with a governance structure that tends to silo faculty and staff interests and concerns (for example, while faculty have faculty meetings and a "Faculty Affairs Committee," staff have their own informational structure) means that there are few spaces where we can focus on issues that we all might have in common as employees of the college. We both had conversations with our staff colleagues about how frustrating the fall planning process was because of the separate meetings for staff and faculty, as if we didn't have common concerns about our health and safety and about the viability of the plan to bring back 85% of our students.
While the immediate concerns about the lack of faculty power in shaping the college's fall plan has brought to the forefront our position as employees, like all other employees at Carleton and beyond, we hope that these concerns shift more fundamentally our sense of ourselves and our willingness to organize collectively as laborers, drawing inspiration from workers' rights campaigns within and outside of academia.
Author downwithbrownblogPosted on July 22, 2020 July 22, 2020 Categories collective organizing, institutional politics, pandemic, power and privilege, resistanceTags teaching as labor3 Comments on Labor, not love or loyalty: Our relationship to our employer
Unfinished Stories
Photo credit: unknown. Photo description: Adriana's mami holding a sign "Rise" in the middle of a crowd of protestors, trying to help rewrite the nation's stories.
Note: We will be working on a series of posts centered around "changing our imaginations" about education, colleges, and all the things that the two of us love to think and write about, as inspired by Kandace Montgomery, a Minneapolis-based organizer for Black Visions Collective who, talking in particular about abolishing the police, said, "They've ruined our imagination and told us that policing is the issue [solution]. We need to change our imagination. We have to change what's possible."
This post is an updated version of Adriana's talk at the Martin Luther King Jr. celebration at Carleton in 2017. We thought it was worth publishing now because of the focus on working towards our dreams even/especially while living in a daunting reality. It showcases Adriana's persistent optimism, even in the face of anxiety and grief.
In his Farewell address, President Obama invited those listening to act as "anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy"; almost four years later, it is more clear what that meant and means for us, how we are all a part of the unfinished story that is this country. We all understand now, so deeply, so gutturally, so painfully that the United States of America that we thought existed, maybe not on the ground, but at least in the world of theory, available in founding documents… that the United States of America has never yet been. Obama, then, was asking for us to be the guardians of something still to come, still to be born, still to be imagined into being.
The burden of working towards a dream might already be clear to you–after, all, how are we supposed to be guardians of that which does not yet exist?, but I want to underline it anyway. First–history does not serve as a blueprint, but it does offer necessary red-ink-comments in our margins that might help us do thoughtful, substantial edits. In the New York Times (2017), historian Khalil Gibran Muhammed writes: "The Dr. King we choose to remember was indeed the symbolic beacon of the civil rights movement. But the Dr. King we forget worked within institutions to transform broken systems. He never positioned himself as a paragon of progress. Nor did he allow others to become complacent." Muhammed worries particularly about the way individual markers of progress serve to simplify history and create a narrative of progress that is so very seductive. (After all, if progress is in process, am I needed? There's been a black president, isn't racism over?) Muhammed's concerns are not unjustified, given that even in the comments section one of the most "liked" comments applies the "we must stop harping on the past in order to move on into the future" logic that imagines we can fix structural inequality and racism without examining its roots. Indeed, as our friend Kevin Wolfe would say (miss you much!), this logic imagines that racism and inequality are curious and singular deviations from the beautiful commands of our founding propositions, instead of emerging from them. The challenge is obvious for those of us who take seriously Muhammed's call to "judge transformation by how our institutions behave on behalf of individuals rather than the other way around": our attention to history only helps to the degree that it is clear-eyed and strong-hearted, willing to battle the myths that sustain this country's most dangerous lies: that we have always and we continue to prioritize justice, equality, and liberty for all.
The second burden of working towards a dream is that it has no end. That protest sign that we've seen on social media–"I can't believe I'm still protesting this shit?"–get ready to see it again, and again, and again. I don't mean to disillusion you or to disappoint you, but rather to steel you for the road ahead: the destination is not yet written; we cannot yet imagine the fitting close to this story. Martin Luther King Jr. warned us that "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." It's long indeed. As Anita Chikkatur and I wrote in November 2016, "You have to really put your shoulder to the wheel to bend the arc of the moral universe." So, right now, as we stand and sit and walk and run and kneel and march and close our eyes and feel called into action, it's important to know this long arc so that you can keep going, knowing that it is unlikely that you will see the fruits of your labor.
