Crepe Face

We spent this afternoon hanging out with friends in Japantown, which has a really nice mall. The highlight was getting a (delicious) crepe à la mode in the food court, and the ice cream scoop on top being decorated like a little animal face:

I like to make eye contact with the things I eat.

Also, if you enlarge the picture you can see that the name of the restaurant is "Belly Good Cafe' and Crepes." We spent a while puzzling over the apostrophe after "cafe" before realizing that it was probably supposed to be a the acute accent in "café."

I haven't spent an entire afternoon hanging out in a mall since high school, although I think I would do it more often if all malls had adorable animal-shaped desserts!

Learning things: Books!

For several years now, I have wished that I had a list of all the books I've ever read - it would be so helpful for all my "I think I read a book about ___ but I can't remember what it was called" moments. I kept not starting it because it seemed so onerous, but Ben and I recently heard someone claim to have a mile of bookshelves in their home, which led to a vigorous discussion of whether or not it is possible to read a mile of books in one's lifetime, which led to me finally sitting down and documenting all my reading to try and prove it was possible. It turns out I have no idea how long a mile is, because after listing the 684 books I can remember reading in my life, I'm still only 1.2% of the way to a mile (although I'm 23% of the way to a ton, so maybe I'll aim for that instead).

Once I had the (fairly) complete list of all the books I've read in front of me, I got curious about the breakdown of the authors, since I've been trying to diversify the perspectives I am exposed to. Diversity in publishing is notoriously horrible, as awesome campaigns like We Need Diverse Books and 1000 Black Girl Books have helped bring to light, so I was prepared for it to be bad... but you guys, it was really bad. First, gender:

Time Period	Female Authors
Childhood	39%
High School	18%
College	56%
Post-College to present	37%
Last year only	59%
Overall	37%

To be fair, the percentage of books by female authors I read as a child would have been higher if I counted all 167 Baby-Sitters Club books separately, but that felt like cheating. It's mildly heartening to see that the majority of books I've read in the last year have been written by women, but I really did not expect that barely over a third of the books I've read in my entire life have been by women. And I'm pretty sure all the women have been cis - I don't think I've read a single book by a trans person, and that's a problem. (I also want to know what share of the authors I've read have been gay or bi, but I'm not sure how to figure that out - I suppose I could identify all the authors who are publicly out and assume the rest are straight? That feels weird but I haven't yet thought of a better way.)

Okay, now race. When I wasn't sure about an author's race I'd check their wikipedia page, which led me to notice that wikipedia identifies the race of people of color but not white people (i.e. authors of color are identified with labels like "Black" or "Mexican-American," but white authors either have no label or are just "American" or "British"). That wasn't particularly surprising, but is a nice little example of white being the assumed norm. Here's the race breakdown:

Time Period	Asian American	Black	Latin@	Middle Eastern	Native	White
Childhood	0.6%	1.8%	0.6%	0%	0%	97.0%
High  School	0%	3.7%	0%	1.2%	0%	95.1%
College	1.4%	2.9%	2.9%	11.4%	1.4%	80.0%
Post-College	1.6%	21.0%	2.1%	3.1%	0.5%	71.7%
Last year only	2.4%	27.5%	0%	0%	0%	70.0%
Overall	1.0%	9.5%	1.4%	3.0%	0.4%	84.8%

I was really surprised at how high the share of white authors was for my childhood - until I realized that a lot of the books featuring characters of color I remembered were actually written by white people (same goes for a surprising number of children's books with female protagonists being written by men) - for example, I remember the strong female Native protagonist from Island of the Blue Dolphins, but that book was actually written by a white man. And while I wouldn't say that authors should only be allowed to write about characters who share their gender and race, I would say that it's a problem when the only "Native voice" accessible isn't actually Native, especially when there are many Native children's authors who have a harder time getting published than their white counterparts.

The white male dominance of my high school reading wasn't surprising, given the white male dominance of the "classics" that comprise most assigned reading during that period. I do remember really not liking a lot of those books, though - so many white boys coming of age under various circumstances really got tedious after awhile. In retrospect I'm lucky that I developed a healthy love of reading outside of school, or that would probably have really turned me off of it.

While the share of authors of color I read has been steadily increasing, breaking it out like this makes me realize I need to pay attention beyond just looking for books by authors who aren't white. Specifically, I haven't read a book by a Latin@, Middle Eastern, or Native person in the last year, and the share of Asian American authors is not much better. And to be clear - my motivation here is not diversity for diversity's sake, it's that I know I am missing some fantastic writing by only reading authors from one narrow band of the human experience. For example - last year a friend turned me on to Octavia Butler, whose work I quickly became obsessed with because it is a type of sci-fi I didn't even know could exist. It's riveting and beautiful and though-provoking in ways that were entirely new for me, and I don't have any doubt that it's informed by her experience as a Black woman and couldn't have been produced by someone without that perspective.

I'm not going to swear off reading white and/or male authors forever, or even for a specific time period, but I am going to be much more intentional about only reading books by those authors when there is a specific reason to. I've got a few lists of great authors of color and female authors I'm going to work my way through (seriously, just google "best Asian authors" or "scifi books by women" or whatever you want - the internet will provide), and I can't wait. I know approaching my reading in this way will broaden my horizons and help push me past the limits of my own experiences, but even more importantly, I know it will lead me to some fantastic books that I otherwise would have missed out on.

Alcatraz

This weekend we went to Alcatraz, aka Muggle Azkaban. We'd been hearing it was a cool place to visit since we spent the summer here 2013, but it took us a few years to get our act together enough to finally do it.

I had thought Alcatraz was just a big rocky island with a prison on it, but I learned from the scale model on the ferry landing that it actually has a bunch of buildings on it:

In addition to the prison, there were also apartments and other housing for the prison staff and their families (including a big mansion for the warden),  a post office, an officers' club, a power plant, a few buildings where prisoners did various sorts of industrial labor, and a lighthouse. Apparently at any given time there were about 75 children living on Alcatraz, and they would take the ferry to school in San Francisco each day.

The ferry ride to the island is a nice treat in and of itself, since you have beautiful views of the Bay the whole way.

As you pull up to the island, the first thing you see is the famous "Indians Welcome" sign from the 1969-71 occupation:

Walking up the hill to the prison, you see another remnant from that time on the island's water tower:

I was most curious to learn about the Indian occupation, but unsurprisingly the tour doesn't address it at all - it just focuses on the active years of the prison (although apparently there is a short film about the occupation that plays in the small theater by the gift shop, we just didn't manage to catch it).

The walk to the prison revealed another thing I didn't know about the island - over the years its various occupants brought in lots of soil, and now it actually has surprisingly nice gardens throughout.

I found the prison itself to be not as bad as I expected - I think because my mental baseline for historical prisons is Eastern State Penitentiary in Philly, which is basically a giant stone dungeon of horror. The cells in Alcatraz seemed spacious and well-lit by comparison.

Of course, I don't think there's any amount of spaciousness and lighting that makes spending decades confined to a cell not horrifying.

The thing that seemed most outdated about the prison was its close proximity to San Francisco, since now prisons are increasingly being moved out of cities and into rural areas as a growth industry, which amplifies the racial inequity of the criminal justice system. It's hard to imagine what contemporary American cities would look like if they had to contain all the prisons necessary to maintain the modern carceral state, or if mass incarceration could have even become so extreme if its consequence weren't tucked away out of easy view.

Only in the Bay?

Seen while walking around a park this weekend:

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.