Doing things: Times to speak up, and times to listen

Background: The MIT class ring is called the brass rat, and it is a Big Deal amongst MIT people. You get your ring at the end of your sophomore year, so wearing one around campus is a status symbol that you are at least halfway through your MIT education. You flip it around at graduation and forever after, so wearing a flipped brass rat is an even bigger status symbol - you have an MIT degree! There is a lot of pomp and circumstance surrounding the ring, starting with the "ring premier" partway through your sophomore year - each class has a "ring committee" that updates the design to reflect that specific graduating class's time at MIT, and that design is revealed at the premier. Starting with the class of 2002 there has been a push to include a woman in the MIT seal on the ring, but despite women making up nearly half of the undergraduate population it took until the class of 2017 to get another woman on the seal (happily the 2018s followed suit, so hopefully it will stick). Supporters of the two-men seal claim that they aren't supporting the exclusion of women, but the continuance of "tradition" - which is bullshit for many reasons, not the least of which is that the seal has been altered in a variety of ways over the years (like placing a remote control in the pocket of one of the seal people for the class of 2006) with no "tradition!" outcry. Also, any time you are defending something solely on the basis of "that's the way we've always done it," you need to dig deeper to figure out what you are really saying, since "tradition" can be, and often is, used to justify the continuation of all sorts of oppression long past the point when one can plausibly deny awareness of the issue (SAE, anyone?).

***

I was beyond excited for my class's ring premier. I look young for my age and was dying to soon have wearable, undeniable proof that I not only was an MIT student (and not a visiting high schooler, as I often got mistaken for), but I was (at least) halfway through my time at the Institute. Plus, like most 19-year-olds would be, I was dying for a status symbol that my particular community valued highly. I would finally have a tangible piece of evidence that I belonged with the cool kids.

My classmates and I dressed up for the premier, and applauded with delight as each successive component of the ring was revealed. I was waiting with bated breath for the revelation of the seal, because I was convinced that our class would finally include a woman - it was 2006, for chrissakes! But when the big moment finally came, they revealed a seal with two men - in fact, they specifically used the term "unadulterated" to describe it. Apparently the inclusion of someone like me would have been an adulteration - would have made it "weaker by adding something of poor quality."

For a split second I felt crushed, but then my disappointment turned to confusion as I noticed the rest of the audience reacting. Men, not all of them but a lot of them, all around me were on their feet cheering. Not just cheering - pumping their fists in the air, whooping, and hollering with excitement. It was like being in the stands at a sporting event when the home team scores, but the unbridled enthusiasm was because people like me were excluded. I felt a new feeling in the pit of my stomach, one that I had never felt before. A minute ago I had been comfortably surrounded by my peers, feeling very much a part of the MIT community. Now a large part of that community was triumphantly celebrating that I had been kept out of a cherished part of our shared culture, and I felt sick. I dimly noticed some students walking out - mostly women but some men as well - but I was too surprised and confused to join them. To this day I still very much regret that I didn't.

(Technically our ring has a woman on it, because it has Athena, goddess of wisdom, in the courtyard in another section. But if you believe that - despite the fact that she is separate, a quarter the size of the men (plural), and standing out in the yard instead of at the dais - she is still somehow equal, then we have a 1954 supreme court decision to talk about.)

MIT is a very male-dominated place, and I had been made to feel my otherness in many small ways over my first two years there - the two most common were people thinking I was there to visit my brother or boyfriend, and other students telling me it was easier for me to get in because I was a girl. It had been easy to brush off those incidents, and even laugh at them, because I thought they were anomalies - little leftover shards of a dying patriarchal culture whose heyday had long since passed. My ring premiere was the first time it was forcefully revealed to me that the belief that people like me didn't fully belong was much more pervasive and deeply held than I had realized, and it was the first time in my life I had been made to feel that way. After all, I'm a cis, straight, white, thin, able-bodied woman from an affluent neighborhood and with a great education - I very comfortably belong in the vast majority of places that I go. That brief glimpse of what it feels like to be marginalized, and to have your exclusion not just tolerated but celebrated by people you had liked and respected, was an eye-opening moment for me. As was the continuing delegitimization of my feelings by many of my male friends, who told me I was being too sensitive, reading too much into nothing, and - like most women who voice their feelings - crazy. In some ways, that denial of my experience hurt worse than the initial insult itself - I vividly recall the pain of a previously-trusted male hallmate telling me to stop complaining about nothing. We are still in the same social circles but I have never felt the same way about him since.

