Humanizing

“You only learn from the experiences you learn from.” — Myles Horton on the purpose and value of education

Growing up, my bedroom was two doors down from my brother Conor’s. Because of a traumatic brain injury during his infancy, Conor has disabilities; for one, he has seizures pretty frequently.

At the time, being an Irish dancer was a really important part of my identity. Taking four classes a week, it wasn’t uncommon for our dance shoes to cut up and blister our heels pretty badly. When that happened, we’d beg our teachers for permission to change into gym shoes. Sometimes they let us; sometimes they didn’t. Getting a “no” was fcking torture.

That’s why, when I’d hear Conor having a seizure in the middle of the night, I would always get up and go to him. Mom and Dad taught us to get him on his side, to prevent him choking on his tongue, and to kiss and hug him closely, whispering in his ear, “You’re okay. You’re okay. You’re okay.”

I didn’t always want to get out of my comfy bed to go to him, so I would remind myself what it felt like when our dance teachers wouldn’t let us change our shoes, even as the blood soaked our socks up to our ankles. I couldn’t leave him alone and let him think that I was unmoved by his pain. Conor doesn’t communicate with words, so I’ll never know exactly what he feels when he seizes. But knowing my own pain — and the added sting of indifference from those who could do something about it — taught me to practice solidarity with my brother.

Fast forward to my first semester of college, when a professor assigned an essay on the first time we realized our racial identities. Having always been a try-hard in school, I knew that the “right answer” I wanted to give was not the truth. I had never thought about myself as white before she passed out this assignment. Until then, I’d thought of myself as raceless, normal.

I turned in a semi-fictional account of taking a wrong exit off the Dan Ryan Expressway one night and ending up in one of Chicago’s poorest, Blackest neighborhoods. I wrote that once I got home, I stayed up all night critically processing my fear, chastising myself for fearing people whose neighborhood was run down because the parents living there didn’t have the sociopolitical or economic power to move city officials that parents in mine did. In truth, there had been no critical reflection that night. I’d sped toward the safety of home in fear, planning never to tell my parents where I’d been, and then I’d slept soundly.

While Conor taught me that people with disabilities are as human as I am, writing that essay taught me that I hadn’t learned to extend that same humanity to Black people. As a kid, any time we drove past the projects, my dad would tell us to lock the doors and look straight ahead. I’ve never had a stomach for cruelty, so now my gut turns when I think about how, following my dad’s directions, I would turn my rings around on my fingers to make them seem as simple and non-eye-catching as possible. This is how white people learn — it’s how I learned — to see Black people as unpredictable, superhuman, natural predators, how we learn to “fear for our lives.” This is how we raise Amy Coopers.

I didn’t grow up thinking I was racist or feeling pride in being white, but I also didn’t grow up thinking Black people are as human as I am. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire writes:

Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, it is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human. (44)

Oppression inherently dehumanizes both the oppressed and the oppressor. Reading these lines makes me think about myself as a little girl, lying in bed convincing myself to get up to go and hold Conor through his seizure. I can, so I must. What kind of monster would I have to be to leave my brother in pain and alone?

And yet, despite what I learned about solidarity from Conor, my humanity remained distorted by my racist thinking. Turning my rings didn’t hurt at the time, but it did make me less human. Now that I know better, I can either find ways to be in solidarity with Black people or accept my own monstrosity.

Thank God that we learn. One story I tell a lot stars a favorite student who has become a dear friend in the ten years since. We were just beginning the Holocaust memoir Night, by Elie Wiesel, and my co-teacher was leading a minilesson on asking questions mentally while reading. A few pages into the first chapter, Jamarrio, a Black boy in the second row, threw the book down on his desk, laid his face on it, and wrapped his arms around his head. I sidled up next to him quietly, kneeled down and asked, “What’s up?” He told me he couldn’t read this book.

This was my third year teaching Night, so I knew it was common for kids not familiar with Judaism to struggle with the book’s early scenes set in Elie’s childhood synagogue; too many unfamiliar vocabulary words disrupted their fluency, comprehension, and engagement with the narrative. I figured that’s what was happening for Jamarrio. I don’t know how the sweet baby Jesus got me to say “What’s up” instead of “Just keep going, it’ll get easier,” but I’m so glad I did. I needed to learn what Jamarrio taught me that day.

I said, “What’s up?” And he said something along the lines of, “I was reading faster than the class, and the people in here are getting locked up, and they can’t stop it, and no one is going to stand up for them. I can’t read this book.”

When I tell you I was shook.

