My blog was originally intended to be a sidekick for my zine Readin & Fightin, and the zine was originally intended to focus on books by women of color. Both have kinda spun into larger projects but I am still documenting the books I read as I have for the past 4ish years, and finally updated my reading list for the first time since the last issue of the zine.
My grandmothers were strong.
They followed plows and bent to toil.
They moved through fields sowing seed.
They touched earth and grain grew.
They were full of sturdiness and singing.
My grandmothers were strong.
My grandmothers are full of memories
Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay
With veins rolling roughly over quick hands
They have many clean words to say.
My grandmothers were strong.
Why am I not as they?
everyones all “write books! teach!” and im all “LOL yeah right, like any one would give a fuck bout a random rantin ravin bitch wif no credentials”. so folks are all “but degreeees!!! getchu some”
but you guise, the thought of gettin me some proper book learnin is just so incredibly unappealing. so unappealing.
do not want. (also, do not have the skrilla)
im ignit. and self-educated. i study on what interests me on any given moment. i generally prefer this to college courses. like, greatly.
therefore, nothing i say or think will ever actually matter (thats what degrees and credentials are for—validation of your voice and worth as a person? or something?).
and i think i may be ok with that.
maybe.
no se.
relevance is apparently something you have to not only buy, but study hella boring irrelevant shit for.
perhaps irrelevance is just all ima have lol perhaps….thats ok.
wait, but that’s my whole debate about higher education too.
This shit is killing me. This “higher learning” bullshit is stabbing me in my soul. I wish I had some kinda talent or skill or drive so I could figure out a way to do life without this shit.
People assume that all the shit I do around ethnic studies/women of color lit & history, that must be what I studied in school. And that because I’m working with kids now as a teacherish, I must have studied education or have a teaching certificate. Nope! I have a physics degree from a fancy place that I hated and have never taken a teaching course in my life. With all the things that matter to me, I’m almost totally self-taught/community-taught.
That said, I know that self-education is something that comes really easily to me but not to a lot of other people. I think it would be cool if some of us who do those kinds of self-education could try to devise curricula in certain areas, and work on it together to share with everyone. That’s kinda what I work on anyway, in less formal ways, with my reading project and zines and our zine distro. But maybe some day (when I have loads of free time!) I could start formalizing more of a starting point curriculum in women of color studies?
There’s a new project I might be starting with some of our students to watch movies and discuss them and have some writing come out of it to make zines (i.e. the school magazine that I’m stumped on), so however that ends up happening I can make our movie list public.
(via wildunicornherd)
Yesterday at school some of my kids were asking what was up with Occupy New Haven, and what was gonna get accomplished by camping on the Green. I told them about my experiences with it. One of them had heard me vent about it before, and was one of the students that was supposed to be speaking at one of their rallies before they flaked out on him. One has been telling me about working on a music video, because he passed by ONH when they were having a march, so he filmed himself rapping in front of it. I told him my friend filmed a hip-hop video in front of OWS recently, but then I wasn’t able to find it. Instead I pulled up the video above, made by the same film-dude friend, of another friend of ours doing a poem about police brutality. So we all watched that together and they liked it.
Also during that same period, I helped a girl with an essay about To Kill A Mockingbird, and how literature relates to culture and ethnicity. Little did she know that’s my jam! We were talking about the book, and which characters were allowed full development and which were not, and right away she said, “This book is racist,” so I said, “Okay, cool, I didn’t want to be the one to say that, because I didn’t wanna force my opinion on you, but I’m glad you’re being critical of it too.” We talked about what culture means and who gets to define literature and history. It was rad to see a high schooler (one who gets in trouble a fair amount, too) get really critical about things like white heroes in supposedly anti-racist novels, and who gets to tell stories that are then called anti-racist and why are those people so rarely women of color, and the rare appearances people of color make in American history textbooks. I taught her the word “marginalize,” and because I’m working on etymology in my afterschool program, we went through margin—>marginal—>marginalize.
Oh, there was also a good quip from one student about how he could record a song that was just him saying, “bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch” and get it on the radio as long as he puts it over a good beat, because people play all sorts of stupid stuff on the radio. So we talked about how, yes, that’s true, but also women in hip-hop are tired of being called bitches either way. But totally reminded me of that Dead Milkmen song, “You People Will Dance to Anything.”
So, all around really really good period.
via Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame, theroot.com, Gay America: Struggle for Equality
Lorraine Hansberry was a feminist and gay rights proponent at a time when such things were considered suspect. She wrote into The Ladder in 1957 calling for a feminist analysis of homophobia:
I think it is about time that equipped women began to take on some of the ethical questions which a male-dominated culture has produced. There may be women to emerge who will be able to formulate a new and possible concept that homosexual persecution and condemnation has at its root not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma.”Late she wrote to the gay magazine ONE. An unpublished letter in 1961 calls out the connection between racism, classism, homophobia and anti-semitism.
I have suspected for a good time that the homosexual in America would ultimately pay a price for the intellectual impoverishment of women. Men continue to misinterpret the second-rate status of women as implying a privileged status for themselves; heterosexual think the same way about homosexuals; gentiles about Jews; whites about blacks; haves about have-nots.
How was she so fierce?? And always wearing damn good little boy sweaters.
