Standing Outside the Golden Gate: Thoughts on Social Media & Alternative Pathways w/ Esther Armah

Are we trying to get inside or are we creating new spaces?

       

             

              Years ago living in Madrid, my husband and I were on one of our long walks, circling back from el casco antiguo nearing La Plaza del Sol, now the central meeting place for Spain’s  Indignados. We were talking passionately about politics, which was (and still is) very common for us.  This was way before there was an Occupy movement and discussions about class warfare or how schools should be run was on everybody’s tongue.  This was before (and I’m talking just twenty years ago) social media took center stage spreading information across borders like forest fires.  It was that day in Madrid when I regrettably attacked my husband because he defended the elite.

            “¡Élite, élite, élite!” I chanted while I pointed my finger at his chest. 

            A guttural sound escaped his lips, it was a chuckle I thought, but then he snapped, “The only reason you’re so angry is because you’re still standing outside the golden gate, little lady.”   

            “What?” I spun, really listening.        

            His head tilted back with the full force and grit of a hard, working-class Andalucian man. “And believe you me,” he added, “As soon you finish your degree, get a good job, become a professor in the mainstream— you’ll be very happy to reap the benefits that come with the so called upper class...because that’s how it works.” 

            That was—what did I say—twenty years ago? Funny.  Life is very, very funny.  Look at me now, still standing outside the golden gate.  But at the age of 41, I’m not kicking or screaming but rather shifting my weight from left to right hoping to keep the circulation going.   

            Why does this conversation ring in my ears like a recurring dream?  It’s because I’m toiling with the role of voice and agency in life, the purpose behind all things—like why I write, why I profess to be an educator even when I’m not teaching.  And I’m not unlike many others who have walked under the banner of OWS—those of us who have not reaped the promised benefits of hard work and a degree.  Millions are still locked outside the golden gates of the American dream.[1]

            But, I’m sort of in a new place right now.  I’m talking to you not from Tahrir Square, Plaza del Sol or Zucotti Park but from Cyber Space!—and I find myself thinking a whole lot about the power of social media and what has it changed really.  Why, Obama’s win into office was touted as a social media campaign and the Arab Spring was ignited in a similar vain—so, I want to know this:  Is social media really an alternative pathway into the golden gates or is it our way of creating a whole new space? 

            As a critical educator and writer, I am acutely aware of how we are “positioned” by the dominant discourses and practices surrounding race, class, gender, religion, language and sexual orientation.  The goal of critical pedagogy has always been about resistance, emancipation or reclaiming power by creating new spaces for dialogue.[2]  And clearly social media has shown us how participation and voice can be expanded beyond our dreams, yet I wonder if social media is just a false sense of agency, that mainstream media still monopolizes the distribution of voice, choosing some over others and that information circulating via blogs, Facebook or Twitter are still subject to the filter of celebrity and popularity.  On the one hand, social media is the cornerstone for social change.  On the other, it is a tool to reflect (and even perpetuate) current power-relations in society.  What are the critical, creative and cultural functions of social media in society?[3]  How can we develop the liberatory nature of social media as a unifying voice?

            Fortunately, I got a chance to connect with Esther Armah last week.  Many of you know, Esther is an upcoming voice in the media and she’s a writer.  Directly or indirectly, Esther’s voice is being heard, broadcast live and tweeted, impacting people internationally.  When doing a little reading about Esther, I discovered her early book called Can I Be Me? The book’s online blurb describes Esther as “addicted to the need for approval, the desire for applause, bright lights and struggle. She’s on a quest, it says, hungry for a place of belonging, a place of comfort and acceptance of her identity; black, British, Ghanaian and Afrocentric.”  Then it ends with the question, “Who would you be if there was no applause, disappointment, injustice, discrimination or rejection?”

            When I read this, I love Esther’s spirit.   I don’t have to read the book to know that this woman is willing to share human vulnerability, that she demonstrates courage and resolve when she writes about her personal journey.  I can breathe life into these few words, Esther’s life filled with intention and purpose, to connect with the universal, to find compassion for her own identity, to search for meaning  and belonging.  All of these things are the ultimate expression of agency and voice.

            So, I reach out to Esther Armah asking myself this question— Where is Esther standing?   Is she standing outside the golden gate or is she planted firmly on the inside?  I’m curious and want to explore my questions about social media from where she’s standing, through her light.  I want to know more about how we can use social media as an alternative pathway to transcend our differences and create a new space. 

