Our Lady of White American Fiction
Yesterday, I took my parents to San Xavier del Bac here in Tucson.
San Xavier del Bac is a small Catholic mission first built in 1797, making it one of the oldest standing structures here in the “wild west.”
One needn’t be Catholic in order to respect the beauty, the significance, the sheer age of the place. More info HERE.
I gravitated toward an old icon of St. Anthony. (Recovering Catholic here. I did many years in the Catholic Schools — I know my saints.) I prayed before an image of St. Anthony. I don’t remember what I prayed.
Just a few mantras on the beads I wear around my neck.
St. Anthony is the patron saint of lost things. Sometimes,
I feel like a “lost thing.”
I prayed to St. Anthony.
What could it hurt?
Far as I can tell, virtually every major world religion, even the most awful
(I’m looking at you Catholics) world religions have a good quality or two.
Jesus, for example.
Jesus was cool.
I can dig a lot of what Jesus supposedly said.
I prayed to St. Anthony, ran my mala beads in holy water,
& moved along.
Also, some of the Catholic beliefs about afterlife?
No thank you.
I really don’t find joy in the thought
that I might spend eternity
being bothered by all the fuckers
I tried so desperately to avoid
in my earthly life.
While I started this post meaning to talk about spirituality,
I do live in Arizona, so something happened while I was writing:
I learned that this batshit insane bill PASSED: https://www.azleg.gov/legtext/55leg/1R/summary/S.1826APPROP_ASPASSEDCOW.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1mHVaubRM580jHbr1jB3UAn-kfmfCzIQIxWBqe2SV1cmrddKaoYvRLNg8
In this bill is a section, quite buried, called “Prohibited Instruction.”
According to the bill, Prohibited is anything that might cause a student “[to] feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other psychological distress because of their race, ethnicity or sex.”
Where to begin with the rage that is boiling in my blood?
Where to begin?
Can we begin with female students? Or
shall we begin with Black students? Or Navajo students?
Or maybe let’s begin with Mexican American students, or
maybe we could choose an LGBTQ kid to start?
Is this what the Arizona Legislature is after with this grotesque bill,
passed (like all dirty secrets) in the middle of the night?
Are they trying to protect the feelings of girls? Of Black kids?
Of indigenous students? Of Muslim children? Brown kids?
Or is it more likely
that this is a pathetic attempt
on behalf of the GOP in Arizona which
we already know is whacked out of its ever loving mind (see: Arizona
Election Audit),
to make sure that American students don’t have access to the TRUTH
about THEIR actual American lives?
This is about 1) the comfort of the white, heterosexual, male student in America and 2) preventing educators from truly educating in the American classroom.
In my many years of classroom teaching, I have brought up myriad social issues.
Ask any student who’s had me as an educator — not a single unit in my ELA classroom passes without politics.
Because here’s the thing, my
“teaching philosophy” is this:
“tell the truth.”
Just the truth. Nothing more.
& for me, education is my way of giving back to the communities
I call “home.” Today, my home community is Tucson. & I will soon
be educating young people in my home community.
Not to brag, but I’m a pretty damn fine educator. Like,
students still want to see my face after they graduate. I can’t say
the same about the vast majority of my high school educators in the Chicago
suburbs.
I’m good at what I do because I care about what I do.
I take my job seriously because it is a serious job: I am
being entrusted with other people’s kids. I am being trusted
to care for and educate children and young people. That’s serious.
The job is more than just tests and worksheets and rote memorization (should be, at least). The job, for me, is about providing students a safe framework, a safe space, in which they can take healthy creative risks, in which they can ask complex questions, questions that may have no answers, in which they can look at the harder truths of our American life & be okay because I am guiding them. No student, to the best of my knowledge, has ever left my classroom emotionally destroyed by what we did or said during the lesson. & if you are reading this, and you were destroyed by a lesson I presented, I want to know.
Here’s the thing: learning isn’t always pleasant.
Learning isn’t always playful or fun.
Sometimes we learn necessary facts or are confronted with necessary theories so that we might be able to endure the hardships of this life with grace, so that
we might be able to have more compassion for our neighbors, so that we might be a little smarter today than we were yesterday and maybe, just maybe, leave the place better than we found it or, at the very least, unmolested by our presence.
I don’t need to split hairs about “my ancestors were not here until after the Civil War” or “my ancestors were too broke to own slaves” or “I suffered, too.” It doesn’t fucking matter.
What matters is now and how the fuck we got here & how do we fix this mess or can we possibly fix it at all?
Every student in my classroom, with or without this bill, is going to get truth from me.
Last year, in a very white dominated part of America, my colleagues and I tried to offer a series of Social Justice Symposiums.
I shouldn’t say we “tried” — we mostly succeeded and they were wonderful, transformative events for those who attended.
When we centered race during a symposium, white parents flipped the fuck out & I was (perhaps very naively) shocked.
These were people who would call themselves “left” these are people who probably did not vote for Trump (not even once), these are people who claim (as do all white Americans) not to be “racist,” but these are still white Americans who are scared shitless that their precious American child will learn the truth about why this country is as it is right now.
Don’t you want to know?
Aren’t you even a little curious as to the truth of this nation?
I don’t know it all, but I have a good handle on some of the story.
If a man feels sad because I, as a woman, talk about my experience of growing up Female in America, or if a straight person feels sad because I, as a lesbian, talk about my experience of living queer in this country, or if a white person like me, feels uncomfortable, because we are reading the works of a Black woman who has lived her American life as a Black woman, whose fault are those sad/guilty feelings?
See, in recovery, I spend a ton of time trying to internalize this FACT:
I don’t own other people’s feelings.
I cannot control other people’s feelings.
I can approach my fellow humans with compassion, but I have no jurisdiction over how they really feel.
Naturally, as an educator of young people, I am cautious because kids have different emotional needs than adults, but I mean give me a fucking break.
If your kid comes home all fucked up and bent about learning an American Truth in school, isn’t that where you, the parent, step in?
Isn’t that where you might continue the conversation?
Or maybe learn from your student and go from there?
And if you really want your kid to learn some watered down,
bullshit, fiction about America why don’t you just write a check
and send your white child to
Our Lady of White American Fiction?
To all my white, wealthy American brethren who wrote and passed this horror of a bill, I will simply repeat what you and your lot have been telling me & all my friends: fuck you & fuck your feelings.
