Systems

Something happened this week. There was a conversation about this cupcake protest and someone mentioned to me that if we all would just stop paying attention to race, racism wouldn't even be an issue. That the way to fight the system is to prove to people that we are more than our skin color. Fight the stereotypes, be successful, and then "they'll" like and accept us.
I didn't respond. I'd already told the person we'd just agree to disagree, but that comment? It's been bugging me since because people are still looking at my skin and my name and my sex as if they're bad things, as if they're the opposite of privilege. The thing is that if it's true that ignoring it and doing the "right thing" will prevent this treatment, I'm not sure where I've failed.

I've spent a lot of my life proving people wrong:

Third grade rolls around and they ask me to take a test to show that I speak English. Yeah, I'll do it. Let's ignore the fact that last year I took a test that put me in my elementary school's gifted and talented program; I'll go ahead and prove to you that I have mastered your language.

In middle school, I was in a special program for gifted and talented students and my English teacher told me that I was the smartest minority girl she'd ever taught. Um, what?

High school teachers and counselors steered me away from advanced classes - not in my HS in Germany, just the one in VA. I didn't listen, and took the classes anyway. I was in NHS and German Honor Society. Oh, and I studied German in high school, because my parents weren't going to let me study a language I already knew and spoke and it just made sense.
In my spare time, I get harassed by cops for walking around with my (Latino) friends at a football game and / or attending my (Latino) church youth group.

College. I came in with something like eighteen credits approved. I was part of my school's Honors program. I made dean's list almost every semester after my freshman year and graduated with a cumulative GPA of 3.7 or something like that. No "C's get degrees" for me. Oh, and my freshman year a girl flat out tells me, "I don't like you because you're Puerto Rican." Mmmkay... Thanks?
I graduated in five years, but only because I took a year and a half off in the middle: one year to volunteer and a semester to earn some money while working for the federal government.

I worked for three years as a Spanish teacher at a public school. I replied tactfully or shut up when my colleagues and / or superiors made comments about our immigrant students, or the "barrio" by the ESL classrooms (I wish I weren't quoting), or when people told me Puerto Ricans didn't know how to speak. Meanwhile, my Latino students were discouraged from taking advanced courses, being guided, instead to Auto Mechanics and Child Care. Security barged in to accuse one of my kids of vandalizing a bathroom when he'd been in my room the whole time. I saw two of my students being roughed up by cops for walking around in the evening. Oh, and this happened.

I went to grad school, and did really well, surprisingly enough. I cried my way through a Cross Cultural Skills class. I fell in love with a white man. I got stared at - not in a friendly way - when I went to the grocery store in my very white neighborhood. I was pulled over because a cop didn't think I should've been in my neighborhood at night.

I taught in Philly. I was told that "some students" shouldn't be held to the same standards, because, really, when were they ever going to use the information I was teaching them? Seriously?

So what I'm saying is that there's a flaw in this type of logic. I've done the right things. I'm well educated, well traveled, well read. I'm intelligent, middle-class, decently attractive. If I'm following the logic that being successful will make people ignore my skin and my heritage, then I should not be dealing with racism at all. Not ever. Not in my life, not in the lives of the people around me.
And yet, I've been yelled at to leave my own country, I've been told that my language isn't worth learning, I've dealt with the reality of being in a relationship with a white man, and I've been utterly exhausted by the dynamics of oppression.

What I'm saying is, I've played by the rules. I've done it even though it's hurt me and I sometimes wonder why I've had to give in and shut up and go along in order to be successful. Does it sometimes make me feel like I've sold out? Yeah, sometimes. But do I also think that I'm subverting the system in some way? Yeah. Put me in your stereotype box, sucker: I listen to country, salsa, and hip hop on the same playlist. But those rules? Those rules did NOT undo the system. It's going to take a lot more than that for me to, oh, I don't know, be paid the same amount as a white man in the same field.
What I'm saying is that I'm not going to feel guilty for believing that there's a system at play here and that said system goes beyond individual actions and beliefs. It's about the fact that people will react to my last name before they react to my educational background. It's about the fact that even though I have zero plans to have children, possible employers are worried about how soon I'm going to want to be on maternity leave. And I've done what I can, I've fought for myself and I've fought for others and I'll keep fighting.

It still matters. It's still important to note our privileges because we all have them. And you know what else is important? Finding ways to shed those privileges, or to subvert them, at least. And it's important that in the areas where we're at a disadvantage that we push and push and fight. And there will be tears and exhaustion and pain, but it's important. Because the sooner we recognize that there's a deeply flawed system at work, the sooner we can begin to live in opposition to it.