            I first ask Esther to comment about her experience from the point of view of a radio personality.  I ask her, which voices do we value in society and how do we validate them?  She says, “We are in a moment where what passes as celebrity are the voices we most value.  Look at the Occupy movement, for example,” she says, “they were mostly ignored - certainly by mainstream media—until the arrival of 'celebrity' voices like Michael Moore, actress Susan Sarandon, public intellectual Dr. Cornel West.  It is a fact that mainstream media is a voice we value certainly over independent media.  The celebrity voice has become this aspirational space because it means having presence, being seen, being heard. It means attention. The reality TV celebrity, for example, that group of mostly women who act crazy, are violent, hurtful and hateful towards other women, yet they are rewarded with small screen action, a check, 15 minutes of fame and access to more opportunity. That lens, the celebrity lens, creates aspirations for some of our youth that are problematic. It means intimate partner violence is not a national issue unless pop star Rihanna faces what teen girls deal with every day. We privilege the voices and opinions of celebrity over everyday people. It now takes a national outrage to get due process in the naked cancerous reality of racism.” 

            When I reflect upon her words, I wonder if Esther is yet a celebrity.  When does one officially become a celebrity?  If she is, then where does that place her?  Can someone like Esther reside in more than one dimension— outside the gate, inside the gate, transcending the gates by actively creating a new space?  In a world where we’re often forced to choose sides— right wing, left wing, black, white, public or private— is it possible for us to define a new universal belonging that exceeds these boundaries?  Is it possible to see the world (and behave within it) organically, holistically and all-encompassing rather than fragmented, polarized, in constant opposition, agitation and indignant-cy? 

            I ask Esther explicitly about youth and creating new space.  That’s when she introduces me to the term emotional justice.  “Emotional justice means dealing with, addressing, challenging the legacy of untreated trauma that is the direct result of our shared global histories,” she says.  “Emotional justice is the difference between acting crazy for a reality TV bit versus the articulation of righteous rage in pursuit of justice. In our activist circles we can be hypocritical about how much we value celebrity.  There are activist stars as with all other types of celebrity.  Our youth sees this hypocrisy and since nobody aspires to failure, the definition of success has been understood as being in the light, standing on a stage, having the mic and so we hear them articulate that aspiration for themselves too.  I'm not mad at young people but I think the call is for us to be more willing to be honest.”

            Honesty?  Esther is bringing up a critical point about social media as a tool to create new space.  Can social media be used to engender honesty?  Some of the common obstacles educators (and parents) face when teaching responsible conscientious use of social media is sensitivity, honesty, establishing ethical codes of behavior and respect for personal and individual rights…like privacy.  In a study of media literacy education in Turkey, participants stated that they did not trust media completely because the media generally presents distorted and exaggerated “truth,” and mixes real and constructed messages together.[4] But does social media, this new discourse in which diverse participants come together in order to collectively “reconstruct” our understanding of the world around us—give us a better sense of truth?  Or does social media create a false sense of honesty, as Facebook might be seen as creating a false sense of community? 

             “If we want to prepare our youth,” Esther says, “we need to face how unprepared we are ourselves. We need to be more willing to own our disappointment, anger, frustration with the world—including with the world of activism and the toll it takes on us and our place within it. The truth is, voices that matter don't always get heard—- therefore the work is to make those voices get heard.”

            But how do we prepare young people to engage in social media with a conscious?  How can we help them negotiate this terrain?  Will these voices have a real impact on society?

            Esther throws a few questions back at me.  She asks, “I would ask you to define what is important, ask yourself what you consider the important issues of today.  We validate voices by using our personal power to highlight other people’s words—with the explosion of social media - we can tweet them, re-tweet them, include them on our Facebook status updates, blog about them, text about them.  With the millions in that space we can create a lens for those voices.   Social media is a great and powerful avenue and we just need to decide how we want to use it.  We need to be merciless in our pursuit of what we choose as our agenda. I've been in sister circles using social media to direct conversation, to shine a lens, to make a change, to advocate and it’s personally powerful. The question is always this— what is the change we want to see and what are we willing to do about making that our reality?”

