Stranger Fruit: The Legacy

Stranger Fruit: The Legacy*

April 16, 2021.

“Hands. Show me your hands. Drop it. Drop it.”

Hands up!

Hands are up!

The boy’s hands are up!

I am screaming now.  Take us back in time.  Move us back in time.  Stop.

The boy’s hands are up.  Don’t shoot him!

Time stands still.

But it doesn’t

It is over. 

Adam’s life is over.

And the still image of baby face, boy, child, with hands up makes imprints. 

I will not watch the video. 

But the grainy still image is enough. 

Adam Toledo: 13. Stop. Brown face

Anthony Thompson, 17. Stop. Brown face

Tamir Rice, 12. Stop. Brown face

Travyon Martin, 17. Stop. Brown face

Aiyana Jones, 7. Stop. Brown face

Emmett Till, 14. Stop. Brown face

Hannah Ocuish, 12. Stop. Brown face

And there are more and there are more and there are more…

I can’t find all the names! 

INTERUPTION: April 20, 2021.

STOP KILLING OUR BLACK AND BROWN CHILDREN!!!!

I add the name:

Ma’Khia Bryant. 16. Stop. Brown face. 

And the old school movie reel plays, click, click. 

Click. 

Jagged images move us back through time.

White Crowd.  White Spectators.  White Murderers.  White White Whitewash.  Stop the clicking.  Stop the Film.  Stop watching.  

Consuming Black death Is death to All.  Our collective soul is burning.

We die with each image.  We cease breath.  We ALL cease breath each time, “I can’t breathe” plays. Click, click. Rewind.  Click, click again.  

Giggles heard across shadows of time

Skittle bag on ground, weighed down by half-full, pieces, rainbow pieces, sweet. Left. 

“Adam played with Legos and rode bikes with his siblings”

Half-finished Lego structure, relegated to basement or 

Stop. 

And the pain as toe steps on lingering Lego on Carpet. The pain. 

A Lego.

Like dust that blows across history swirling and swirling around us

They are disappeared

White gaze and then gone

Gone to record

Gone to community

Gone to family

Gone.

“And Black Children Are Six Times More Likely to Be Shot to Death by Police.”

“The lawyer said that the shooting, while tragic, was justified given the nature of the threat.”

Like a manic murder that most of us white folks say, “this can’t be happening” even as we consume and consume and consume Black life.   IT IS HAPPENING!!!!!!  I am screaming. Black and brown children are consumed by us.  STOP.

White folks, TAKE RESPONSIBILITY.  One white man’s action is SHAME on all of us.  We all pulled that trigger.  Don’t cover your ears, close your eyes, or escape to fantasy. I speak to myself here as I speak to all of us.  I am speaking to White folks, to those us of who study and teach race and childhood.  It is time to do more, to yell louder and to use the power we have unjustly been granted in our institutions.  We sit at the tables.  We hold the reins and the whip.  Listen.  We hold the lash.  It is time that we recognize the power we have unjustly benefited from and speak and act.  We must speak, act, and ABOLISH THE POLICE.  The institution must be torn out from its roots.  The root system lingers and we must dig and dig and dig with all of our might.   It is time to build community safety through ways that respect ALL life.  BLACK LIVES MATTER.

*Thank you to Gaylene Gordon for the title of this piece, in reference to Billie Holiday’s 1954, “Strange Fruit”.

The world is different.

I woke up this morning and just as the day started to break open my consciousness but in a slow way—a gentle way, a meandering way

I remembered—I saw the light glow from the window.

Snow

Lots of snow. 

And the joy of this extra light/glow started to rise up in my spirit. 

And no sooner did the reality of snow hit me 

That I hear Kaia babbling away—sharing uninterrupted commentary about the snow, snow, snow. 

Such joy

Such excitement

As if I could bottle this up as an elixir when we all need it.

To gently ease our troubles.

Snow!

And it struck me as we played outside and cleared the covered walk

The world is different.

We are different.

Blanketed in glistening glowing snow. 

The walk becomes an adventure and there are new discoveries to be made

In the visage

Snow covered hills and untouched glory

We make prints

We make gentle marks

Our existence. 

Before any annihilation or quick eruption from the plow—the clearing

We make gentle marks.