How do you keep going? How do you not get exhausted and shift back into complacency? I want you to think of cultivating a muscle within yourselves–your resistance muscle. Like any muscle, it needs to be flexed regularly; it needs to be trained; it occasionally needs rest in order to work harder. This muscle profits from alliances, from listening, and from risk-taking; it requires the attention of truth-seekers, visionaries, and organizers. At the heart of it, this resistance muscle needs love and narrative.
Yes, narrative. Let me talk about why narrative matters. One way to think about this problem of not having a blueprint, about not knowing exactly where we're going, is just as I've started to do so, in the language of maps, a spatial metaphor for figuring out the necessary social, political, and economic reorganization to come. I think a more sustainable metaphor, when talking about our own participation-our calls to action- is narrative. In a talk he gave at Carleton in 2017, psychologist Corey L.M. Keyes talked about the markers of mental health; hearing two of them, "purpose" and "autonomy," the inner literary critic in me couldn't help but rescript what he was saying just a tiny bit. Purpose and autonomy grow in us as we feel like the story we're living makes sense, that our part in the story matters, and that you have some degree of control over your part in the story.
Lin-Manuel Miranda's amazing musical Hamilton (now streaming! But this isn't a commercial! Also like all art, it has problems!) is all about narrative–indeed, the character Hamilton as imagined by Miranda is so very sensitive to the purity and perfection of the narrative of him that he torpedoes it. There's a lesson there for all of us as we begin to own our roles in this grand story about this country, this moment, the future: do not invest yourself in idealized heroes or perfect narratives. Be humble as you sketch your part in the story; be forgiving as you look back and wish you'd taken other steps; appreciate your fellow sojourners who also work to build the story.
Of course, the true hero of Hamilton–my preferred role model today–is Eliza. In the final song, "Who lives who dies who tells your story," all the other characters moan and lament, "when you're gone who tells your story," She's the one who changes the mood and direction of the song, forcefully responding: "I put myself back in the narrative." In many ways, so many of us have imagined ourselves beyond and on the edges of the national narrative. It is high time we write ourselves back into the story. The more that we work on inserting ourselves into this story, asking ourselves, as Eliza does, "when my time is up, have I done enough?," the more we can feel our strength, be ready for the long haul, glory in the small victories along the way.
So. Narrative–your approach to the national version of it–matters. And love matters. I'm talking of the love that Dr. King hints at when he says, "Here and there an individual or group dares to love, and rises to the majestic heights of moral maturity." Dares to love. Dr. King points out that love is, indeed, difficult, because it asks us to engage in "understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill for all men." For King, daring to love during struggle and sacrifice makes possible–indeed, it is the only way–to "create the beloved community." "Love is the most durable power in the world," he proclaims. Solange adds to that, "what's love without a mission?"
Yeah. We're not talking about romantic love or some anemic, anodyne love. This cannot be a touchy-feely love. This has to be an angry, justice-driven love, a commanding love, a requiring love. It is a get-up-and-shout love and a do-you-see-me-now love. To create the beloved community, we need to be able to imagine it into existence, to be able to see and care about our neighbor, our enemy, our kin. We need to love, so as not to fall into tactics of exclusion, division, and separation. It's important to know that love is not easy. If it ever feels easy, you're probably not doing it right. Don't shy away from this kind of hard, daring love–it is a love that helps us re-imagine the terms of our story.
You might be asking right now, "love seems hard. How does it keep my resistance muscle from getting tired? Why is hard love sustaining?" My answer is as follows: I do not love institutions. Or corporations. Or policies. I love people. Institutions, corporations, policies will never return your love. Demand from these entities justice, equity, fair measures and processes. Love is different. Love people, without expectation of return. Love fully, knowing they may not be able to. Love honestly, letting your light shine. Love people, because loving them makes you a better, stronger, wiser person.
Author downwithbrownblogPosted on July 15, 2020 July 14, 2020 Categories collective organizing, feminism, race, resistanceTags literature, love, mlk, narrativeLeave a comment on Unfinished Stories
Crisis pedagogy
Note: We will be working on a series of posts centered around "changing our imaginations" about education, colleges, and all the things that the two of us love to think and write about, as inspired by Kandace Montgomery, a Minneapolis-based organizer for Black Visions Collective.
"Did we connect curriculum to this moment? Or did we continue to show that the curriculum is totally irrelevant to our lives? Did we acknowledge trauma in this moment? The curriculum must be connected to the moment, must be relevant, must be impactful."