            Bingo.  This brings me back to that moment with Michael Moore at the Beginning is Near event this month, remember?  When we asked him what people can do to make a difference, he told us the very unglamorous story of his humble beginnings as a comic and semi-trouble maker in Flint Michigan.  I remember his humility and simplicity telling his story, sprawled back on the chair in jeans and a pair of sneakers.  I thought then, Michael Moore is just like me— a nobody and a somebody at the same time.  I was able for an instant to look at Michael not through linear time or as a celebrity but as a multi-dimensional human being.  Rich and poor, a comic and a politician, young and old, smart and learning, receiving and giving —a nobody and a somebody simultaneously.  

             As I think critically about our use of social media as a society, I think about whether we’re all trying to get inside the golden gates.  Or are we bonding with others like ourselves on the outside?  Or if neither exists in cyber space, that we’re really creating a new space that transcends our earthly domains?  Social media has something to teach us all, perhaps.  This alternative pathway, this wonderful “free” and often revolutionary community.  How can we use it to raise consciousness, validate each other and prepare the road for even greater transcendence? 

            Implicit in what I call a transcensory approach to education is that humans are at a critical point in evolution.  We do have the power to exist above and independent of our bodies and the material plane.   As our personal and communal development expands into new territory (like that which we are experiencing through social media), we learn to become critical agents in our lives.  We learn to honor the call— to be honest, to transcend our individual differences, promote healing and most importantly build community.     

            How are we to teach voice and agency in the age of social media?   Start with you. Each individual must find their personal inspiration—there feel the pull of empowerment.  Your voice emanates, spread light into others, especially for the sake of our children whose lights are shining so brightly.  Like Dr. Cornel West says, education ought to be about creating a space for young people to attend to things that matter.  What matters is what is taking place outside of school, the life that transcends the walls of the school—it is our universal human experience.     Understanding the transcensory nature of social media repositions all of us inside the golden gates…or better yet—it pulls all of us up…up…up and over.

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[1] Nearly one in two Americans are now living in or near poverty, including millions of middle class Americans who find themselves caught up in the economic “tragedy” they never imagined could happen to them. (Smiley & West, The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto, 2012)

[2] Burnett & Merchant (2011) Is there space for critical literacy in the context of social media? English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 10(1)

[3] Burn & Durran (2007) Media literacy in schools: practice, production, and progression. London: Paul Chapman

[4] Elma, Kesten, Dicle & Uzun (2010) Media literacy education in Turkey: An evaluation of media processes and ethical codes. Educational Sciences: Theory & Practice 10 (3).

The Beginning is Near but the Perennial Oreo Cookie Stays

On the Conversation with Cornel West, Michael Moore & Esther Armah

            The Beginning is Near conversation with Cornel West and Michael Moore presented by the Brecht Forum at Hunter College Friday night, really should’ve included more of Esther Armah’s voice.  Although simply the moderator who for the most part sat silently poised between the two entertaining men (each for very different reasons obviously)—Esther Armah, a tall and rather glamorous woman clearly had much to say.   The WBAI radio host, international journalist and playwright (Esther wrote Saviour? the play that tackled the difficult topic of white privilege, produced by Voza Rivers at the Dwyer Cultural Center last year) is not only a brilliant conversationalist but she certainly has the courage to push through complex, hot button topics with prominent public figures, like white rage & privilege, both pretty controversial in the Obama era of politics.  Thanks to Esther, those of us in the audience got the honor of watching Michael Moore squirm as he slowly arrived at his own understanding—an “epiphany” of sorts— of what it means to be a white male in America.  It was equally captivating to observe Cornel West zigzag over the subject and return to a more comfortable mode of race talk which examines (and often criticizes) people of color for having “sold out,” or having forgotten their moral (and racial) obligation to fix things. 