We explore freshly fallen snow crest

Adventure. 

My whole world is new

Our whole world is new under the blanket. 

Abolitionist Childhood Now.

Here’s a link to an invited blog post with Youth Circulations:

Abolitionist Childhood Now.

Innocence will not save us.

I’m a little ashamed to admit that I found myself susceptible to one of those Facebook adds.  “Oh, those pants are cute and they look super comfortable!”  I put the pants into my cart.  Low and behold, a request to enter my email popped up to receive 20% off!  I entered my email and found the discount.  I went back to my cart and started to check-out.  At the top of my screen appeared: “With every purchase, you save a child.”  WTF?!?  I felt simultaneously furious and ashamed.  I quickly hit the red X at the corner of my browser.  Gone.  

This is racist, ageist, capitalism at play!  Hey you, elite privileged (read: white) adult: with your purchase, you just saved some imagined (read: Black or Brown) poor suffering child from a far-away land.  Poof: all personal responsibility for harming children or enabling children to be harmed is gone.  You are free.  You saved a child.  So many of us in this racist ageist capitalist circus will feel ease and comfort believing, “With my cute pants, I’m saving the world.”  The mirage continues.  The circus continues.  Children keep dying.  

The children are not responsible for our collective future!  The children show us a mirror to the present, past, and future in their vulnerability to the harms that we adults continue to inflict on them and on us.   Adults: you can deny accountability over and over again, but we are in charge.  We make the rules. We cannot tell children that it is up to them to make the world right.  How unjust!  We feed them poison and then ask them to make everything better.  They do not have access to the kind of power needed to make things better.  We have access to that power.  

Let me be clear: I believe that adults learn our greatest lessons from children, from paying attention and relearning what it truly means to live with conviction and to experiment.  Children play.  They are not innocent.  They play.  That is what we crave and desire.  Children watch the world very closely and they are constantly learning from us—our violence and our care.  Children also resist. They take to the streets to force us to face our hypocrisy and with courage, they demand justice for one another and for all of us. Children have always been at the forefront of protest.

As childhood scholars, we look for children’s voices and I love children’s stories.  These stories bring life and joy and pain and beauty.  I will continue to listen and learn. But we must be real.  These stories will never free them or us without adults dismantling the violent institutions that continue to mistrust, misbelieve, and mischaracterize children.

Children may not have all the ugly words yet for the harm we create, but they are not innocent.  This so-called innocence that we say we are trying to protect in our children is what we imagine, desire, and crave.  Because without knowledge, we can pretend that we are not responsible. But friends, we have always experienced harm.  Children experience more harm than adults with higher rates of poverty, food insecurity, and susceptibility to environmental degradation.  Do not delude yourself in thinking that there is some sort of innocence out there that will free you or your children.  Innocence is a scapegoat that lets us ignore—lets us refuse accountability—for the many harms we continue to perpetuate in our world. 

The future is all of us. Children show us a mirror to the parts of the world we do not want to see. We make them innocent so we don’t have to look at the harm we inflict on them and on all of us. Together with children, let’s reimagine and build new and sustainable webs of care.

PTSD is a real thing.

First, PTSD is a real thing, folks—please stop minimizing us when we express symptoms from it.   Second, a disclaimer:  this post is not meant to disparage individual health care workers for whom I feel great compassion.  They are doing the best they can while working under tremendous stress.  Our government and our racial capitalist health care system is to blame for the sense of dehumanization I experienced.

On Monday, I woke up with my right side of my face in partial paralysis. Scary. I was diagnosed with Bell's Palsy and it should resolve in a few months. I feel lucky. My ER experience was tough because as a person who lives with PTSD, medical facilities and especially hospitals trigger a panic response in me.  I know this about myself and I communicated this to the medical practitioners who admitted me.  

As they hooked me up for an EKG, I started to feel light headed and nauseous, the first symptoms of a vasovagal reaction (which tends to end in me losing consciousness, if I don’t have the space and time to lay down and intentionally relax). I know this because it is a patterned cascade that I experience under extreme stress. My wife also knows this because she has, unfortunately, witnessed me go through this several times—about once or twice a year. 