Kevin Kumashiro posed these questions in his brilliant recent seminar on how higher education must step up in a moment of crisis if colleges and universities are interested at all in being institutions that are about social justice. He started the webinar by saying, "What we do in the midst of a crisis should actually take us closer to the vision we have for higher education, not farther."
While we started this series of posts inspired by the words of Black organizers, activists, and intellectuals calling for all of us to imagine a different future and society in the face of the racial justice uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic had already set into motion discussions about how to re-imagine education in a moment of crisis.
While neither of us had the experience of teaching online this year because of leaves, we did hear from many of our friends and colleagues about their experiences, and we engaged (sporadically) with conversations at Carleton this spring about what should happen next fall: Should students return to campus? Should faculty continue to offer online courses? What shifts needed to happen to our curriculum and pedagogy because of the pandemic?
In line with Kevin's questions about connecting curriculum to the moment, Anita had posted the following comment in May on a Carleton online forum about teaching in the fall in response to a comment about the potential for team-teaching: "This is perhaps a much more 'out there' suggestion but (sort of) building on this notion of team teaching, I've been thinking about how amazing it would be if Carleton used this next year to be completely bold and innovative. Rather than having traditional courses, what if we used a liberal arts interdisciplinary lens to create teams of faculty who could collaborate to create learning experiences for students around the theme of PANDEMICS! Maybe we would do shorter terms to give us a time to plan, or maybe we'd stick to the same groups the entire year and do it all online. I can't think of a single discipline that doesn't have some bearing on the topic in some way. What better way to show that the liberal arts approach matters, that subject matter expertise matters, than by actually tak[ing] on a topic that matters to/in the world in a more immediate, substantial way and by responding to the world as it is?"
Before Anita posted this comment, the two of us had exchanged a series of text messages where we had fleshed out some of the possibilities. We first started by expressing some of our frustrations about the framing of these conversations that faculty were being asked to engage in as well as the neglect of expertise about infectious disease (the college has since brought in an epidemiologist to campus). We provide here an edited transcript with some notes added in italics as we've learned more about the effects of the pandemic and people's response to it (edited mostly for clarity…and um, colorful language!)
Adriana: The framing is just all wrong…it's imagining that somehow things are "normal" in 6-8 months… or that there's ANY WAY to bring students back to be in a college community that is SAFE. Nightmare scenarios don't make for good learning. [A recent nationwide survey found that 18-25 year olds have been the least likely to follow pandemic hygiene.]
Anita: Also, why are any of us weighing in on this to begin with? Asking me for my view on how to do social distancing or whether it'll be safe is like asking my students to "weigh in" on whether race is biologically real. I don't have that discussion with them. I have them read social science research about the impacts of people having that false belief.
Adriana: YES.
Anita: That's what I wanted to write…this discussion is basically undermining any defense of why places like Carleton or universities in general are necessary. If we can all be "experts" because we've read a few things, then why should families pay us $70,000 for our subject matter and pedagogical expertise? We just need YouTube and TED Talks.
Adriana: The one thing I found interesting is some folks talking about team teaching online — I love that idea.
Anita: Yeah, I'd love to do a version of the structured gap year but a cool, liberal arts interdisciplinary one where a team of faculty collaborate to create learning experiences around the theme of pandemics. And we would do shorter terms, to give us a month to plan and then two months to work with students.
Adriana: OMG – an AMST sequence on pandemics would be amazing.
Anita: What better way to show that we matter, that liberal arts matters, than by actually mattering to the world and responding to the world AS IT IS?
A couple of days after this discussion, Anita posted her comment to Moodle…mostly to silence (cheers to a staff member who emailed their support!). When Anita mentioned this idea to a friend who teaches at a large state university, they asked what such a scenario might look like in more practical terms.
Friend: Can you sketch out a more detailed plan? How do you see interdisciplinary work working?
Anita: The whole point is that we would need to do it together!
Friend: Sometimes you need to sketch out the idea so people can conceptualize it
Anita: Fine. It's not that difficult to imagine scenarios. Let's think about how the pandemic has made worse inequities through the disciplines of education, sociology, biology…Let's think about the metaphor of pandemics in literature: English, Spanish, Latin, all the languages.
Friend: I make those kinds of suggestions in my program a lot. If I taught in a liberal arts school, I'd say let's do it!
Anita: Exactly! We're supposedly all about doing this kind of innovative teaching but we mostly do it on the edges, in small ways.
Friend: Yes. This would reconfigure how you approach a problem. I like the interdisciplinary approach because how else can you approach big problems? You could create interdisciplinary learning groups with students and profs. What's the number of students versus professors?