            Why are discussions of white privilege so hot tempered and even more so in the age of Obama politics? Is it because Obama is really half white and half black, but touted (and self-identified) as the first black president?  Or is it because it’s about shifting our focus from the victims to those who have benefitted from racism & white supremacist policies?  According to Francis Kendall, diversity consultant and author of Understanding White Privilege (2006), whites have created and sustained a pathological system in which their positive sense of self is based on the negative sense of someone else.  Therefore, says Kendall, it’s important that whites take responsibility to understand their individual and collective role in maintaining a system of white superiority.  That is the first thing.  Then, there’s linking this responsibly to individual and institutional practice and policy.  It’s asking whites to fix it.  This is new territory for many and often dismissed as left wing rubbish.  In a recent online dialogue I participated in on the retention of people of color in the work place, I was slammed when I brought up white privilege.  I was told (by a white, male diversity professional) that white privilege has nothing to do with retention issues, that a conversation about white privilege makes people of color feel unwelcomed and would be interpreted in an organization as “trying to make white people feel guilty.”  No wonder discussions of race focus solely on the effects on those who are oppressed and not on the oppressors or beneficiaries, almost as if they don’t even exist.

            Back to the 68th street assembly hall.  Overall the conversation with Cornel West and Michael Moore was a stimulating voyage into the minds and worlds of two distinct gentlemen, each coming from completely different backgrounds, opposite in every way; from physical appearance to personality to political strategy—and yet, the juxtaposition of them both on stage personifies the juxtaposition of themes that continue to stir the debate—a debate that we “liberals” like to call “Occupy Wall Street.”  While I personally harbor conflicting opinions about the Occupy movement, I do credit it for giving us a popular all-encompassing name, a hashtag if you will, or better yet—a unifying platform from which so many can coalesce and coexist.  And that was the point, I gather of bringing Cornel West and Michael Moore together for the evening.  We need a unifying platform in spite our diversity.

            Let me give you a metaphor: Clink, clink, clink, draaaag, clink, clink, clink.  It’s the sound of a fork hitting against the sides of a ceramic bowl as eggs are being whisked, tiny bubbles begin to froth at the sides, each flick of the wrist causes some spillage then a pour and sizzle…followed by a flip.  The conversation was fantastically organically scrambled, multiple messages trying to blend, quick, inevitable, hits and misses, ending in an imperfect mound of yellow which ultimately became the centerpiece for a delicious and hearty breakfast.  What a better way to  mark the “beginning” of a new day?

            Spillage. Like Michael Moore’s rage directed at Obama.  Moore’s generally mellow voice reverberated throughout the assembly hall as he screamed into the mic, “What part of the equation didn’t Obama understand?”  He was referring to the fact that Obama’s bi-partisanship agenda has backlashed and consequently pissed off millions of voters who got him into office, many who would have then identified themselves as leftist.  (I wonder what they would call themselves today.)  “I want the black Obama not the white Obama in the White House,” Moore yelled.  If my memory serves me correctly, this was even before Esther brought up the topic of race, and maybe it was Moore’s comments that compelled her to do so, but either way I couldn’t help wince when Michael bashed Obama politics and deployed the old “oreo cookie” metaphor—black on the outside, white on the inside.  That is— if he were really black, he would be an honest liberal, or in the very least a true democrat.  Are blacks born into a political party or as Moore reiterated later in the conversation—are blacks intrinsically more conscientious and more likely to stand up for human & civil rights?  Is the white half of Obama pulling him down?  Really?  What is it about our perception of race that skews our expectations of people and their moral obligation in society?  Do we expect more of Obama’s presidency because he’s black when in a different arena, say the classroom or the boardroom, we expect less because of the same profiling? 

            Although Dr. West has been criticized for his disdain for Obama’s centrist politics which he similarly links to Obama’s “fear of free black men” due to his “white cultural formation,” he did end up responding diplomatically to Moore by explaining that blacks have historically been at the forefront of revolutionary politics because of their history of oppression, that any person or group continuously oppressed will inevitably react accordingly.  Unless… unless they are victims of the “dumb down culture,” aka “weapons of mass distraction.”  Many black folks, just like many Jews, according to Dr. West—have forgotten their suffering.  They no longer remember history, are “up for sale,” and very unlikely to challenge the status quo.  “Our young people no longer have a sense of three dimensional time, past-present-future,” West said and then added, “We must remember those who suffered so that their afterlife is at work.”  Cornel West who is now in New York teaching at the Union Theological Seminary in Harlem and touring with Tavis Smiley to increase awareness on poverty, leaned over into the audience and said in his feast of poetic rap-rhythm, “It’s about having compassion for those who’ve been crushed but not destroyed.”