The medical practitioners expressed frustration with me because I was not able to let them complete the vitals quickly enough.  I asked if I could lay down in a different room (there was no cot in this room) for a minute and they said I couldn’t until they finished the vitals.  As soon as they removed the EKG cables, I laid down on the dirty cold floor and tried to breathe.  The nurse said I had to get up right away because they needed to use the room.  I apologized and got into the wheelchair.  As they started to wheel me to a room, I started to get that ringing in my ears and blurred vision and I told them I was going to throw up.  After that, I passed out.  My wife said that the medical practitioner kept telling me over and over again that I needed to sit up straight in the chair.  According to her, my wife held me up so I wouldn’t fall out of the chair and then she exclaimed for them to look at my face, that I had passed out.  I came to with a bunch of strangers in my face telling me I had passed out, asking my name, birth date, etc.—they had moved my wife away from me.  I had no idea where I was and my sense of self came back quickly but in those seconds that felt like ages, I experienced the abyss and panic that comes with having no sense of self or context. 

I share this story because the added layer of pain from PTSD is when folks treat you like you are making up your symptoms or overreacting.  As a childhood sexual abuse survivor, I lived for many years believing that I wasn’t experiencing what I was experiencing or having my pain minimized.  I speak now because I can and because it is important to affirm myself and other survivors.  PTSD is real.  We do not exhibit our symptoms for attention or exaggeration.  Our pain is real even if it appears to others to be disproportionate to the situation.  Again, the dehumanized feeling sucks, but I really don’t blame the individual health care workers.  While a bit of compassion might have helped me to feel less bad about myself and the feeling like I was taking up too much space, I understand that the ER conditions did not allow for the kind of care that I needed.  It is the system that we must change and increased education around trauma and PTSD.

Bees

As if a breath of fresh air is available at any moment. 

 It feels like everything I do and write must matter beyond me.  And this is true but sometimes the most intimate acts can be truly transformative.  Maybe the issue of scale is an illusion; for our bodies are a universe to the atoms within.  Maybe in healing our bodies and our intimate lives, we heal the world in ways that we cannot always see or trace.  Just maybe.  Just maybe it is okay to write about my days with my 4yo child—playing, learning, exploring.  Maybe these movements matter in ways that I will never fully grasp.

Kaia was afraid of bees.  She ran down the sidewalk toward me with a look of panic on her face, shouting, “Bee! Bee!”  (Ironically, her middle name is Bea, short for Beatrice after my grandmother.)   I gave her a hug and told her it’s okay.  

Bees don’t want to sting you. They only sting when they are surprised or you accidently interrupt them. I reminded her about the one time she mistakenly stepped on a bee. The sting hurt but it got better.

The bees are just doing a job and their job is to help the flowers and feed themselves and their hive from the flowers.  We love flowers so isn’t it wonderful that the bees are here?  We need the bees. The flowers need the bees and the bees need the flowers.

I told her that we could look online and learn all about how the bees and flowers work together.  She seemed interested and as we went about our day, she spotted a stationary bee on its back on the sidewalk.  We squatted down close.  “It passed away,” I told her.  “Why?” “Maybe it was very old; I’m not sure.”  She brought her face close to it and was silent as she looked at it intently.  She said, “Poor little bee.  I love you.” 

Kaia is no longer afraid of bees. She’s fascinated with them. I too have developed respect, growing knowledge, and admiration for bees. In fact, several weeks after learning lots about bees, watching many youtube videos, and observing bees on our daily walks as they pollinate flowers, we came again upon a dead bee.

Kaia squatted down close and asked, “Can I touch it?” “Yes.” She gingerly laid her finger upon the bee and then we took a helicopter seed and I gently wiped the bee off the pavement and into the grass. She picked up the helicopter seed and lay it over the dead bee.

Intimacy.  Our lives are deeply intertwined.

My new favorite picture of us. This image has nothing to do with bees directly but everything to do with life and magic and nature and interconnectivity.

The hidden ‘labor’ of care in higher education in the time of quarantine by Rashmi Kumari

Post authored by Rashmi Kumari:

A few weeks ago, a twitter user tweeted: “what troubles me about urban education, in the US, is that it is interchangeably used with race.” The tweet got me thinking about my first independent course (of which, I am quite proud of!), Urban Education. I teach this course as part of an undergraduate course offered by the Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University. 

