Bodies and mental gymnastics
I’ve often thought of prison as a place that’s so literal in its approach to oppression. Bodies in cages. And I’m interested in how that bodily oppression gets abstracted into school policies that help to shape the metaphorical school-to-prison pipeline sucking Black and Brown kids and their parents out of their homes and communities.
The weirdest thing about being on strike was the amount of time I spent walking pretty much silently in a single file line around a very small circle in front of the 15-foot wide gate to our school’s parking lot.
Of course there was plenty of small talk and strategizing, but over the course of many hours and seven days, there was also a fair amount of time spent silently walking around and around. Sometimes, to bring new energy to the crew of typically 10 or so teachers circling, somebody would suggest that we all turn around and walk in the other direction. It felt endearingly pathetic. It’d be like, “OKAY, LET’S SWITCH! READY 1…2…3…YAY!” and then back to silence.
The strike looked very exciting on social media — and theoretically, it was. I remain totally inspired by all the effective organizing by teachers, students, and families (even if we “won” what turns out to be a shitty contract.) But I keep thinking about what my favorite professor in grad school once said: “Like it or not, we are all embodied.”
The embodied experience of the strike was oftentimes humiliatingly boring. Sometimes it was exciting but still humiliating, like the two times scabbing substitutes drove their cars into our circling bodies— very slowly, very contentiously— trying to cross the picket line and enter the parking lot.
It got me thinking about how when you boil all communicative symbol systems out of human power dynamics (again, theoretically speaking), shit comes down to some degree of physical wrestling. It comes down to literally putting bodies between the people in power and what the people in power want until they give up some of their power to the disrupting bodies.
In our circling crew, there were two quietly dignified teachers with graying hair who kept capturing my attention. My respect-your-elders home-training flared up, and I found myself appalled that we could be in this economically booming part of the world and these two educators — credentialed, with advanced degrees, and with decades of professional experience in Oakland schools — could be in put in this bizarre physical stand-off, demanding what the numbers make clear is actually just modest compensation for their intellectual labor.
In a strike, workers’ effective communicative tools are reduced to bodily ones — withholding labor, walking in picket lines, communing in large marching and rallying crowds. That’s because when they have collectively negotiated for more power using language, an abstracted symbol system that exists in our minds, those with the most power over resources have been unwilling to submit.
And yet, ironically, once the powerless demonstrate a willingness to go there (to the place of bodily humiliation), their power swells.
Have you seen this video from the Sacramento city council meeting after the non-indictment decision on the cop who killed Stephon Clark? You can actually see the cognitive dissonance happening for the police when the non-Black people keep on physically surrounding a protesting Black person. (Sound on.) Dude wants to bring that night-stick down on the Black guy, but he can’t because none of the police are willing to engage physically with the non-Black people around him to get them out of the way. In this case, I’m calling the police the powerful and citizens the powerless, but of course each citizen’s level of power vis-a-vis the police is significantly informed by physically perceivable markers of race. (Lord, I’m even thinking in circles now!)
Anyway, no coherent conclusion yet. Except that I know that now that we’re back in the classroom, I want to physically resist complicity in the pipeline to prison metaphorically hanging over my kids’ heads.
To that end, I’ve been re-committing to designing a physically and aesthetically comfortable but stimulating space in solidarity with my students. (Think: Christmas lights, couches, framed artwork, puzzles, rugs, blankets.) I want to see how we can leverage physical nurturing toward thriving negotiation of power through the use of literate practice’s dynamic and intersecting symbol systems.
(And if you were wondering if I went to grad school, re-read that closing chain prepositional phrases. Woof.)
