I grew up in a relatively conservative Christian family in Cleveland, on West Blvd just 5 houses from Madison Ave, to be exact. The city rec center where I learned to swim, played on volleyball, soccer and basketball teams, attended summer camps is the same rec center where Tamir Rice was shot. On more than one occasion members of a local gang sat on our front stoop. I had sleepovers at friends in which they told me not to wear certain colors because of rivaling gangs. Our next door neighbors were a same sex couple that taught my mom about gardening and who came into our home for dinner. Around the corner from our house was a union hall. I have vivid memories of men standing outside in the bitter cold around a burning garbage can. In my young, naive, and idealistic mind I wanted to stand with them in what I perceived to be a fight against injustice. I also attended a very small private school that created a sort of bubble.
My community was quite different than my family. It would have been very easy for my parents to subtly or even directly name the different behaviors and people as "wrong" or "unsavory." Instead, as I mentioned, those people that were different than us were invited into our home, I was taken to theirs. There was no judgement to these different people and how they lived their lives.
It just was. Period. My parents demonstrated how to be with others that were not like us whether it was in their beliefs, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religion, and class. They demonstrated kindness and compassion. Yet they instilled in us their values and beliefs. I don't think they lived a life of contradiction or hypocrisy, at least not as I remember it. But then again, when you value kindness, human life, when you acknowledge that every person was created by God, the natural outflow of that is a life that loves every type of man, woman and child, regardless of how different they may appear.
Fast forward to college where I attended Case Western Reserve University and majored in History and Education. I sought out courses that would allow me to understand "other," and had a social justice component: African American history, Women's history, and a concentration in African Studies, The primary text in my US History intro course was Zinn's History of America. I read texts like Live from Death Row: Mumia Abu Jamal, about multicultural feminism and white privilege, My Education courses required us to look critically at the textbooks to see who was left out of the history, how certain histories were written, how a map could teach us so much about ethnocentricity, and so on.
then I spent two years working abroad in South Korea and had the amazing opportunity to travel throughout Southeast Asia where I was exposed to poverty in a way I had never seen in America. Yet, I experienced amazing acts of generosity from these very people. It was striking, to say the least.
After living abroad I spent a year getting my masters at Teachers College in Manhattan. The program, Literacy Specialist, was founded on challenging our concepts of what it means to learn and be literate. Daily we were challenged in class, in our writing, and our work with students to get rid of preconceived notions and to "name" our own experiences and how that influenced our talk, our actions, our everything. In one class I wrote a paper on how I "read the world." I documented pretty much every thought that came to my mind as I rode the bus, subway, went out to eat. I considered myself to be open and non-judgemental. That was a very humbling and eye opening experience because I had my own set of preconceived ideas about people. It's an exercise everyone should try just for a day or even a few hours.
As a teacher in an international school in Korea, private and public schools in Baton Rouge I found ways to have discussions about privilege, to challenge how history has been presented. My students had social justice journals where they were asked to pay attention to their surroundings, movies they saw, comics they read, conversations they overheard and where they shopped. They responded to questions like: who is there, what do they look like, why are we here and not somewhere else, how is this different/similar, how does it make me feel, etc. I had students to be able to come to a realization that the child who lives in poverty was no more/less deserving than they who lived a life of wealth and material privilege. What an amazing thing to witness! in 2008 while teaching at EBR Lab at Istrouma High School I took my kids out on Saturday's to register voters and tasked them to volunteer with political campaigns. Then councilman Torvald Smith talked to my class about civic responsibility, the law, and their rights.
And then I got pregnant and I kept getting pregnant, even pregnant with triplets. I constantly struggled with "what am I doing to make a difference? How am I contributing to the greater good." When I would hear people say "action is better than dialogue" my immediate response was "my kids need to hurry and grow-up so I can get out and teach again because in the classroom is where I can make a difference and working in the classroom is admirable and acknowledged." I saw friends and family doing really important work and here I was wiping butts, sweeping up the upteenth spill of the day, and washing dishes. I was resentful of my stage of life. Even as I am writing this I am having to push down feelings of resentment, missing out, and not doing enough.
Last year SCOTUS voted in favor of same sex marriages. One of my close friends was/is in a same sex relationship and we were regularly in each others homes and our girls played together. My girls never asked any questions or made comments but they were years younger at the time. Everyone seemed to be talking about it and not always in the nicest of ways. All I felt I could say, if the topic was ever mentioned was, "God made everyone and He loves everyone. He wants us to do the same. Love others and show kindness"
Last year my eldest daughters began school. Evelyn attended the Polk campus of FLAIM on Thomas Delpit and Lucy was in gifted pre-k at University Terrace. (I mention the programs they are in because I know in some ways they are in a unique setting and it is not the same as sending my kids to a traditional EBR school) That said, my girls are not among the majority. These schools are across town in a neighborhood very different than ours. Their friends were diverse ethnically, religiously, and socio-economically. I still was not content about being home, it didn't feel like I was doing enough to "fight" injustice. Then one day, a day no different than the days before, it dawned on me that neither of my girls ever mentioned anything about how the neighborhoods and kids looked different. It reminded me of my childhood. I was exposed to different people and places as simply being a part of life. Then I became more intentional, everytime we went to the library we travelled across town to the Carver branch to further expose them and to live more aspects of our life outside of our little neighnorhood. I looked into activities at the Baranco YMCA, however what they offered didn't meet our unique family needs.
I have been telling myself "being a mom is enough." I don't completely believe it yet. But I realized that my childhood environment, what was said and not said by my parents, and how they lived their lives were so influential on how I viewed others and the world. I can have conversations with my kids about always being kind, I can read them stories about people overcoming adversity and showing compassion, I can instill in them the knowledge that we do things differently than other families but that doesn't make other families wrong or bad. I can teach them that God made every living person so unique, He loves each person just as they are, and all God wants us to do is one simple thing: Love others.
This whole blog entry came into being because I wanted to share a pinterest board I started last Spring: "social justice for kids." For whatever reason, I felt I needed explain that I had not just hopped on this band wagon of social justice. Kind of silly, I know. I want to raise daughters with strong character, a desire to question and know more, to be those who stand up for others, to see things that are different as just that: different with no judgement or value, and above all to love. I need moms who want the same. I want to learn about the books you are reading, the conversations you are having, the activities you are engaging them in. Let's face it, I will always be a mom.
