December 30, 2016 - 11:46
For our collective exhibit, I researched oriki, or praise songs, which are part of the Yoruba oral traditions. I specifically looked at the oriki poem about Ọlọ́wẹ̀ of Isẹ̀ , who is considered by many art historians and art collectors to be the most influential Yoruba artist of the 20th century. I researched how Ọlọ́wẹ̀ of Isẹ̀ made his doors and some of the carving techniques he used, such as high and uneven relief work. I also wrote a piece for my group’s “Insider Curatorial Perspectives” about concepts from Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories, relating to how stories serve different functions and have different impacts in indigenous culture.
The stories we have included, left out, or have been buried are possibly all that we are.
In asserting that stories are all we have, he plants the seeds of responsibility. For we are responsible not only for the stories we tell and the stories we hear, but for the stories we choose to believe. King builds up, with his fierce and funny mind, to not let anyone off the hook when he gives an explanation for why he doesn’t tell a particular story out loud, because he ends up crying:
…for the world I’ve helped to create. A world in which I allow my intelligence and goodwill to be constantly subverted by my pursuit of comfort and pleasure. And because knowing all of this, it is doubtful that given a second chance to make amends for my despicable behaviour, I would do anything different, for I find it easier to tell myself the story of my failure as a friend, as a human being, than to have to live the story of making the sustained effort to help.
This is where the subtitle of this book becomes relevant: King restates the introductions and endings to each of the four chapters, and also uses the same ending in his Afterword.
“Don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now.”
Yet these narrative frameworks are essentially different every time because they are understood and interpreted differently every time they are told.
When King talks about evil coming into the world as a story in Silko’s Ceremony, he warns his readers: “you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories that you are told.”
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“As Knapp and Shields (1990) suggest, the so-called "deficit" or "disadvantage" model has a serious problem: (1) over time a cycle of failure and despair is created that culminates ‘in students' turning their backs on school… because teachers and administrators fail to adapt to and take advantage of the strengths that these students do possess" (Knapp and Shields 755). I think this quote summarizes many of my feelings in this 360. I think our texts were not framed within a historical or cultural context. The topics of discussion in class felt undirected and therefore it was difficult for me to determine what was relevant information to bring up. This made it very difficult for me to follow class discussions or analyze our readings. I feel that my knowledge of the school-to-prison pipeline as it connects to our education course, the Black Lives Matter movement, the prison-industrial complex and continued colonialism as is evident with the protests to shut down the North Dakota Access Pipeline and as it relates to The Truth About Stories were underutilized in a 360 course cluster devoted to discussing core issues about race and racism in the United States. While I did not bring up these issues in class enough, I felt that my postings and papers addressed my interests in these topics. I felt that the knowledge my classmates brought was underutilized and often deemed “irrelevant.”
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In a class called, “Raceing Education” we did not devote, but one day to talking about the school-to-prison-pipeline, one of the core issues in any class about race and education. As stated by Erica R. Meiners in Right to Be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies, poor, undereducated people of color become accustomed to punitive measures in insufficient schools:
Trapped in failing schools that are often physically deteriorating, disciplined and moved into juvenile justice systems through violations of punitive, zero tolerance policies, demoted or labeled through failure to pass high-stakes standardized tests or through biased assessment materials, and channeled to special education programs, poor and/or youth of color are undereducated (Meiners 31).
Schools reproduce racial inequities. The racial profiling of youth of color is the first step on the school-to-prison pipeline. Non-white students are more likely to be suspended and expelled. The management and “definitions” attributed to student “deviance” demonstrates that public schools are increasingly treating students like prisoners. These terminologies are often racialized and shaped by class dynamics, which describe certain communities as inept, lacking, and incompetent.
Public schools have implemented law enforcement “tough on crime” policies: large presences of police officers, the expansion and integration of zero tolerance policies, the use of metal detectors, and “random” locker inspections. Nancy A. Heitzeg in “Education Or Incarceration: Zero Tolerance Policies And The School To Prison Pipeline” demonstrates that non-white students are progressively being expelled and suspended more than white students as well as disproportionately being directed to law enforcement:
Students who are suspended or expelled may also be referred to juvenile court by school officials, but in a growing number of schools, zero tolerance policies are directly enforced by police or school resource officers… The presence of police officers at school—most of them large urban pre-dominantly minority schools—adds as well to racial disparities as racial profiling practices are transferred from the streets to the hallways. Additionally the majority of these arrests are—not for weapons or drugs—but for minor infractions such as disorderly conduct or disruptions. This criminalization of what were once issues of school discipline is a direct conduit into the prison pipeline (Heitzeg 21).
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I was often silent, feeling lost on what to discuss when I felt my ideas about structural inequalities and the racial caste system were not addressed in our readings.
The withdrawal of some previously vocal White students from the classroom exchange, however, is sometimes interpreted by students of color as indifference. This perceived indifference often serves to fuel the anger and frustration that many students of color experience, as awareness of their own oppression is heightened. For example, Robert, an African-American man, wrote:
‘I really wish the White students would talk more. When I read these articles, it
makes me so mad and I really want to know what the White kids think. Don't they
care (Datum 8-9).
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“Instead of being presented in a variety of modes, instruction in too many U.S. schools tends to be abstract, devoid of application, overly sequential, and redundant. Bits of knowledge are emphasized, not the big picture, thus handicapping global thinkers” (Cole 7). I struggled to find entry points to express my knowledge of environmental racism and climate change since our texts were not supported with supplementary theories and readings. I did not know how to enter the readings when so many of the topics the books seemed to discuss were not brought up in class.
I do take responsibility for not addressing issues of race and racism in our class. We read Getting Mother’s Body, which is a book that is set on the day before the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice about a black family the Beedes race to LaJunta, Arizona, to exhume Willa Mae (and her jewels) before her grave is paved over for a supermarket parking lot and we never once talked about segregation or Jim Crow. I do see this 360 as a collective undertaking and I feel that by not addressing these issues in class was unthoughtful, hurtful, and ultimately racist. I was complicit by not bringing up whiteness:
Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) is a growing field of scholarship whose aim is to reveal the invisible structures that produce and reproduce white supremacy and privilege. CWS presumes a certain conception of racism that is connected to white supremacy. In advancing the importance of vigilance among white people, CWS examines the meaning of white privilege and white privilege pedagogy, as well as how white privilege is connected to complicity in racism. Unless white people learn to acknowledge, rather than deny, how whites are complicit in racism, and until white people develop an awareness that critically questions the frames of truth and conceptions of the “good” through which they understand their social world, Du Bois’s insight, (that “the color line is the defining characteristic of American society”), will continue to ring true.
I felt that I saw and didn’t see so many racial microaggressions and acted or spoke on very few. My pain today comes from my lack of knowledge of the struggles that many of my classmates went through just to show up to class. I was too often not present for my classmates, not fully hearing them speak their truths as they would like to be understood. I did not ask enough questions and I did not probe deep enough. I did not address the cultural and historical context of our classes and I am ashamed of this.
Works Cited
Heitzeg, Phd Nancy A. "Criminalizing Education: Zero Tolerance Policies, Police in the Hallways and The School to Prison Pipeline." EDUCATION NOT INCARCERATION: (2009): 0-36. Hamline University. Oxford University Press, 2009. Web. 7 Dec. 2015. <http://www.hamline.edu/uploadedFiles/Hamline_WWW/HSE/Documents/criminalizing-education-zero-tolerance-police.pdf>.