I tell this story today because my womanhood is often how I connect to and seek to more deeply understand other forms of oppression. I can never claim to understand what it feels like to be a person of color in this country, because my white privilege so far outweighs my oppression as a women given all the other forms of identity privilege I listed above. But moments like the ring premier and the conversations I had after it - and moments like when I was at the movies and the row of men behind me couldn't stop laughing at an anti-rape PSA (because apparently trying to prevent rape is hilarious), or when I was in the park and and a group of men near me kept catcalling a group of women marching against sexual assault - give me slivers of insight into what daily life is like for so many people in this country.

What stands out to me the most about all of those moments is not the small number of men committing the offense, but the large number of men watching what was happening and doing nothing. That is the real staying power of systemic oppression - not that some members of the dominant group occasionally make their power visible in ugly ways, but that the rest of the dominant group lets inertia prevent them from interfering. It is not the responsibility of the oppressed to intervene and educate the people who are oppressing them, and oftentimes doing so is not even a possibility for them. I felt physically unsafe in that movie theater and at that park; there was no way I was going to approach those men and ask them to stop. The ones with the power to dismantle oppression are the members of the dominant group, and - just like Spider-Man - having that power gives them the responsibility to do so.

The way I wanted men to disrupt other men during the moments I talked about here (and so many others) - that's the way I need to disrupt my fellow white people when I see them perpetuating racism, and my fellow cis people when I see them perpetuating transphobia, and my fellow straight people, and able-bodied people, and... And the way I wanted my male friends to actually listen to what I was trying to tell them about something that was painful and difficult for me - that's the way I need to listen when a person of color trusts me enough to tell me about a painful confrontation they had with racism, even if I was the one who caused the hurt. I don't need to explain away what happened by talking about good intentions, or alternate interpretations, or hyper-sensitivity. I need to listen, empathize, apologize when necessary, and above all else be grateful for their trust in me, knowing how hard it is for me to openly talk about my experiences with sexism with most men given how often it is met with denial.

For me at least, I often times don't speak up when I see something happening because I feel like I don't know how. But there are a lot of resources out there on how to effectively challenge oppressive moments and how to tell someone they sound racist, and letting my fear of making a fool of myself prevent me from fulfilling my responsibility to disrupt oppression is just another way of accepting the oppressive status quo. My silence legitimizes the power of systemic oppression, and makes me complicit in perpetuating it.

I still wear my brass rat every single day, no longer because I need the world to know that I went to MIT, but because when I look at it I remember that pit in my stomach nearly a decade ago. I remember how my silence forces other people to spend most of their lives with their stomachs in that pit. And while I don't always speak up when I should, and I don't always get it right when I do speak up, I wear the ring like Spider-Man would wear a locket of Uncle Ben. I have power to disrupt oppression, and that means I have the responsibility to do so.

Mini-Samplers

I took advantage of being together with all my TFA friends and colleagues last weekend to make mini-samplers for two of my teammates/friends. I like making tiny hoop samplers (this is still one my all-time favorite projects), although at first glance these both seem pretty weird:

Let me explain. First, Shannon:

She lives in New Mexico, which explains the red and yellow sun symbol at the top. Her favorite NM food is green chiles (she even gave me a green chile candle once), and she also really likes beer and brewing, hence the beer and chiles at the bottom. She lived in Baltimore for five years, and her favorite Baltimore thing was eating crabs, which is where the little crabs come from. Lastly, our team mascot for reasons that predate me and I don't fully understand is the hedgehog, so I added them in to round everything out.