 Wait a second!  Urban Education (do you mean schools for children of color?) 

 And…

 Childhood Studies (does that even exist? What does that even mean? Is it part of childhood psychology? Are you a nursing student? Is it about education?). I am frequently asked these questions every single time I try to explain my doctoral program.

 To some of you, yes, I am interested in childhoods of children of color. I am interested in intersecting inequalities that children (and youth) of color continue to face because of institutional racism, unequal class-structure, gender-order, and of course many other things like geographical locations, immigration status, disability, skin-color, and religion and ethnicity, that compound the challenges of teaching-learning processes in urban schools. 

 So, getting back, I am currently teaching, and transitioning to teaching remotely, Urban Education. My experience so far and my musings amidst the COVID-19 crisis: 

 Several of my class discussions have been around the aspects of structural racism, and intersecting systems of oppression that shape the education scenes for many African American youth in cities. In the past, when I was a teaching assistant for this course, for Dr. Lauren Silver, many of the concepts were new to me. As an international student, from India, the idea that Urban Education would essentially mean race and education was definitely not what I thought of when I consider urban schooling. For the students, on the other hand, it meant to grapple with the idea that institutional racism is more prevalent in school than widely assumed, and it is a lived reality for black and brown students. 

 However, in my current class, I find myself repeating these understandings and oftentimes, I’m challenged by my students’ knowledge and awareness of the topic. I am not going to take the trouble to explain the topics that I teach in the class in this blog post. Want to know more? You are welcome to reach out!

 There is a new challenge to the course now! No – not the COVID-19, but teaching online to students who were forced to vacate their university housing, students who had to face incarceration because they were forced out of their dorms, students who’ve had to work double shift as health-care providers, students who have to figure out child care, school closures, and home schooling their children before they get online for their own classes. 

 The pandemic, and the responses towards it, makes urban education harder for many of my students – the students who do not need a course explaining to them that the system is against them. Their lived experiences of this system instead offer learning for many of us, educators and scholars, in higher education. 

 While understanding the systemic challenges and to continue the process of learning, how do we respond when the “university is business as usual”? – when university demands that there be a smooth transition from face-to-face classroom interactions to a remote learning course. When, as an educator, I am unable to concentrate on any of my impending deadlines, how do I expect my students to continue to submit assignments, continue to keep their attendance up in the remote classrooms, and continue to be involved in group projects and presentations in the time of ‘social distancing’? What about the technological affordances that some students might have and others might not?

 Over the last one week, I have found myself assuring students over phone, emails and other platforms, that their ‘late assignments’ will be considered on time, that I am not going to deduct points for the lateness of their submissions, and that they are not making mistakes by choosing their lives over the course right now. 

 My sociologically trained brain identifies all of this as invisible labor of care that all of us educators and students are engaging in. My cynical pedagogy also questions this labeling of care as ‘emotional labor’. While I understand that it is important to make this care-work visible, I also question labeling the care-work into a category of labor. 

 Is this not the language of capitalism? 

 For some of us who come from not-so industrial capitalist communities, the care work is more organically performed, and we do not see it as gendered emotional labor. How do we continue to perform care by not valuing it against labor but also making those systems of care visible? 

How do we remain open to the emotional labor that this system demands of us while also demanding that this emotional care be supported through systemic infrastructural transformations?  

 Only when there is a reciprocity in emotional care, it can be looked at as more than the mere label of emotional labor. 

Queer Kinship in the Time of COVID-19

Yesterday, I tweeted:

 “Queer kinship is more important now than ever! Care networks across bio, chosen, and interconnected families!”

 And today, even amidst many obligations of caring for my child and prepping my first online classes for next week, it feels urgent to spend a little more time reflecting and sharing. 

 Recently, I wrote a piece, still under review, in which queer kinship provided the “aha” moment that I was seeking.  

 Queer kinship is truly powerful, particularly during our current moment.  We are a global family and we can feel this now more than ever.  Our strength to survive rests in our ability to understand and practice queer kinship. 

