Identity Memo

My primary interest in participating in the college/correctional facility partnership this year directly stems from the fact that I was a part of the program last semester in Jody’s Multicultural Education course. Before I joined the group, however, one of the first motivating forces I was able to identify was the strong desire to challenge my understandings of incarcerated individuals as well as the prison system itself. In my own life I have never had a loved one or anybody I personally knew go to prison, and that is a privilege in itself. There is a staggering number of people who are incarcerated in the United States and an even larger number of families and friends who are affected by the U.S. prison industrial complex; it seemed (and seems) so wrong to me that the only images of prison life I had been exposed to were so clearly negative, untruthful, disrespectful and biased. Biased both because of the sources of my information and also because of m social status and distance from the prison industrial complex. The television can only tell you so much about someone’s story, and people who have been incarcerated have never really been afforded the respect they deserve by the media and by people who have never been personally touched by the prison system. 

A related motivator for me that I was quickly able to perceive was a factor that moves me to do almost all of my self-selected work: genuine connection with other humans. Although I could have elected to be in a classroom with younger people for my ed placement, I was so drawn to the notion of working with adult women because that is a group that I hadn’t had the chance to do intellectual work and trust building with before. From this desire to connect grows another motivator of mine that was not immediately apparent to me when I started in the partnership. I soon learned that I kept returning week after week with wholehearted enthusiasm because I wanted to continue to facilitate creating a space where the women inside could not only build their confidence in reading and writing but also in self expression and creativity; a space where everyone’s thoughts are acknowledged and given equal weight, no matter if they are incarcerated or visiting from the bi-co. I have grown to see the partnership as one way for the women inside whose self esteem has often been cut down through the process of imprisonment and being deemed “criminals” to explore their own perspectives alongside those of the students. And I would be lying if I didn’t mention the fact that I too have grown from this experience. Part of why I’m drawn to return is because I have learned so much about myself as a woman, an educator, and a student, all in very unique and complex and interconnected ways. More about that in another memo, I suppose. 

My love of personal connection comes from the meaningful relationships and conversations I’ve had with others where my worldview has altered entirely just by hearing about another’s perspective. I grew up in a semi-segregated white liberal “haven” that preached equality and acceptance but often failed to practice it. I only really began to see my whiteness as an integral part of my daily life when I was a teenager and starting becoming more conscious of the inequalities that surrounded me in my hometown and especially my high school. My high school organized its classes in such a way that each of the floors were segregated. My school was about 40% students of color, but I could go an entire day with being in classes that were 90% white. As I began to realize this I wondered why nobody ever talked about it, but it wasn’t until I came to college and started learning on my own accord about systemic racism why that was the case; and, of course, I am always learning more about this tacit acceptance of systemic racism in the educational system. I could tell a similar story to this about my non-disabled body and mind, upper-middle class socioeconomic status, straight-presenting appearance and cisgenderedness*. 

When I came to Bryn Mawr, I immediately began to engage with my peers in a way that I never had before. Meaning, I began to learn much more about people’s experiences that differed greatly from my own. A majority of the people that populated my everyday life back home had at least some significant similarities to me, be it class, race, ability, etc. While I strove to listen to individuals who differed from me when I was younger, I felt much more empowered once I left home to explore the complexities of structural injustice that I had never been personally oppressed by. I think the combination of my new form of education at college, completely new social circle, and leaving a familiar environment all contributed to my newfound drive to deconstruct my own truths. 

On a related note I have always considered listening a strength of mine, and it is an activity that I truly enjoy. I constantly find myself growing as a listener and learning more about what listening really means to each individual person. It’s sort of odd to realize this, and I’m only just realizing it now as I type, but I have a much easier time listening to and learning from people who have identities/experiences different from my own than I do people who share my identities/experiences but have dissimilar perspectives from mine. For example, I find myself fighting to hold my tongue when I disagree with another cisgendered white woman who has a similar background than I do than another person who doesn’t share one or more of those identities with me. Understanding this now makes me want to explore exactly why that may be and indicates to me the spaces in which I have really developed my listening skills and where I have not. I speculate that part of that comes from not engaging much in intellectual/political conversations with my peers when I was in an environment where I could always turn to someone who had a comparable life experience to mine. 

*Is this a word? I’m not sure. If someone reading this has a better word I would actually like to know.