As one of the most commonly taught stories of people’s struggles for social justice, the Civil Rights Movement has the capacity to help students develop a critical analysis of United States history and strategies for change. However, the empowering potential is often lost in a trivial pursuit of names and dates. Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching, published by Teaching for Change and PRRAC, provides lessons and articles for K-12 educators on how to go beyond a heroes approach to the Civil Rights Movement.
This website provides information about Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching and many more resources for teaching about the Civil Rights Movement.
See the site at http://www.civilrightsteaching.org/
OMG yes. I was just about to post about me & my students’ reading teacher nerding out at school about Sandra Cisneros and Tupac. We’re making plans to have kids read the book After Tupac & D. Foster (which a few of my students recommended we read together) about two girls who become friends over Tupac’s music, and also read some Sandra Cisneros, and use both of those to put lit in larger contexts. Like using the book about Tupac to read his poetry and listen to his music (no srsly, in class!!) and other like-minded hip-hop as well, and then move from Tupac’s writing to talking about the Black Panthers, and then we can get into reading nonfiction by talking about the Panthers. One of my students told me about her relative who was involved with the Young Lords, so we can read about them too. Oh, and we’re gonna read some comics.
High school is about to get so fucking relevant.
(via versosdeliberacion)
Schools are closed yet again because we had an all-night ice storm. I have had more snow days from work this month than I can remember ever having in 12 years of public school in Chicago. CPS never closes. Fine by me, I have some young adult novels to read for work and some snobby coffee shops to read them at.
Also reading today:
Tons of essays by Pedro Noguera, who writes about antiracism and critical pedagogy
On becoming educated by Joy Castro via larebelde
The newly complicated Zora Neale Hurston via curate (I think?)
Short pieces from a writing workshop my friend did, so that my kids can read work by other kids their own age
“Any more fires in this house, I’m lighting them!”
“Hellfire don’t need lightning and it’s already burning in you…”
“Whatever’s burning in me is mine!”
“Amen!”
“And I’ll split this town in two and everything in it before I’ll let you put it out!”
— Sula and Eva, Sula, Toni Morisson
(just found this written in my old notebook)
While “Monkey Junk” tells the classic migrant tale on the country mouse/city mouse theme, the third find, “the Back Room,” is as fully immersed in the most sophisticated 1920s upper-crust Harlem party life as any story previously known from the Harlem Renaissance: “West 139th street at ten p.m. Rich fur wraps tripping up the steps of the well furnished home in the two hundred block. Sedans, coaches, coupes, roadsters. Inside fine gowns and tuxedos, marcel waves and glitter. People who seemed to belong to every race on earth—Harlem’s upper class had gathered there her beauty and chivalry.” In the background of the story are the human entanglements of a night at a party that also features a Charleston dance contest. The ambience: “Everybody being modern. Cigarettes burning like fireflies on a summer night.”
…Hurston idealized Eatonville, the town where she grew up, because it was, as she put it, a “pure Negro town,” a self-sufficient, independent place, a “burly, boiling, hard-hitting, rugged-individualistic setting,” filled with black pride and self-determination. She rejected what she called the “sobbing school of Negrohood,” famously declaring that she did not feel “tragically colored.” She believed in empowering black individuals and communities to gain economic and social justice for themselves, instead of depending on white Northern liberals or the federal government.To her, Brown assumed the inferiority of black culture and life, imposing a supposedly more developed white culture on black people.
The Newly Complicated Zora Neale Hurston - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Oh wow. I’m really excited to read this. Also to read some Zora short stories with my kids at school sometime soon. Admitting to being a sap: I once read the intro to I Love Myself When I am Laughing…and then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive, a collection of different genres of writing by and about Zora, and I was sitting in the library in a big cozy chair, and I started crying, because she was so so fly, and dammit white people just wouldn’t let Zora be Zora! I don’t think I had ever cried from a book before in my life. She was so fly, I can’t handle it!
Interview with Gloria Anzaldúa
(thanks again to tiaramerchgirl for posting this! <3 )
A friend lent me INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence’s “Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology” and “Colonize This!” Political bliss—with a bath for my feet and back (trains suck).
I am very happy for you because these two books are AMAZING. Sometimes I just hold them and think about how smart everything in them is.
from Cherríe Moraga’s “La Güera”:
I have many times questioned my right to even work on an anthology which is to be written “exclusively by Third World women.” I have had to look critically at my claim to color, at a time when, among white feminist ranks, it is a “politically correct” (and sometimes peripherally advantageous) assertion to make. I must acknowledge the fact that, physically, I have had a choice about making that claim, in contrast to women who have not had such a choice, and have been abused for their color. I must reckon with the fact that for most of my life, by virtue of the very fact that I am white-looking, I identified with and aspired toward white values, and that I rode the wave of that Southern Californian privilege as far as conscience would let me.
I think: what is my responsibility to my roots – both white and brown, Spanish-speaking and English? I am a woman with a foot in both worlds; and I refuse the split. I feel the necessity for dialogue. Sometimes I feel it urgently.
and that book is amazing. I’m about halfway through. Alice Walker is a BALLER.
This blog is about books by/about people of color, especially women of color, and especially young adult books. I’m trying to find books I can help my students get interested in (almost all Black & Latino) because they’ve said they don’t read much because they never find books they’re interested in. So I’m going to comb through this blog for some suggestions.
This post is a list of links to interviews they did with women of color writers in 2010.