Now Stevie:

First and foremost, I know that monkey at the top looks crazy, but I swear it's a real thing! Specifically, it's a red-shanked douc, aka the monkey Stevie is studying for the anthropology PhD she is working on part-time, and it really does look like that:

She also loves Star Wars, hence R2D2 and Chewbacca, and has two dogs that I tried to portray at the bottom. I made her hedgehogs purple to add some color, because there was so much brown from the monkey, Chewie, and the dogs.

Now back to my never-ending list of wedding samplers!

25th Anniversary Summit

This past weekend was TFA's 25th Anniversary Summit in Washington DC! At the 20th we had 11,000 attendees and I couldn't believe how many people that was; this year we had 15,000. We took up the entire million square feet of the convention center, and could no longer fit in any one room of it - the only time all 15,000 attendees were in the same place was for closing ceremonies in the Verizon Center. Just like five years ago it was a re-energizing and inspiring weekend for me as I think about the work I do and why.

Me looking cool with my lanyard and buttons by the Philly sign.

Besides running around squealing and reuniting with TFA friends from all over the country (including Ms. L, who is now in her eighth year of teaching!), I got to attend some pretty great sessions. One highlight was a panel on "What is the role of white leaders on the path to educational equity?", which was moderated by Dr. Beverly Tatum, who I have a HUGE professional crush on. I was helping set up the room for the session before it started, when she came in and introduced herself to me like it was no big deal, and then SHOOK MY HAND!! Alas, I don't have any photographic evidence that this happened, but it did and it filled my heart with joy. The panel itself was pretty great too:

From left to right: Dr. Tatum, Elisa Villanueva Beard (our CEO), Dr. Jeff Duncan-Andrade, the principal of a local DC school, and John Deasy (former LAUSD superintendent)

(Seriously, if you haven't seen Dr. Duncan-Andrade speak before, definitely click the link and watch the video.)

My other favorite session was on intentionally diverse schools, since as Ben and I get closer to starting our own family, we have been talking a lot about the type of school where we want to send our hypothetical future kids. We both agree we want a racially and socioeconomically diverse public school, but those are few and far between - and ever fewer and farther if you want such a school that is actually integrated, and doesn't track its students by race and class under the guise of "ability." The panel consisted of four principals of intentionally diverse schools, and was moderated by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who you may know from a recent piece she did on This American Life - The Problem We All Live With. That's another one you need to listen to as soon as you can if you haven't already. You can also watch the full panel online if you are interested - I learned a lot, but honestly left feeling discouraged about the backwards progress that seems to be happening in school integration across the country.

The closing ceremony at the Verizon Center was great - there's nothing like being in a stadium full of people passionate about working towards educational equity.

Photo shamelessly lifted from the TFA twitter feed.

I'm embedding the video below - you can watch the full thing if you are interested, but there are a few highlights I particularly recommend:

• First 10 minutes - three different groups of student performers: students from Hawai'i performing a hula, students from New Mexico performing a drum circle and hoop dance, and a drumline and dancers from a DC high school
• 0:43 - a second generation corps member (aka a TFA teacher who was taught by TFA teachers) talks about his journey to end up teaching students in his home community of the Rio Grande Valley
• 1:02 - President Obama!! (sadly, he was present via video only)
• 1:22 - an alum's powerful spoken word piece, it's hard to explain but just watch and you won't regret it
• 1:27 - a truly amazing student leader from Baltimore (and hopefully a future TFA teacher!)
• 1:36 - Memphis parent activists and organizers (I will be sending this segment to everyone who trots out the old "but those families don't care about education!" racist bullshit from this point on)

Also - a small personal highlight for me was that in our CEO's closing remarks (last 10 minutes of the video above), while listing out the many identities that comprise the TFA community, she said "we are a community that is Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Humanist, and Atheist and so much more." There are a lot of religious folks at TFA, mostly Christian, so there is often language that is unintentionally exclusionary to atheistic folks like myself (e.g. "please join us all in praying"). A few years ago I started a small resource group for secular people at TFA, and several times in the intervening years we've contacted the CEO when she says stuff like "we're all praying" to let her know we exist and ask her to consider more inclusive language like "our thoughts and prayers." So the fact that she included "humanist and atheist" in her list was very exciting to me, since it means she knows we exist and proactively thought to include us, and I think I can take some small amount of credit for that fact. It was a very small thing in a weekend bursting with big things, but it was a very personally satisfying note to end on.