At that point, it’d been seven years since I wrote that first essay on being white, and I’d dedicated those years to learning about race, racism, and systems of intersecting oppressions. Starting in my first year teaching, I chaired the school’s Social Justice Committee and was working on a number of antiracist school improvement initiatives. (How much I bought into teacher-leadership and school improvement planning during my first five years is a whoooole ‘nother essay.) I truly thought of myself as one of the “good” white teachers. But here was Jamarrio, making it obvious to me that I had assumed he was another Black boy who “can’t read.” Actually, he demonstrated the ability to get so absorbed in his reading as to tune-out the distracting noise of our minilesson — his fluency, comprehension, and engagement with the story deepened his empathy for the narrator. It wasn’t that he couldn’t decode the words on the page; he couldn’t tolerate the inherently passive role of the reader, not for this story of ultimate dehumanization.

Stereotypes cause damage not because they’re not sometimes true; by and large, our public schools have done Black boys dirty, and that’s reflected in any data they collect — reading scores, graduation rates, truancy, discipline referrals, etc. By default, I approached Jamarrio (and how many of my other Black male students?) as if I already knew that he fit that stereotype. Can you imagine how frustrating and hurtful? I hadn’t until Jamarrio made me. That’s when “What’s up?” started to become an important part of my classroom practice. Asking kids “What’s up?” opens me up to seeing a lot of my own blindspots. My critical, supportive teacher-friends, too, often help me to recognize instances of white supremacist ideology popping up in my practice. But kids are kids, and I am ageist in an ageist world. And the majority of my teacher-friends, though adults, are white members of predominantly white faculties. It wasn’t until I started teaching in prison — working with and personally accountable to Black adults — that I realized how very limited were my gains in learning to see my anti-Blackness.

Let me back up just a bit. After my first five years teaching, I moved to the Bay Area for a job at a middle school, and at the same time, began volunteering with a GED prep program inside San Quentin Prison. My experience at that middle school is another whole-‘nother-essay, but the short of it is that teaching there accelerated my simmering burnout. The principal discovered me sobbing at my desk one morning and sent me home; I went to the doctor, who put me on disability, and I resigned. (Years later now, more so than burn out, I’d say I was experiencing acute moral injury. Like I said, it’s another essay.)

I wanted to stay in the Bay to keep volunteering at San Quentin, so I got a job selling expensive wedding dresses at a fancy boutique in San Francisco’s Financial District, and at night and on my days off, I went into the prison. Our team started to meet an extra day each week so I could share the basics of my profession’s knowledge-base and skillset; that way, the peer educators who had started the program could take over more of the academic work that had previously been done by outside volunteers. We read Freire, invited in more local educators and academics to build with us, and developed new, more inclusive routines and procedures for designing the curriculum, instruction, and assessment for our bi-weekly GED prep classes.

My incarcerated colleagues taught me the habit of beginning every meeting with a check-in. Around the table, each of us would share our present moment with the group — our worries, excitement, joys, terrors, tragedies. We clowned. We challenged each other to wall-sit competitions, crying-laughing as we watched one another’s thighs and knees wiggle, sweat dripping down our faces as each of us tried to hold our squat the longest.

The people in that program became my closest friends during those years; still so new to the Bay, I spent more time with my friends at San Quentin than with anyone else. Especially in the first few months I lived here, when I was still teaching middle school, and even after resigning, my depression was intense. “Leave-for-work-without-brushing-my-teeth-because-I-just-fckin-couldn’t” intense. Over four years, our check-ins played not a small role in bringing me back to life, in restoring my humanity.

Convicted of murders and robberies and other violent crimes, my friends are exactly the kind of Black people my dad taught me to fear. These friends shared generously, and with sincere accountability, their stories of growing up on the wrong side of the War on Drugs and Tough on Crime. My friends committed crimes that caused irreparable harm to others, and they had helped save me from dying by suicide. I have to say it as plainly as that.

Remembering sitting in the back of my parents’ minivan, turning my rings around so as to avoid drawing attention with my broke-ass shiny objects, I wonder whose attention I thought I was avoiding. I wish I could sit next to my child self and ask her. Who are you hiding from? Who do you imagine Black people to be while you’re turning those rings? I’d be gentle with my child self, but I’d ask her to imagine, for what I know would be her first time, that Black people are as human and complex as she is. I don’t feel guilty about being white, and I don’t feel guilty about growing up racist. I was a child. I don’t fully blame my dad either. No kid growing up in America, definitely not in hyper-segregated Chicagoland, can be protected from prolonged exposure to racist thinking. Many white people don’t tolerate hearing this very well, but the fact is our nation’s origin story rests on white supremacist logic, and that racist core echoes through our daily life from sea to shining sea. I don’t feel guilty. I feel responsible for learning and acting on what I learn about white supremacy and how it has imprinted on me.

We inherited this shit, but what kind of swamp creatures would we be to accept living in it? I know I didn’t grow up thinking Black people were human like me because I don’t remember my stomach turning as I turned my rings, and it should have. My stomach twists when I know something is wrong — like it did when I realized I’d assumed Jamarrio couldn’t read, like it did before I forced myself out of bed and down the hall to hold Conor.

I am human only as long as I keep learning how to be in solidarity with humans.