Sunday, January 25, 2015

It's alive!!

I love orchids, but I've never been able to get one to re-bloom after the initial flowers fall off. I usually keep watering them for a few months until I give up and buy a replacement. But yesterday, for the first time ever, I went to water my latest all-leaves-no-flowers orchid and saw that it has sprouted a new shoot with buds on it!
Look at all those buds!

I'm still sort of expecting that the buds will die and fall off without blooming, but at least I've gotten farther than I ever have before!

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Learning Things: History

As I talked about in my last entry, I am re-committing myself to doing more and being better about using my privilege and power to work for equity. I've been working on myself in this area for a while now, but am going to start documenting my efforts here to try and hold myself accountable to doing this work more, not just when it's convenient. I'd also love to get ideas from others, if anything I write here is something you have thoughts on! I'm tentatively thinking I'll divide my efforts into the highly nuanced categories of "learning things" and "doing things," to try and make sure I am not doing entirely one or the other. I am going to always include what I've been doing so far (even if it's nothing), and what I'm committing to do next.

So, today's theme is learning things - history edition! One of the benefits of being in the dominant group is that you get to write your own history - that's how I went through school learning things like "the Indians helped the pilgrims and they all feasted together!" and "slaves were really treated like part of the family!" and "the Civil War was about state's rights!"  From my (non-American) parents I was often taught the second half of those sentences at home - "... and then the pilgrims committed systematic genocide against the Indians!" and "...only if you consider people in your family to be your property that you can beat, rape and murder!" and "....specifically, the right of states to base their entire economy on slavery!" So, I'm not coming into this with the view that everything I learned about history is the One Righteous Truth, but I do know that my knowledge of history is often lacking and one-sided. Since one of the ways that oppression works is erasing the history and culture of the oppressed, I am aiming to re-educate myself about American history (and maybe eventually world history, but I'm trying to not be overly ambitious at first) in an effort to resist that erasure.

What I have done so far: I have been somewhat sporadically learning about history as I find interesting articles and books, but I haven't been particularly purposeful about it.
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case For Reparations is excellent, and brilliantly lays out how America as it currently exists could and would not exist without being built on the plundered lives and labor of Black people. I got to see him speak at Penn a few months ago, and he is equally brilliant in person - the video is online if anyone is interested.
  • Because Ta-Nehisi Coates is the best, I made a twitter account so I could follow him, and he recommended A Sword Among Lions: Ida B Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching.Oh. My. God. I don't think I even learned about Ida B Wells in school, but she is AMAZING! I think I annoyed the crap out of Ben and everyone I work with while I was reading this biography, because I just couldn't shut up about her. Anecdote: She was riding in the "ladies car" of the train, and the conductor told her she had to leave because she wasn't White and therefore not a lady, but she resisted his efforts to remove her and even BIT HIM before he physically forced her out. Then she sued the train company for discrimination and won - in 1884. Unfortunately, the company appealed and the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the ruling in 1887. And that was one small blip early on in her lifetime of fighting for the rights of women and Black people.
  • At the recommendation of a friend, I read The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. I think the great migration was mentioned once in passing in my AP US History class, but I really had no idea about the magnitude of both the migration itself and its impact on the country. The whole thing is beautifully written - it's nonfiction but reads like literature. One of the parts that made a big impression on me was the utter bafflement of many White Southerners about why all the Black people were leaving - there are many letters, editorials, journal entries, etc... from the time that illustrate their complete inability to comprehend why Black people wouldn't want to stay in the land of sharecropping and lynching, because they genuinely believed that conditions were as good as they could be for Black people. I had previously thought that White people not understanding the reality that Black people live in was a recent phenomenon, but this book disabused me of that notion.
  • I can't actually remember where I saw this book recommended, I think it might have been the Daily Show, but I also read and enjoyed Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barrack Obama. My previous understanding of the civil rights movement was very superficial (MLK was Professor X, Malcolm X was Magneto, a few new laws were passed, the end). This book complicates that linear narrative, and taught me a lot about how the different leaders interacted with and influenced each other throughout their lives.
What I'm committing to do next: I want to be a bit more systematic about filling in the holes in my history education, instead of (or at least, in addition to) my previous haphazard approach.
  • I'm going to start with A People's History of the United States, because I keep seeing it suggested as the starting point for learning American history from the point of view of the colonized, not the colonizers. I figure that will give me some high level understanding, and then I can use the bibliography to pick what to read next.
  • I'm also going to read Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year. I saw it on the Daily Show and it looked really interesting, and I know I need to
    unlearn the sanitized "MLK just wanted everyone to get along" version I was taught in school, and learn instead about the radical who railed against the triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism.
  • Lastly (for now), I signed up with some work friends for a free online class on the history of American education reform. I think we often have a tendency to think that the work we do "really" started when we got here, so I want to better understand the history leading up to the education system as it currently exists, and the history of efforts to reform it, so I can better and more accurately situate my work in that context.