            Did it feel like we were talking about many different issues at once?  Yes, absolutely.  But it’s not surprising since any real conversation about the current state of affairs, the role of capitalism in our country, the Occupy movement and the corporatization of our democracy— will unleash this volcanic lava, pressured and sometimes sealed, but ultimately ready to explode at any given moment.  It is inevitable as we are now witnessing the culmination or “the beginning,” if you will, of civic discourse rooted in the great intersection of identity politics: race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion— to name a few.  And I haven’t even mentioned how this convulsion of variables is systematically twisted, dismembered and reassembled in today’s media.  Neither have I discussed the role of education in the mix, because just as Cornel West said—what about the youth?  Out of what appeared to be an overwhelming response from the audience handing in questions on small index cards (there must have been at least a hundred questions!) the topic of education, the privatization of schools and the systematic slashing of arts & critical thinking programs were at the top of the list.  

            But, I will save that discussion for next week.  Until then, I leave you all with a few questions:  Who are the dominant voices in the pundit community that shape how we understand the issues surrounding race, politics and education? What does it say about which voices we value as a society?  How do we validate them?  And finally, how can we prepare youth in our schools to enter the conversation, navigate this flailing public discourse to have an impact on these important issues?

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“We do it with the old perennial reality of love.”

                                                                        ~Cornel West

Ode to David Gruenwald: On Resistance, Reinhabitation & Regime Change

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
    By Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

    
            Salman Rushdie’s short but poignant speech at the Pen American Center’s Arthur Miller’s Freedom to Write Lecture reminds me of the intersection between art and education, or at least reminds me of the old education that I once loved.  It was the education as a practice of liberation.  Education as an act of reinvention.  Education as enlightenment.  Oh, how do I miss thee!  But is this education still reserved for some?

            Rushdie speaks about the power of censorship.  He refers to the artist’s stubborn dismissal of such topics—because what artist wants to anchor themselves to a conversation about the antithesis to art?  Yet, we must.  We must have the conversation if we are to resist any and all efforts to limit our capacity as artist educators to transcend.  Voila!  I’ve just invented a new terminology: artist educator.  Or has this always been in existence?

            Here is a quote that reminds me of the significance of Salman Rushdie in my life,  like when I read Midnights Children.

Originality is dangerous. If you want to increase the sum of what is possible for human beings; to say, to know, to understand and therefore, to be—you have to go to the edge and push outwards. 

            Censorship.  I’ve been feeling the heavy weight of my writing for years.  Yes, I’ve been told to quit blogging— it’s hurting your pocket, don’t you know?  I’ve tried to stop and then I can’t.  Why must I stop writing about my struggle to transcend this miserable time and place and the covert and not so covert hijacking of my beloved field of education?  But, there is a real and tangible force that makes resistance in today’s climate difficult.  Rushdie talks about freedom to write like free air.  Then he adds, “free unless you’re an African American male wearing a hoodie.”  Free, he says, unless you are… and then I blank out for a moment hearing nothing.  I am thinking to myself—free unless you are me. 

            What is this illusion of freedom, the art of education for freedom, that is often espoused by “free” men and women and not dared to be truly uttered (and acted upon) by the most vulnerable members of our communities?

             I remember the words of a former comrade, Joseph Skinner, teacher and former union rep, as he scoffed at the round table dialogue I held at The Gordon Center, Institute for Urban & Minority Education in 2009.  We were talking about how we can bring together people of different races and classes for change in education policy and practice.  He said— who can afford to be an activist these days? Who has the time to sit around and “contemplate” the green movement, for example?

            There are so many ways we censor our freedom to write, to breathe, to educate.

            Definitions of critical thinking vary, but it’s generally considered to entail a doubting attitude and an ability to scrutinize ideas and assumptions through reasoned argument.  According to Lipman (1991), critical thinking is crucial to the survival of a rational, democratic society.[1] While critical thinking skills are listed in the Common Core Standards, I ask: Are teachers likely to encourage critical thinking and its counterpart, freedom of expression in the current climate of examination, standardization and value added teacher evaluation? Probably not.  Testing companies are given a list of “controversial” words that should not be included, multicultural programs rooted in Freire’s theory of emancipation are being slaughtered, teachers and administrators are being recruited from the business sector, veteran schools are being pushed out by virgin charters, kindergarten students are asked to evaluate teachers, the list goes on. 