Anita: 2000 students, maybe 200 faculty. And if we include staff (librarians, tech folks), maybe another 50 instructors
Friend: What?! That would only be like 10 students per instructor. If you grouped 3-4 instructors, you are still talking about a small student/teacher ratio. You could create an overarching framework to consider what should be accomplished but then each group could design their own learning plan and outcomes. That's so totally doable! You could have a research fair at the end to highlight outcomes.
Totally doable, but only if we have the will to imagine it.
For example, rather than each university bringing back their students back to campus, what if universities coordinated regionally to use dorms and dining services to serve people in the more immediate communities who need housing and food? One reason that Carleton cited for their recent decision to bring back 85% of students to campus in the fall were inequities in students' ability to access online learning. Of course, this inequity is a much larger and systemic one. What if campuses opened up their spaces for students in immediate communities, including K-12 students, to access better Wi-Fi services? And if this kind of access was coordinated regionally and nationally, our students might have access to housing, internet, and other necessary services, along with the thousands of others in their communities with the same needs. Perhaps there are lessons we can learn from businesses that have pivoted to serve community needs, such as this Black-owned distillery in Minneapolis.
We're not arguing here that these ideas are THE ideas. As Anita noted to her friend, the point is to work on such ideas together as a community. Kevin notes in his webinar that the point is not to agree or disagree with the specific ideas that he proposes, but rather to ask different questions about what this moment allows us to do, compels us to do. Rather than asking how we can tinker with our curriculum and pedagogy to get us as close to "normal" as possible, what if we asked instead, as Kevin does, "How should universities better serve community capacity building, democracy building, and movement building?" How might we answer that question in this moment of the pandemic and racial justice uprisings? How might those answers then shift fundamentally our visions of who our institutions should serve and to what purposes?
Kevin calls out faculty, and we would say perhaps his challenge is especially relevant for those of us with the security of tenure, for NOT protesting more robustly against our institutions for failing to live up to social justice standards, especially in this moment of the pandemic and the racial justice uprisings. He urges us to organize and collectivize. There are small liberal arts colleges that have started to move in this direction.
We'll admit that the two of us are at a loss about how to do so at Carleton. Given our own histories of feeling stymied in our efforts to influence systemic institutional change, we have focused instead on what we can do in our classes, with our research, and in our communities outside of Carleton. So we don't have a neat, inspiring ending for you about what we have done or what you should do.
We would, though, love for all of you to share with us your ideas or ideas that you've encountered from others that you find particularly intriguing, ideas that move us closer to dismantling educational systems that reinforce and reproduce White Supremacy and economic inequities.
Author downwithbrownblogPosted on June 24, 2020 July 6, 2020 Categories collective organizing, institutional politics, pandemic, resistance, teaching, theories of changeTags academia, crisis, pandemic, pedagogy, racial justice uprisingsLeave a comment on Crisis pedagogy
Reimagining K-12 schools in Minneapolis and beyond
Center High School students protesting mistreatment by school resource officers in May 2016. Photo credit: Andy Rathbun, Pioneer Press.
In this post, we want to signal boost a statement issued on June 7, 2020, by Education for Liberation, Minnesota Chapter, in support of the Minneapolis School Board's recent decision to end their contract with the Minneapolis School Board. As this statement makes clear, taking cops out of schools is just a first step in moving towards developing curricula, pedagogy, and practices that truly educate and nurture Black and Indigenous students and students of color.
Anita is a member of Ed Lib, MN Chapter, the first-ever local chapter of the Education for Liberation Network. Our chapter was started by core local organizers of the 2019 Free Minds, Free People Conference. Our goal is to be a network to bring together various constituencies in MN toward organizing for educational justice. Our membership consists of about 100 teachers, youth, activists, and academics. Our current emphasis is on designing a statewide mentorship network for BIPOC educators who are or want to teach Ethnic Studies.
Schools without police: Our vision for liberatory education in Minneapolis and beyond
The Education for Liberation Network, Minnesota Chapter, stands in solidarity with the youth, families, teachers, and community members who organized to push the MPS School Board to vote to end the district's relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department. We specifically want to lift up the Black youth who led this effort despite being constantly targeted by police in schools. The vote was a testament to the will of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) youth in organizations like Black Liberation Project, Youth Political Action Coalition (YPAC), Young Muslim Collective, and YoUthROC, among others, who strive, each day, to implore the district to live up to its rhetoric of equity and to truly serve the children of Minneapolis by providing an education they deserve. Ed Lib Minnesota recognizes that the termination of the racist MPD is just one stretch of a long road to justice that will take courage, imagination, humility, and will among the district's leadership and its communities.