Monday, January 19, 2015

We The People

Some pictures from today's Reclaim MLK march in Philadelphia:

School District of Philadelphia central office
City Hall
National Constitution Center
Independence Hall
I have been reading Dr. King's Letter From a Birmingham Jail and thinking a lot about the part about White moderates who agree with the civil rights movement but don't actually do anything to further its goals. I think about the White people who read about lynchings and beatings and did nothing and I feel so incredulous - and then I ask myself what have I done about the ongoing murders of so many unarmed Black people by the police. I have been letting myself off the hook because I work for a nonprofit whose mission is educational equity, but that's not enough. I need to learn more, I need to march more, I need to give back more, and I need to talk to my fellow White people about these issues more. Dr. King also said "large segments of White society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity" - I have let myself be too content with tranquility, and that needs to change.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Hanging with my little sister

My little sister* was in a really funny mood today, I think because she was insanely excited about a sleepover birthday party at a hotel that she was going to after I left. We had a bunch of ridiculous conversations - I wish I had been writing them down since I know there were more, but here are the top three I remember:
LS: What would happen if it rained gumballs??! [There was absolutely zero context for this question, by the way.]
Me: It would probably hurt!
LS: Nuh uh, how could a gumball hurt?
Me: Imagine if someone threw a gumball at your head really hard.
LS: I would throw it right back at them!!!

LS: When I grow up I'm going to start a business and live in a pink mansion with a pink swimming pool and pink hot tub. [If you can't tell, pink is her favorite color.]
Me: That sounds awesome - am I allowed to visit?
LS: Yes, but it will be really far away. It will be in California.
Me: Why will it be in California?
LS: Because that's where businesses come from. Duuuuuh.

LS: [Talking about playing school with her little sisters, and pretending to be their math teacher.] I taught them about the nominator and the equinominator.
Me: The numerator and the denominator?
LS: No, the nominator and the equinominator.
Me: [Thinking this was some new math thing that I'm ignorant of] I haven't heard of those before.
LS: That's because I made them up! [She then proceeded to explain that the "nominator" is the math problem itself ("2 + 2") and the "equinomator" is the solution ("4"). She had her sisters underline the nominator and box the equinominator for a bunch of math problems - she even made worksheets for them. I love that she is nerdy enough to make up math terms for fun!]
* The one I am mentoring, not the one I shared a uterus with. The uterus one actually came for a visit today, which was excellent, but she wasn't quite so adorable. No offense, Mariel.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Black Socks

When I'm doing the laundry and come across an unpaired sock, I put it on the little shelf above the dryer until its match turns up later. Over the four years we've lived here, though, a few unmatched socks have accumulated up there with their mates apparently permanently lost. There are nine of them, and they are all black.
The only possible explanation I can think of is that we have some sort of dryer gremlin with a black sock fetish. How else could we end up with nine distinct unmatched black socks, and no unmatched socks of any other color?