 Smietana, Thompson and Twine (2018: 114) define ‘queer’ as “a critical perspective toward normative reproductive arrangements and institutions made visible by LBGTQ+ family making.” I use queer as both a way of seeing beyond the normative and I use queer family expansively to include diverse forms of family making. For instance, the non-normative or queer family could be considered the single-parent-headed household, families created through assisted reproductive technology, non-bio chosen families, or families created through various forms of adoption, among others.  An expansive definition of family allows us to recognize queer kinship beyond biological and nuclear-family attachments (Moore 2011; Dyer 2016; Weiss 2016; Acosta 2018; Compton, Meadow, and Schilt 2018).   

 I’ve been thinking a lot about queer family during these times of social isolation and COVID-19.  As we’ve been asked to “shelter in place,” I think about the meaning of home and how we make family and home.  I think about the queer young people who are being forced to leave college dormitories and who may not have a safe bio family to return home to.  I think about the young people in foster care; I think about the children who are “unseen” and abused in their “homes” who can no longer take refuge within their created families at school.  

 Can we pay attention to these harms in the midst of the virus?  Can we embrace queer kinship in new ways that enable safety and well-being for the family whose mother has migrated across national borders to provide for the well-being of other more class-privileged families?  

 As we shelter in place, can we think anew about queer family?  Can we put together and build families and home by choice?  Let’s physically isolate in units that are safe, sustaining, and supportive of each member’s well-being. I fully recognize how this sort of choice is also shaped by privilege and privileges that many do not have access to.  For instance, the child who is being abused at home likely cannot choose to move households. 

 If we move our attention to queer family, we can find new ways of sustaining one another and build toward new forms of more equitably connectivity.

 I also think about networked families during this time.  Until very recently, the well-being of my relatively privileged family has been dependent upon the carework provided by our daughter’s daycare teachers.  Last week was the first, probably among many, in which my wife and I juggled full time childcare with our full-time employment.  And, we recognize our privileges here in that we have careers that allow us to work from home.  U.S. childcare workers (who are predominantly female and women of color) tend to earn poverty wages and generally receive few or no benefits for themselves and their families.  They care for children, like my own, from more economically privileged families, while their own families struggle.  

 And, I’ve been thinking a lot about my daughter’s teachers.  How will they sustain their families during this crisis? We will continue to pay tuition but we have the means to be able to do this, and this still is not enough.  What about the families who have lost their employment because of the virus?  How will these families and the daycare workers be sustained through this crisis?  And this is why our response can only be found in a substantial public—the public good must expand. We must demand that our governments take care of those who are most vulnerable.  These are the same fault-lines that have been here long before the virus.  We can no longer ignore the vulnerabilities created through the intersectional harms of capitalism, settler colonialism, racism, ableism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny.  

 Through a lens of queer kinship, we must consider the daycare worker’s family in relation to my family. Coalition through queer kinship is a way forward and a way to organize our energies and resources collectively.  

 In peace and solidarity.   

Reflections on Day 4: Childhood Studies Moves In and Home

Calm

Could I let this feeling of settling in

Move slowly in waves

To pay attention

To daily rythmn. 

And the fear

Sickness

“Don’t touch that!”

VIRUS

Rings in my head breaking

Into 

Sharp relief

When I want to return to steady

Moments

And my daughter has attached to me.

Like the moss green integrates into tree bark.

She climbs on me

Like I am the jungle gym she has missed

From school days

She attaches. 

I walk into next room and she runs to me

Urgently

Concerned face.

“Momma, I’m scared.” 

As if my fears

Are this unnamed anxiety that 

Scares her

And she needs to be with me in every moment. 

The VIRUS

Becomes the fear in my daughter’s muscles 

Need to be close.  

And the trees are in bloom

Pink blossoms

Don’t know there is a virus in our midst. 

Multiple realities in our midst.

And I am burdened.

And choosing to be open

To peace feels 

Somehow like a betrayal

To those who are suffering

But I have a choice. 

I can feel the pink blossoms

And appreciate my daughter’s

Spinning of stories

Constant stories

Evolve 

Into bowls of milk

And trains from small blue puzzle pieces

And Elsa castle we made from cardboard and blue paint

And sticks

Sticks galore for lasers.

And tents

And houses

And everything our imaginations can spin. 

Can I choose this play?

Can I choose this time to pay attention to our bond?

To our creations?

It is time to hold multiple realities in respect

And to feel peace

Move through my muscles in waves

To move through my daughter’s muscles in waves.