Simply removing police from MPS, alone, will not ensure the safety and well-being of Minneapolis's BIPOC youth and families. The path forward must take into account the educational paradigm that allowed for police to have a role in schools in the first place. MPS must question the nature of educational structures that seek to justify notions of meritocracy, standardization, ability, and competition. Ending the contract with MPD should not be seen as a way to save money. The money needs to be reinvested in programs that nurture BIPOC youth. MPS must take bold steps to center trauma-informed practices and ethnic studies, and address racial disproportionality between teacher and student demographics in order to create an ethic of care across the district. The district must take a reparational stance to address the decades of racial animus faced by generations of youth of color, including making substantial financial investments in historically underfunded neighborhoods and funneling the most effective educators to the students with the most need. In addition to the elimination of police in schools, the district must terminate teachers who consistently remove youth of color from classes, and administrators who ignore the data showing the evidence of racist practices occurring each day.
The district must fundamentally change its curriculum across all grade levels to center the histories, cultural practices, knowledge, and skills of its diverse constituency. No longer is it acceptable for students to graduate without a deep and profound understanding of Indigenous, Pan-African, Pan-Asian, and Pan-American studies. No longer can multilingual youth be treated as though they are deficient against a monolingual English standard. No longer can racialized disparities in discipline continue to push students out of schools. Youth who consciously or unconsciously resist racist educational contexts are not behavioral problems. They are the barometers who measure the toxic atmosphere of a district with a deep history of anti-black and white supremacist logics.
Ed Lib Minnesota stands with the people of Minneapolis, and other communities, to demand that the cops who are being kicked out of the schools be replaced with BIPOC counselors and educators, rich and vibrant ethnic studies curricula, transformative justice practices, and translingual classrooms. Our organization would like to be a resource to help MPS transition toward this vision. Every child deserves to be the subject of their own educational journey, and not the object of an imaginary white norm. Police in schools are just one piece of a much larger white supremacist puzzle that must be taken apart and exposed for the lie it is.
The Education for Liberation Network, MN Chapter
minnesota@edliberation.org
Author downwithbrownblogPosted on June 16, 2020 Categories collective organizing, race, resistance, teachingTags reimagining schools; liberatory education; ethnic studies1 Comment on Reimagining K-12 schools in Minneapolis and beyond
Divestment and (Re)investment
Photo by Anita; on Chicago Avenue between 37th and 38th streets, South Minneapolis.
Note: We will be working on a series of posts centered around "changing our imaginations" about education, colleges, and all the things that the two of us love to think and write about, as inspired by Kandace Montgomery, a Minneapolis-based organizer for Black Visions Collective. This post is by Anita.
They've ruined our imagination and told us that policing is the issue [solution]. We need to change our imagination. We have to change what's possible. Concretely, it's putting investment in things like making sure everyone has food, making sure everyone has housing…being in process together so how do we want to keep each other safe? How do we want to address harm? Because harm will happen. How do we do that without sending racists with guns who have no accountability? Kandace Montgomery, Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block.
Two weeks ago, an unarmed Black man was murdered by Minneapolis police officers. Murdered brutally, casually, for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill.
Since then, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and cities and towns across the U.S. have erupted in protests against police brutality, calling for an end to racist policing and more importantly, an end to policing. Minneapolis is leading the country in reimagining community safety and community health and resilience beyond police. Thanks to the decades of organizing by Black activists and communities, especially Black youth, the Minneapolis School Board voted to end their contract with the Minneapolis Police Department and nine out of twelve City Council members have pledged to "dismantle the police department."
During the first week of the uprisings in Minneapolis, I had a conversation with a friend that got me thinking about all the ways in which we need to divest and reinvest as we collectively imagine and build futures of justice for Black communities and for all of us. There's the concrete divestment of money and resources from harmful institutions and the reinvestment of money and resources into community-led, justice-oriented solutions. What is also necessary is the divestment of my own thinking and ideas about safety and order. Or as Kandace Montgomery put it in an interview with Unicorn Riot after the community meeting on June 7, 2020, where the nine city council members announced their pledge to dismantle the police department, "We need to change our imaginations."