Advance apologies

* This is much longer and more rambling than I'd originally anticipated. I didn't reread it or edit it; it's "as is". Mostly, it's a look at myself; me trying to process everything I've been thinking about both in and out of class. I'm not trying to offend or polarize - just thinking "aloud", if you will. *

I was trying to upload Boston pics this morning, to no avail. Blogger really needs a better system for uploading pictures - just saying.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about a lot of things lately, and one of them is how far the church is from the teachings of Jesus. This is something I've thought a lot about since I started reading the Bible for myself when I was in high school, but it's been compounded in the past five years, and this semester has me wondering about this all over again. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that I'm an accurate picture of who and what Jesus is, just that I'm feeling really convicted by my inaccurate depiction of Him. Does that make sense?
I hate the "Christian" dichotomization of the spiritual and the mundane - there's a spirituality in the mundane, and an everydayness to the spiritual. There is no distinction, as far as I can tell between Jesus's spiritual, social, and physical healing. He repaired relationships, repaired people's sense of self-worth, went first to the untouchable and undesireables - and He preached salvation to them as He met their needs. Needs so deep they didn't even realize in some cases that they had them. I don't do this often enough, and neither does the church.
I was reading the Bible the other day and it struck me that Jesus looked out on the people and that His heart BROKE for them. Not just that it ached, but that it broke for them. My heart doesn't break that easily. It's one thing to say that I feel sorry for people - that keeps me on the moral/social high ground - I am somehow better than those people. But for my hear to break, there has to be a participation: the pain must become mine. That pain was Jesus's pain, and His heart and body broke for it. I don't allow myself to participate much.
In class today, we were talking about how the church would reject Jesus if He were to come today, Pharisees and Saducees that we are. We're so indoctrinated in "church culture", in the moral issues, in pro-life, anti-gay, creationism arguments; in buildings, in "ministries", in music. We've fallen away from the unbelievably inclusive revolutionary nature of the founder of our faith.
The truth is that if Jesus were here today, He'd be on the corners with the drug dealers and the addicts. He'd be talking to strippers, to homosexuals, to the mentally ill, to the immigrants, to the forgotten children in poor schools. He'd be embracing everyone the church has so neatly excluded - everyone I've excluded.
I was reading about the Kingdom of God being a whole new game in the middle of the old ballpark. It takes a special kind of crazy and a special kind of bravery to take the church to that level. Shoot, it takes all of that to get one person out there, playing tag in the middle of a play-off game. The book was talking about the church doing this in the middle of broader American culture, but I've been thinking about it in terms of people doing this in the middle of general church culture. I had this thought in class today, this phrase that popped into my head as we were talking about God's intentions for community and society as a whole as laid out in the book of Deuteronomy: "the unreached church". I'm not exactly sure what it means, but I wrote it in the margin of my notes.
There's a church that's complacent with the current systems: with exclusion, with injustice; with comfort, and riches, and big buildings. There's a church that's okay with saying that God is on the side of a particular political party, and that His will magically lines up with our own (that's rarely - if ever - the case, but that's a story for another blog).... Yes, that church exists, and it's huge, but there's another Church. It's a Church that wants its heart to be broken when Christ's heart is broken, a Church that can't be okay with injustice and oppression, a Church that won't use God to justify all kinds of ugliness. This Church, these people, must change the church.
I'm in school with all these amazing Christians - the kind you will never see on tv - who want to see this amazing Kingdom being played out, on Earth as it is in Heaven. Whenever two or more are gathered He is there; when we agree in prayer, there is power. This is revolutionary to me lately. I keep seeing myself as this tiny puzzle piece.
Have you ever done one of those gazillion-piece puzzles? The kind with the tiny, tiny pieces? Each piece looks like a whole lot of nothing. Sure, there are pretty colors, but you can't really make out the picture based on any one piece. So you start putting them together, and you have clusters spread out on the table: pieces of a tree over here, some river over there, a cloud in the sky... It's not quite finished, but these little groups of pieces are starting to make sense. And then you put them all together and it's amazing. This is how God works. He sees this great big picture, and all the little pieces of it. We have to start linking up with other little pieces to make this picture of a world where debts are forgiven and the alien is welcomed and the poor are provided for.
That's the good part, this linking up of the Church. Even so, it will not be easy. There will be a church to contend with and all of those outside who just won't understand. And that's okay. I mean, yo no soy monedita de oro para caerle bien a todo el mundo. These revolutionary words of Christ, the structure that God set up for His people won't make sense in the light of American individualism and the American dream (Turning the other cheek?! Cancelling debts?! Providing for the poor?!). The important thing is to stand with the Church and say that things are not okay as they are. And if makes people uncomfortable, that's kind of the point. I mean, it's making me very uncomfortable; I'm feelin' pretty convicted and challenged myself.

