Connections

This week a group of students and faculty at school participated in a webcast from the Smithsonian to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1961 Freedom Rides. Four of six panelists were Freedom Riders who had journeyed on the buses that left from Washington, D.C. and headed into the Deep South to protest the Jim Crow laws that segregated Blacks and Whites on interstate travel. This nonviolent protest organized by CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) eventually had more than 400 participants who risked their lives to affect positive change.

In his introduction to the program, Brent Glass, president of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., said, "They (CORE) were hoping this would start a national movement." The Freedom Riders talked about the power of the individual and the motivation to act. One person said, "Every time I obeyed a segregation sign I felt like I was agreeing." Another commented, "I got arrested and I felt free."

During the question and answer session a high school student asked whether the panelists thought that the uprising in Egypt was an evolution of the nonviolent activism of the Civil Rights Movement. Watching the coverage of the peaceful demonstration in Cairo, Egypt this past week, that has ended with the stepping down of President Hosni Mubarek after 30 years in power, can certainly give us hope that non-violent activism is alive and well and evolving. It is also an indication that the action of individuals can directly affect the behavior of the masses.

The organizing methods of the Civil Rights Movement have given way to the power of social networking through the internet. The speed of the internet has given "movement" new meaning. What has remained the same is that just as the actions of 13 Freedom Riders or the Greensboro Four or the Little Rock Nine could galvanize masses and help to build a movement, the few faces of the Egyptian revolution, Wael Ghonim, the Google employee who started the revolution with a text message, and Mohamed ElBaradei, the diplomat and scholar, set the tone for and fueled the power and determination of the mass of peaceful demonstrators.

Snow Day

   Today is our fourth snow day in 2011. That's one snow day per week in the new year. Today's snow fell sometime in the early morning hours and stopped by the time I had woken up at 5am. There's at least 12 inches on the ground on top of about 3 inches that fell yesterday morning between 9 and noon. It is large-flaked, heavy and quite beautiful. It's not bad shoveling snow unless you give in to the instinct to pile too much onto your shovel and then it's quite heavy. How can so many light flakes create such a heavy mass?
   Now with four days' of experience, I'm beginning to want more ways to describe the day. For this, I've turned to the Eskimos. It turns out that they may not actually have more words than the rest of us to describe snow, but what they do have is a highly nuanced language for snow. Looking at a list of "lexemes" I am most drawn to nutaryuk, meaning "fresh snow," on this beautiful Snow Day #4. 
   Perhaps from the winter of 2011 will arise new holidays and today will be Nutaryuk Day, the day of fresh snow. Our first snow day would be Pirta Day, blizzard day and Day #2 would be Anui Day, snow on the ground day. Snow Day #3 would be hard to describe. That was the day the snow barely made it to the ground. Maybe it's a term like Snow in the Air Day. We called it a No Snow Snow Day.
   I wonder what we'll call next week's snow day?


Note: At mid-day I shoveled our walk and decided this snow is Wedding Cake Snow, the kind you have to shovel by the slice because it's too heavy to lift in shovelfuls. 

Those beautiful faces

It's a terrible tragedy with all the elements of homophobia, wreckless invasion of privacy, technological toys, and leftover high school prank. All Freshman, with their feet barely set down on the college campus, and now one is dead and two have been charged with a hate crime. Why is it that what caught my eye and haunts me are the three photos splashed across the front page?

They are the face of diversity. This could have been an example of successful efforts to have a diverse student body on campus. This could have been an article on the changing face of a generation. It could have been a hopeful moment. In my mind I can't help but think that I would not have reacted the same way to a tragedy like this involving young people, though still disturbing and regrettable, if it had been what we have become accustomed to: a white boy shooting at classmates in a high school cafeteria or white fraternity brothers rampaging through campus after a late-night party or white, blond, rich girls reporting date rape. 

I recently listened to a presentation by Dr. Elizabeth Englander on bullying. She was speaking to law enforcement officers in Massachusetts where public schools are now required to have a curriculum on bullying. She said that the difference between bullying in person and cyberbullying is that 25% of cyberbullies are also victims. If placing a camera to capture a private act and sharing it over the internet is cyberbullying, then could it be that these two bullies have also been victims? It's not an excuse to release them from responsibility. 

It is a compelling question in a world where the historic victim of racial microaggressions may now have a tool with which to retaliate. In our effort to protect the victim and stop the bully we may have overlooked the fact that with technology in hand and the invisibilty of cyber-acts we have now armed both the bully and the victim with  a lethal weapon. Is this what we intended?

Finally, this happened at Rutgers, the college I watched because they rose to women's basketball fame under the guidance of an amazing coach. It's also the college where the basketball team stood up to racial slurs uttered one morning on a radio show. It's a reminder that embracing diversity may be beautiful, but it isn't easy.

Invisible Disabilities

Recently, someone talked to me about invisible disabilities. He shared a video made by a friend of his who has no sense of smell. It was fascinating to hear her and her friends talk about how they help her to know the smell of her shampoo and her soap. How she navigates the complicated world of socially accepted pleasant or desirable smells and unpleasant smells.