During a phone call with a friend the day after the 3rd precinct and many nearby buildings had burned down, we talked about how my first reactions watching buildings in South Minneapolis burn down were shock and horror. I talked about how I was raised to believe in the politics of respectability, to obey laws, to follow the rules, and to believe that the police were there to help us. I needed to be honest in naming that my first reactions might have been shock and horror, rather than pretending like I didn't have those initial reactions. I needed to acknowledge that I needed a moment to reframe what was happening. That I had to understand what we were seeing through a different lens than the ones given to me as a child of South Asian immigrants to this country. That I needed to shift my focus to the kindling from the flame, as historian Carol Anderson described it. That I perhaps needed to learn more about what it means to abolish the police if I am to truly divest from what I have been taught to believe.
To that end, a partial list of resources that I've found useful if perhaps you too need to divest from some of your previous ideas about what keeps us safe:
MPD150's frequently asked questions page that answers questions such as "Won't abolishing the police create chaos and crime? How will we stay safe?"
The first eight steps of abolition–what do we divest from, what do we invest in.
How to talk to children about the idea of abolition: a Woke Kindergarten reading of Wings by Christopher Myers
The end of policing Alex Vitale
Are prisons obsolete? Angela Y Davis
Throughline podcast episode about the origins of American police
P.S.: Yeah, we've been on hiatus for a while…but we're back at least for now. Given everything happening in our world today, we won't promise that we'll be blogging regularly or all the time, but we'll try our best to put out posts on somewhat of a regular basis. As always, if you have a question about a race-related topic, particularly one pertaining to how we can imagine different, more just, more anti-racist ways of living, working, learning, and teaching on a college campus, you can write to us here.
P.P.S.: We'd love to have folks do guest blog posts for us around the theme of "changing our imaginations," especially in the realm of education/higher educational institutions. So BIPOC folks interested in doing so, hit us up!
Author downwithbrownblogPosted on June 10, 2020 June 11, 2020 Categories race, resistance, theories of change, violenceTags abolition; Minneapolis uprisings;1 Comment on Divestment and (Re)investment
Shout out (and congrats!) to the Yale Ethnic, Race, and Migration studies faculty
Image source. Stanford students striking in 1989 to call for Ethnic Studies programs. Ask Adriana about her role in it if you know her IRL!
In April this year, 13 faculty with appointments in Yale University's Ethnic, Race & Migration studies program withdrew their labor from the program. These faculty, who represented 13 out of 19 faculty associated with the program, made clear that their decision came after years of trying to get the Yale administration to support the program more robustly. All 13 faculty hold positions in other departments and were doing the work of the program without any pay or recognition. They argued that while such programs face challenges in most institutions for reasons that include racism, the difference at Yale was the vast amount of resources that Yale has at its disposal, with its $29.4 billion endowment. We wanted to highlight this move by Yale faculty as we appreciate deeply this collective action of the Yale faculty to push their administration to make true commitment to a program that has enormous intellectual, social, and political value at Yale and to many students and faculty elsewhere, especially those of color.
Earlier this month, the faculty announced that they were recommitting to the program, following Yale administration's move to provide concrete support to the program's status and permanence on campus by allocating five faculty positions to the program.
Congratulations to the Yale faculty and students on their accomplishment!
Author downwithbrownblogPosted on May 17, 2019 May 16, 2019 Categories collective organizing, links, resistanceTags ethnic studies, YaleLeave a comment on Shout out (and congrats!) to the Yale Ethnic, Race, and Migration studies faculty
Midterm elections and break
As the results of the midterm elections came in, we cheered on the women of color and Indigenous women who will be a part of a more diverse group of representative on the local, state, and national levels. We feel good about the part that we played. Anita is especially excited about having played a tiny part (writing 60 postcards to voters) in support of Florida's Amendment 4, which passed and restored the right to vote for more than a million Floridians. Adriana also wrote postcards in support of candidates across the country, but is especially proud of getting out to canvass twice in MN-2.
And we know that there's so much more work still to be done. We're inspired by our friends, family, students, and alums who have dedicated their time and energy to electoral politics while also being clear that elections are only a part of what needs to change in order to build a more equitable society for us all.
We plan to be back in January with a series of posts about the ramifications of the #metoo movement on academic freedom, particularly as it relates to how we think about what and who we teach in our classrooms. We'd love to hear if there are particular questions or topics you've been thinking about in that area that we might be able to address in our posts. You can email us as doxprofx@gmail.com or submit a question here anonymously.
Author downwithbrownblogPosted on November 9, 2018 November 8, 2018 Categories identity, resistanceTags electoral politicsLeave a comment on Midterm elections and break