            And what about the resistance?  Although resistance is a typical, even expected response to [this sort of] domination, it is also a privilege to have the economic and social capital needed, and the distance from suffering required, to be able to reflect in relative comfort on the world’s problems, to be an interpreter of major crisis instead of a victim.[2]
            My fourteen year old son, like Walt Whitman, rises up and wanders off by himself.  His grades have dropped dramatically and when I approach him about it he says, what do you expect when there's no time to breathe?  At my son's school, he is tested on the average 2-3 times a week, not including the barrage of state exams and upcoming Regents.  I watch his spirit walk out on the system every day and I'm exhausted and depressed, a hypocrite for begging him to stay.  I can't afford to change schools right now and I think about Katniss and the Hunger Games, how she thought about running away.  Who will stay and fight for the rest of us?  I ask myself, but are you really fighting?  I've been warned recently.  Careful.  You'll just be another soldier down.
          What do you have to do to become a philosopher, mommy?  My nine year old daughter asks me the other day.  I stop and think.  What does one have to do to become a philosopher?  I'll have to get back to you on that, I say.  Then, when I'm alone in my room at night, thinking and frowning myself into a migraine--I decide I won't dare clip my daughter's wings.  But I'm not sure what that really means or how.
_____________________

[1] McCrae, N. (2011) Nurturing critical thinking and academic freedom in the 21^st century university. International Journal of Teaching & Learning in Higher Education, 23(1)

[2] Gruenwald, D. (2006) Resistance, Reinhabitation and Regime Change, Journal of Research in Rural Education, 21 (9)

Poverty Consciousness & Community Building

            I’ve got a hole in my pocket much bigger than a quarter.   A year ago in Abu Dhabi I lived amongst riches, slept between white crisp bed sheets that were laundered every day by mostly Indian or Thai hotel workers, who shamefully became a natural part of my backdrop—the way I grew accustomed to them taking care of me!  I was making money, taking care of my family back home though, so the money I made was spread thin around the globe like one spreads grape jelly on toast.  That was typical in Abu Dhabi.  Talking  to the cabbies and the girls that set the buffet table at our trainings, I learned that most folks working were taking care of somebody back home.  One salary, regardless of the amount took care of mothers or fathers, children, grandparents, siblings and sometimes good friends.  When I asked them how often they visited their families, they told me sometimes once every two years.  Once every two years?  Then they’d assure me that every moment, every penny is worth it because at least they’re eating and the kids can go to school.  “It gives me pride to know that I can do it.  Without me, they wouldn’t have anything.”

            Living in New York this year has been filled with elation and melancholy, poverty consciousness grows inside me like a weed as the bills pile high and there’s no sign of work.   My daughter sings every morning though and my son hugs me every day even though he’s already fourteen.  I see them grow by the millimeter, notice every subtle mood, make their lunch every morning and hide secret messages inside their napkins.  I’m surrounded by the joys of parenthood and in between our conversations about school where I’m given permission to interject (because I always have to), I realize that I am the most important teacher in their lives and I do a hell of a job at it too.  How much are our conversations worth if I compare them to the conversations children of privilege have at some private school?  I am after all a private, one-to-one, state of the art, PhD clad instructor on life, academics and social development, aren’t I?  Can’t afford to pay the rent this month, but I’m spilling every ounce of wisdom into my two babies’ ears, a luxury that last year I couldn’t afford because I was so far away making a living in Abu Dhabi.  I know this will not last for long.  I can’t afford to stay home. 

            My mind wanders to Up With Chris Hayes as he discussed the value of a woman’s work at home (or a man’s for that matter, because as many of you know my husband has been home raising the kids for years while I traveled).  Chris was outraged by Romney’s comment that we need to make sure poor people learn the “dignity” of work.  I’m reminded of how unfair our society is and how often we discredit the most important types of work, the work that sprouts up from the blood and sweat of a family, a community, a culture, a tribe, a passing down of a legacy, of hope.  The taking care of people.  The value of human beings.