Learning things: History part three

My normally rapid reading pace got derailed a bit with the road trip and the move, but now that we're pretty well settled into our new apartment, I am back on track! Since today is MLK Day it seemed appropriate for a history update.

What I've read since last time:

• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. I had started reading this one as of my last history post, so already shared a bit about it. The central thesis is that the Americas were much more populous and advanced (technologically, politically, artistically... in every way you can think of, basically) than we have historically been willing to acknowledge in the face of overwhelming supporting evidence, given that the more we acknowledge the extent of pre-contact American civilization, the more horrific the ensuing genocide we also have to acknowledge is. The book also tries to reconstruct some of the history of various empires, wars, etc... in the Americas before 1492, which helps dispel the colonial misconception that American Indians were somehow these history-less people frozen in time at the moment of their "discovery."
• Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. I really loved this book! I learned a TON about the history of Asian American activism and resistance (and even the emergence of "Asian American" as a social category). It is incredibly engaging - the author interweaves the broader history with her own personal story of identity and activism (i.e. she went to Princeton in the first class to admit women, and worked to establish an Asian American Student Association there. She's also a lesbian and writes about the intersectionality of Asian American movements with LGBTQ movements). I didn't realize that there had been so much Asian American involvement in the labor movement, and how much of that involvement was done in partnership with Latin@ activism in multi-racial coalitions. One of the stories that really stuck out to me was that of the Wards Cove cannery workers - the Asian workers were restricted to the lowest-paid and most dangerous jobs, while the White workers got the higher-paid and safer jobs. They sued for discrimination and the case went to the Supreme Court, who basically said "okay yeah, the data shows all the Asian workers get crappy jobs and all the White workers get good jobs, but you can't PROVE discriminatory intent, so suck it." The ordeal unfolded over decades and there was never any justice for any of the involved workers.
• City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972.  This book was a bit denser than I anticipated - I think it was somebody's dissertation turned into a book? Anyway, it was still very interesting, especially because so many of the events happened in our old neighborhood in Philly. Growing up after mainstream acceptance for being gay was already starting to spread, I don't think I fully realized the extent of the oppression gay people had to live under not that long ago - large-scale police raids, mass arrests, and beatings were a fairly continuous part of the gay experience for decades in Philly.
• Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America. I added this book to the list after I saw it recommended somewhere, and holy cow am I glad I did. It's about a rape case Thurgood Marshall took on when he was still a lawyer with the NAACP, before Brown vs Board of Ed. It was a pretty archetypal Jim Crow-era rape case - a white woman claimed to have been raped by four black men, and although there was zero evidence to support her claim and a ton of evidence to disprove it (example: two of the four men she accused weren't even in town when it allegedly happened), it was a white lady's word against four black men's, so all were convicted and sentenced to death (by an all-white jury, of course). A lot more stuff happens as well, but I don't want to give it all away - I highly recommend everyone read it. It's engrossing and enraging in many different ways; one of the most striking is how many of the quotes in it are virtually indistinguishable from contemporary ones. For example, in 1949 the (white) mayor of the town involved said, in reference to the NAACP getting involved, "[outsiders] are attempting to create race hatred and discord... where relations between whites and coloreds have always been good." This was the mayor of a town where the majority of Black citizens labored under debt peonage and the sheriff was literally a publicly active KKK member, not to mention all the regular injustices of the Jim Crow South, and yet if you update the word "coloreds," it could have easily come from the white mayor of Ferguson in 2014. And it's not just quotes that still resonate nearly 70 years later - there is literally a case in front of the Kentucky Supreme Court right now about the (un)constituionality of all-white juries.

