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I’m sitting in my motel room in Douglasville, GA, about to drive 30 minutes to Georgia Tech for Induction and Institute — a five week marathon of intense learning, growing and applying of skills. I am not sure if I could even begin to pick through the mix of emotions this brings, but I do know what I need to leave behind: doubt and disbelief. Kathryn Waggoner, who sold me on Teach For America a year ago or more, helped me find a good antidote with the Memphis Grizzlies, who had the playoff slogan “believe.” (see photo)
I also encourage you to watch this poem on working with children. Copy-pasted below is my “story of self” which we were asked to write for Induction and Institute. This tells, as best as I can put together, the path which led to Atlanta. Here we go!
“Story of Self: Teach For America 2013 Institute Pre-Work Part VII
The street vendor sat as a sentry on the same corner by the metro station every day for the entire four months I studied in Seville, Spain. An immigrant from Sub-Saharan Africa, he received a short shake of the head at best and dismissal at worst from the passing motorists and pedestrians. Down the street in a dimly lit convenience store, a Vietnamese woman and child sat nursing against the rickety shelves while her husband rang up my bottle of soda at the register. These initial encounters with immigrant populations in Spain in fall 2011 sliced through my hidden biases about the discrimination faced by marginalized groups in the developed world. What I had once considered to be only an abstract, political issue came uncomfortably to the foreground of the work I undertook in college. As I blogged and photographed my way through a semester in Europe, I had not yet connected social issues to the value-claims of social justice. I had not yet affirmed the human struggle which is rooted in inequality. Yet I had set my feet on the path of such difficult encounters.
I once subscribed to the view which asserted that peace and justice would simply come into being if education and tolerance became universal norms. After all, my education and my grasp of tolerance made my life pretty peaceful and content. This warm, familial view of people and societies met an almost insurmountable challenge when I faced down my serious privilege as a middle class, white, Protestant, straight male for the first time in terms of gender issues. No longer just faces on the street such as the immigrants in Spain, my candid conversations with women and other men in a State of Women in Tarrant County, Texas service spring break trip in spring 2012 showed me my decisions played an active role in the continued oppression of women and denial of rights. I saw how, even with a legal framework which claims to give equal rights to all, it is the perceptions and decisions of individuals which create a larger, exclusionary social system. As a social science student, I puzzled long and hard over the approaches which could address these inequalities, but kept coming back to myself. How could an offhanded statement about gender roles, sexuality or policy reinforce a male-dominated power structure? How could I unwittingly be a participant in this long narrative of those who reap the benefits of their physical attributes over others?
Despite the blunt encounter with the cruel underside of privilege, it took a little more coaxing to finally shatter the illusions I kept around me like a blanket. By the beginning of 2013, I found the support network, the opportunities and most importantly the ability to swallow pride and admit the complexity of the problem and my own contributions to it. On a college Civil Rights Bus Tour, the deepest forgotten reaches of the Mississippi Delta grabbed a hold of me, the immortalized faces of victims and heroes such as Emmitt Till, Fannie Lou Hamer, Freedom Riders and thunderous preachers fell around our stops across the American South. Our small group traveled to the Mississippi State Capitol in Jackson to make a political statement against harsh immigration legislation in the state. And just as the columned galleries there circle the capitol’s rotunda, I realized a similar “full circle” of the issues we faced: immigration today, voting rights today, health and education today are the civil rights struggles of the 21st century. Without such a powerful mandate to walk in the same convictions of past activists, I could not have the determination to place myself in service of social justice.
The last semester of college became an ever-accelerating justification of this new path. I engaged my friends and colleagues in new kinds of conversations, analyzing and linking our beliefs to the biggest debates of our time in the United States: what is our identity? What is our civic responsibility? What can we ask of others in understanding the same? Late into the night, delirious from lack of sleep but energized by an irreplaceable sense of purpose, a friend and I wrote a report for our university’s student government about the school’s approach to ethnic and socioeconomic diversity. Never again would such issues sit latent in the back of my mind, because their implications surround us, and their consequences too often constrain us. While I still have so much distance to cover, I think I have begun to shed the fears of rejection, revulsion or self-criticism which come with these new questions. I can turn these fears instead into new dilemmas, a sharpening stone and proving ground for my beliefs.
This new earnestness fuels my beliefs and unsettles my conscience. My admiration for today’s reformers only increases as I watch with what great personal cost they fight for human rights – and I know this is no longer simply a puzzle to put together. Since when is any problem that one-dimensional? This is a building to be assembled, a foundation to be laid and a rough, unforgiving terrain to be reclaimed. I only have some small part of the tools necessary to approach the problem of injustice, but know that the convergence of minds and hearts in the next chapter of our lives here in Atlanta will erode the mountain of injustice we must confront. When I see someone on the street or in the classroom as I did in Spain, I know they are not in a position of power not because of their choice, but because of a collection of social forces which guides them there whether they like it or not and often without their consent.
This, for me, is where I come into the Teach For America story – where we assert that a child’s zip code should not determine their educational future, or their test scores predict their involvement in the criminal justice system. Individual lives are at stake, and all our stories together warrant a lifelong commitment to these causes.”
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