            The Dwyer Cultural Center falters under the heavy pressures of the economy as does many other cultural and social institutions in Harlem, the Bronx, New York, the US, all over the globe.  I’m talking about the rattle and shake of the big boys pressing down on the few places working middle class and poor folks can go to for help and a sense of community.  The unions are disappearing and the schools are being locked up and sealed behind business cubicles, jobs are little to none and if someone is working—it’s often temporary consultant work where community building gets harder and harder.  Read Sennett’s work.  Where do people have these democratic conversations if everyone is worrying at home, isolated, desperately fighting off the onslaught of a depression that feels so much worse emotionally and psychologically than what we might see on the outside where garbage and broken concrete are accumulating?  Who has the energy to go outside when you’re bankrupt and the house over your head is falling and mostly, just like back in the day, in the Reagan years, it’s still mostly women and children who are falling.

            Voza Rivers the Chairman of the Harlem Arts Alliance (also the Executive Director of the New Heritage Theater Group) hands me a check to put in my broken pocket.  He’s been writing checks for years supporting hundreds of struggling artists of color.  It is who he is and he does it effortlessly.  As we drive down Lenox Avenue, he tells me the horror stories of what’s going on, which businesses are falling off the radar and how he and Lloyd Williams, the President of the Harlem Chamber of Commerce are discussing how the cultural institutions in the black community need to work together, merge in order to leverage their resources, create a united front as they navigate this flailing economic rampage, hardest on poor communities of color across the United States.  I look down at the check in my hands and I’m reminded of my own isolation and my own economic downfall, then as if he picks up on my energy he says, “Everybody’s going through the same thing.  We’ve all been there before.”  Then I feel a surge of hope born out of the admiration for the man.  He’s so different than what they say about black folk and poor people in general.  “We must continue to help each other and push aside our silly differences.  This is about the community, not about one man’s personal credit.”  Voza is the essence of community building.  Donate.

            When I get home, I flip open the book Voza lent me.  Panther Baby by Jamal Joseph.  In the first few pages Jamal writes:

            “In 1968 nobody was badder than the Panthers.  They took manhood rating to another level.  Not only were they willing to fight and die for “theirs,” they were also willing to lay down their lives for every man, woman, and child in the black community whether they knew them personally or not.”

            All of the images of blacks looting on television whenever there’s a crisis flashes through my mind and I think, this is so different than the black folk I’ve been taught to see.  Who are these people that in spite of poverty consciousness are willing to lend a hand and pick each other out of the ditch?  Just like workers in Abu Dhabi whose salaries shelter and feed huge families and me and my own family taking care of each other, even in the most desperate times, my friends, my cousins, my “peeps,” always taking care of each other, spreading thin the few pennies like a grape jelly smear on a bagel.  We’ve always been fighting, giving, working with each other. There are so many of us and when you hear our stories, you must wonder how we can't believe in ourselves.  How much weight can a people carry, how heavy a load is needed to wear us down?  Believe.

            In my new novel, Flip Flops in Winter (represented by a fabulous up and coming Latina literary agent, Leticia Gomez) which is about my grandmother who came to New York City in 1935 from Puerto Rico to work for a wealthy Jewish family in exchange for piano lessons, Maria discovers how poor folks in Harlem were forced to live together in order to help each other pay rent:

            “I fell silent.  Ruben and Walker had prepared me for it earlier in the week.  They explained that no one wanted to rent to Negroes throughout the city so landlords in Harlem charged them outrages prices knowing very well they had no other choice.  An average apartment could rent for fifty dollars for a white family while they’d ask somewhere between one hundred and a hundred and fifty dollars for a Negro family.  That was why so many Negro families took in boarders once they were in.  It was the only way they could afford the high rent.” 

            How we frame our experiences is important, I think, how we share with each other and publish personal accounts about what is really happening out there is important work.  Don’t stop.  Poverty consciousness and community giving is at the heart of the poor man’s experience and people of color in particular.  Often we forget our heritage, we are misinformed by the media, we are broken down at the work place, pulled apart when we try to exercise our democratic rights, we are marginalized in so many ways that are both subtle and overt—

            Each one of us who is out there working, we share what we have with those of us less fortunate.  Men and women are walking around, tired and groggy, first thing in the morning to the night, carrying a briefcase or a hard hat or a black and white composition notebook in a cotton bag— we are carrying ourselves and more often than not, if you look a little deeper, we are carrying so many more around us who are struggling to make ends meet. 

            We can’t and don’t do it alone regardless of what some folks have you think.  We know what it means to be a community.  We must give thanks to all the poor, working & middle class patrons who are carrying so many these days.  And, know this.  The rich do not have a monopoly on philanthropy.