The thing that most surprised me in reading this book actually had to do with gender, not race. In particular, I was taken aback by my own reaction to the white girl (she was 17 at the time) who accused the four men - the part of my brain that says things before I can consciously think about them pretty consistently reacted to everything she did with some version of "that whore" or "fucking slut," and I found that I hated her the most out of everyone involved. And yes, to be clear, what she did was reprehensible - but why did I hate her more than the sheriff whose literal job it was to uphold justice, and who instead refused to conduct an actual investigation and did all kinds of terrorist activity with the KKK? Why did I hate her more than the judge who, again, was legally obligated to uphold justice, and refused to admit any of the evidence that would have exonerated the men? And why did I hate her in such gendered terms? My brain never said "what an asshole," it was always "what a whore." I think part of my intense hatred comes from the sense of betrayal that I feel whenever a woman makes a fake rape claim, because it feeds into the popular narrative that rape is something women often make up, which in turn makes it so much harder for actual rape victims to be believed and get any sort of justice. But the fact that my automatic reaction was to express the hatred in such gendered terms tells me some disturbing stuff about the extent to which I have internalized patriarchal ideas about women. Ugh. I'm glad it forced that particular bit of ugliness to the surface so I could start to grapple with it, though.

What's still on the docket for future reading:

• Racism On Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice
• Mankiller: A Chief and Her People
• Working my way down Ta-Nehisi Coates's reading list
• Whatever other recommendations come my way!

Nerd-o-rama

I've had a nerdier than usual past few weeks. First, steotch (my cross-stitch idol) posted a bunch of internet-inspired mini-patterns, so I made this just for fun:

(If it makes no sense to you, it's a mashup of the Carter and banana for scale memes. Also, congrats on not wasting vast amounts of time on reddit.)

I then made a second meme-inspired cross stitch, this one a wedding sampler for our friends who have a Shiba Inu and as a result think doge is the funniest/best thing ever.

(As you can tell from the wedding date, this one's a year late. *awkward collar tug*)

Close up so you can read it better.

And THEN last night I got to go with a friend to see Patrick Rothfuss do a reading/Q&A at a bookstore, which was entertaining and funny and sweet all at once, just as you'd expect. Afterwards, and after a mere 1.5 hours of waiting in line, he signed my kindle!

The line moved slowly because he took time to have a short but genuine conversation with every single person. He talked to my friend for a good 2 minutes about writing techniques, and he talked to me for a minute or so about his feminism and anti-racism as manifested in his writing. We were numbers 94 and 95 out of ~250, and he promised to stay until every single person got through. I didn't think it was possible, but my nerd-love for him has grown even deeper.

Exploratorium

We'd been hearing about the Exploratorium since we temporarily lived in SF in 2013, but it took us until this weekend to finally make it there. It was awesome! I finally have to give credit to the Bay for having one thing better than Philly (besides sushirritos) - the Exploratorium knocks the Franklin Institute out of the park. We spent the day there and felt like we barely made a dent in all the cool interactive exhibits, so will definitely not wait another two years to go back. My favorite part was not actually one of the science demos, though, but this giant toothpick sculpture:

It is so huge and beautiful!

Most of the activities are fun to do but not super photogenic - the exception being the toilet water fountain that Ben was brave and drank out of.

Hooray, science!

30 Days of Wonder

Today is Ben's 30th birthday, and in celebration of that fact I gave him a present a day for the last 30 days. It was mostly small things (a box of his favorite candy, a six-pack of his favorite beer) and free things (arranging a skype date with old friends, a gift card for him to pick the movie we watch without me arguing), with a few nicer things thrown into the mix (like the surprise birthday party I threw him earlier this month). Today was the finale, and the present was a portrait from our friend who is a really great painter. It was complicated to arrange since she lives in Israel now, so getting it here was a bit of an ordeal, but it all worked out and he loved it.

Also this past month, we volunteered at the Black Girls Code Robot Expo, which was a great way to get our hang-out-with-middle-school-nerds fix since this will be our first year not volunteering with FIRST Lego League since 2010. Another first - we didn't go to both Frederick and Chicago for the holidays, since now we live far away and Ben is no longer a student with two weeks off. Instead we just went to Chicago, and my family met us there, for a five day combined-family holiday visit. We had a great time, especially hanging out with our four-year-old niece.

Play-doh party

Family selfie

The visit and the "30 days of wonder" (yes I really called it that because I am a huge dork) were a great way to end 2015. Here's looking forward to whatever 2016 has to offer!