I thought about people I know who have told me they have learning disabilities, dyslexia, or color blindness. Their conversation reflects a sense of confidence that the disability is not a problem to them and it is apparent they are leading happy and fulfilled lives. What they don't often reveal is how different their world view is from mine, a person without that specific disability. People with invisible disabilities seem less likely to talk about the accommodations they need and adjustments they make to live in a world that assumes certain abilities.

Oliver Sacks has an article in the August 30th edition of The New Yorker about a condition called prosopagnosia or face blindness. He talks about the challenges of recognizing people when he cannot use facial qualities to help with recognition. A recent segment on NPR told of a man who was diagnosed with phonagnosia or voice blindness. He couldn't recognize people's voices and relates the challenges of answering the phone.

In all these instances the invisibility of the disability is a reminder that many people have learned to live in a world normed to people able to do things that they cannot do or can only experience with accommodation or help. Being and having allies is one of the tools we teach in diversity work to support and connect potentially marginalized groups and individuals to mainstream life. Having allies reduces vulnerability and ensures dignity. People with invisible disabilities depend on allies to experience aspects of the world they cannot discern, cues they cannot read.

Invisible disabilities. It gets you  thinking. How would you describe the smell of rain or the smell of garbage to a person without a sense of smell? How would you help a person to recognize you without looking at your face? To recognize you without hearing your distinct voice?

The 47th anniversary

August 28, 2010, the 47th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the day that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his remarkable, memorable and still relevant "I have a dream" speech. Bob Herbert, NY Times columnist, whose column, A Hero Named Bobby, appeared in last week's paper and contains the best example of a thoughtful and enduring response to a question that could have been about race, has this wonderful column, America is Better Than This, in today's paper.

On this anniversary, it is worth it to re-read the speech and think about the progress we've made in response to Dr. King's urgent call for action and unity. It is still urgent and the solutions continue to perplex and elude us as a country. On this anniversary, it is worth it to re-read the speech and be reassured that intelligence, thoughtfulness, sincerity and honest conviction can lead the way to effective solutions. The speech is still filled with hope, expectation and promise.

In education, this is the day for which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. should be celebrated and what better way to start a new school year?

Horray for Kindergarten Teachers

I'm sure there's a connection somewhere between this report on kindergarten teachers and diversity. The difference may be in the degree to which great kindergarten teachers recognize the sheer enthusiasm and curiosity embodied in kindergartners and embrace and nurture it. It could be that great kindergarten teachers recognize the dispositions kindergartners possess that affect, and perhaps determine, their behaviors as learners. Maybe it's just that kindergartners, when given the opportunity to play and build and explore and experiment, all things that great kindergarten teachers do, they thrive. Kindergartners are at once excited, brave, and bold experimenters, but also uncertain, cautious, and emotional social beings. They laugh, they cry, and they celebrate every small success. Great teachers laugh, cry and celebrate with them. Maybe that's the difference. $320,000 for a kindergarten teacher - a small price tag for a world of productive, educated adults.

Funerals

How many memorial services is too many? At some point they start to add up and then they are a part of your life pattern. Unlike celebrations where you usually wait to be invited, attending memorials is generally your decision. Yesterday, I attended a service for a professional colleague thinking that our professional connection was the primary reason to go. I had a personal feeling about it, too, knowing that she and I had, for many years been the only two Asian women in a large, predominantly white female professional group. I doubt it had meaning to anyone but me, probably not even to her, since we rarely met and hardly knew each other. It turned out that I only met one person I knew and suddenly felt more like a witness than a participant.

More than 300 people gathered to share stories about a woman I hardly knew. They described how she had dedicated her life's work to one nursery school. One person at a time, the depth of the community revealed itself: an African American mother who travelled from the Bronx in the '90's to bring her boys to a school that welcomed them and made them feel part of a community; teachers who had worked at the school more than 20 years ago, but remembered how this colleague reached out to them; a salesman who said that he made a cold call to this school twenty years ago and because of the director's warm response he entered into a business relationship that has, over time, turned into a friendship; a father who said that the director had always sent him on his way reassuring him that his son would be fine and now, he felt that the community had gathered to send the director on her way; a younger sister who told family stories about how she, her older sister and her younger brother were the three youngest of 10 children.

The moment that sticks in my mind, however, is when a boy walked up to the lectern and asked that all the alumni come forward to light candles in memory of their school's director. From every corner of the room young people walked toward the candles. Most of them were black or hispanic males, some were white and a few were Asian. I had recently heard at a meeting a comment that the independent schools are wondering where all the black boys in New York City are; they are the one group that is underrepresented in most schools. But here they were, the majority of this group.

Then a young black man stopped at the microphone on his way back to his seat and spoke. He said that he had attended the school in the '80's and had recently been asked by a friend how he had made it through life and avoided becoming a statistic. He commented that all the forces were in place for that to happen, but something had saved him from falling through the cracks. He set out on a detective's search for the answer and ended up at "the scene of the crime," his nursery school. So, recently he had gone there to be reminded of the love and care that had set him on a path to adulthood. With tears in his eyes he said, "The one thing I just forgot to do that day when I saw the director was to say thank you."