What Keeps You Up at Night?
The killing of Renisha McBride keeps me up. So does her killer’s non-arrest. What most keeps me up though is the way her death fails to shock so many of us. I don’t mean those of us who “aren’t shocked” (but are dismayed and outraged) because we know McBride’s death (like Jonathan Ferrell’s before it) is one part of the reality of Black life in the U.S. I mean the fact that so many “aren’t shocked” because they assume some justification other than white hatred must surely exist to explain an innocent, unarmed, injured, woman of color being killed on the porch of a white-owned home as she sought help; some justification that instead merely reveals how deeply anti-black perspectives are part of “normative” U.S. citizens’ consciousness.
This keeps me up at night.
It also makes teaching exhausting some days. The transitional nature of the college campus means having the same conversations with students entering this year as I had with their peers last year. Intellectually I may know that students often leave this institution in a very different place from where they were when they arrived. But having to have the same conversations over and over can make it all too easy to feel like my teaching never really “progresses”—isn’t making an impact somehow. As if I’m on treadmill as I attempt to enable critical consciousness: I’m moving earnestly, I’m sweating a lot, but I never really arrive at a destination.
That’s hard.
But that’s not completely what this blog post is about.
This blog post is a reminder to myself and my fellow teachers that as we do this difficult work with our students (over and over again), helping them become shocked, dismayed and outraged, we need to also be mindful of developing ways to help them channel their developing consciousness and awareness toward active possibilities and responses that grow from that development. (Perhaps this is as simple as never forgetting to focus on praxis.)
It’s all too easy to forget how important this is. In fact, we are right to resist our students when they complain at the end of nearly every challenging book (sometimes after only one chapter of such a book), “but she/he isn’t telling us what we should do about ‘x’!”
“That’s because,” I tell them, “it’s worth the time and energy first to figure out how to best understand this problem or history.”
“That’s because,” I tell them, “if we jump to quickly to ‘solutions’ without deep understanding of the problems, we can’t develop wise, effective responses.”
“Developing critical awareness and understanding—which sometimes is as modest as simply figuring what kinds of questions we should be asking—is itself important ‘action,’” I say.
I believe this to be true.
But I also need to remember that just as my students “didn’t know” something critical about the nature of our society before I and the writers we engage helped them to see it, they also “don’t know” that things can change or that they only change when people collectively and actively say “no!” or “yes!” and work hard to change reality. They “don’t know” where to begin. Sometimes they don’t even know that one can begin. They rarely know people have already begun in the very communities in which we live.
And enabling them to develop a critical feminist, anti-racist consciousness doesn’t achieve this “knowing” on its own.
So I have to teach them this too. I do want my students to tarry long enough to develop astute and wise understanding and analysis. But even while the painstaking, slow intellectual work of critical analysis is itself action, I’m increasingly clear that if I’m part of opening their eyes to realities of misogyny, racial oppression, the disparagement of the poor and the many other manifestations of injustice and evil in our world, then I must also teach them that not only are these realities not inevitable, but that they can have agency in insisting they not be inevitable.
I’m responsible to not leave them perched on the cliff of deconstruction once having led them there without providing them ways to envision routes of construction they might take to move forward in those perilous places—even if the routes they begin to see are necessarily provisional.
So what does this have to do with the realities that keep me up at night?
This semester my students have responded in incredible ways to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. I can’t exactly explain why. I’ve been teaching them about the realities of state-sanctioned oppression of African Americans and Latinos via the criminal justice system since I began my entire career. But something about the way Alexander exposes the scaffolding of this system has enabled a different level of insight and understanding. I’m endlessly grateful for this book.
And my students are getting it. They are becoming dismayed. They are becoming outraged.
But they are also describing to me having arrived to levels of despair I haven’t heard students admit before. They’ve located Alexander’s work, the killing of Ferrell, the Zimmerman verdict, and a host of other manifestations of white supremacy in the context of the racial atrocities out of which this nation was forged. They’ve made made such strong connections between our past and present they feel completely overwhelmed by the depth and breadth of injustice that lies at the heart of this nation.
Despair has many causes. One is being so overwhelmed such that any response seems too small or insufficient to be worth doing.
So, I’ve modified my speech. When despair in my students became clear to me last week, I didn’t give them my “developing understanding is one step of action” lecture. Instead, I asked them a simple question.
What keeps you up at night?
Then I shared what it is for me. Renisha McBride. Racial profiling of my students by the Des Moines Police Department. Jail cells (cages) filled with dark-skinned human beings in the state of Iowa. And I shared the places and ways I’ve plugged in to be part of saying a loud and public “no.”
What is that thing that has such a hold on you that you can’t shake it without losing part of your deepest sense of self?
If you can’t do it all you need to do that. Relentlessly.
As I shared this with my students and they shared theirs with me I felt myself step off the treadmill. I found myself gesturing beyond the cliff to possible paths.
I re-remembered that my commitment to teaching is one response to that which keeps me up at night. And I re-discovered that offering them that question invited their agency and heart into the room.
In that moment we together found that the despair accompanying them on their journey into a new consciousness and accompanying me on my “treadmill” journey lost some of its power.
What a great reminder.