I was talking today to my roommate about institutionalized racism affecting education in low-income areas. I have my student seminar tomorrow, and I'm going to be talking about poverty and education. Here's the thing: it's impossible to talk about poverty in this country without also mentioning race and ethnicity. It's a fact that the levels of poverty among people of color are higher than they are among Whites. There are real historical reasons for that based largely on slavery and other exploitative systems (*cough* immigration and economic policies *cough*). It's so much safer to just refer to "the poor", though, without acknowledging that the poor tend to be black and brown. It's the way things are right now. I was vacillating - wondering whether I should take it there during my presentation - and I talked to her about it briefly. It made her uncomfortable, I could tell; as if she didn't want to think that the system that had worked so well for her (and to some extent, for me), could possibly be anything but empowering to all. Ah, America, land of opportunity and equality.... It occured to me as I was talking that if I'm afraid to bring it up because it'll make folks uncomfortable, it probably needs to be addressed. I don't think Jesus's heart aches when he sees these institutions, I think it breaks; that means that mine should and that the hearts of my classmates probably should break as well. That's something I'll be praying about as I'm preparing my presentation and actually presenting it. If y'all would pray, too, I'd appreciate it.

Oh, and if you're the praying types, I'd also urge you to sit down with a Bible and take a look at Deuteronomy and Matthew. If possible, pick up a different translation so that you're not just rereading the words you already know - sometimes that alone can give you that shift in perspective. I hope they challenge you as much as they challenge me.

Own worst enemy

This is something that I've been thinking about for a long time, and I've been meaning to write about it for quite awhile (see "Hypothetical"), but I just hadn't gotten around to it.
Tonight, however, I've got John Legend on iTunes, and I'm inspired partly by him, and partly by the time I've had to think.

First: this area where I'm living feels so *white*. It's been a loooong time since I've been somewhere that isn't crazy diverse, and as a brown-skinned woman, it's a comfort to know that there are people who look like me around. It makes me feel safer. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone but my fellow minorities, but we don't have the luxury of not noticing those kinds of things. I'm aware of these things, and with the recent news about the teens here killing a Mexican man basically for being Mexican, I'm a little worried.

Anyway, that's not the direction I was going to take with this post, because it doesn't really have to do with the violence inflicted on minorities, but rather on the violence and oppression we inflict on our own people.

Yes, we've still got to deal with racism, discrimination, and a real fear of how people might react towards our otherness. No matter what people say, things haven't changed that much - racism is just more hidden now. It continues to be a systematic, endemic thing in this country, a presence just as real and as evil as any other form of oppression or injustice. I'm not saying that there isn't a real need for racial healing and reconciliation here, because there IS. There absolutely is. That said, how much do we as minorities turn on our own people?

I think I first started thinking about this in earnest after watching "American Gangster". It was a good movie, don't get me wrong; the story pulls you in, and Denzel Washington is just so stinkin' good. The thing is, as I'm sitting there falling in love with his character, wanting him to get away with everything, and getting caught up in the sexiness of organized crime, it occured to me that while Frank Lucas's life is being built up, countless other lives are being destroyed by his product.
He's using this crime syndicate to show that a Black man can be succesful and run his own organization, but this is at the expense of all these other Black lives which are being consumed by heroin.
There's an allure, an attractiveness, a sexiness in that gangster lifestyle. Otherwise, movies like "American Gangster", "Scarface", and "The Godfather" wouldn't be the icons they are. There's something so smooth and so cool in the way we portray these men. And it's not just in movies, music and popular novels are also filled with these gangster ideals; it's part of American culture. And we buy into it.
It's not a matter of life imitating art. This is a true story, and organized crime was around before these movies and rap and reggaetón came into being. As minorities, we turn on our own people in search of that prestige. Frank Lucas wasn't taking his cheap heroin to exclusive neighborhoods; he was getting rich off of poor Blacks and Latinos: people who looked like him and his wife. And the man who started his empire to be free of the control of white America made slaves of his own people.

When I was working in DC this summer, we had several big incidents at the Rec Center. One staff member was physically assaulted, another was held up at gunpoint, and a man was shot on the same block. We keep doing these things to our own people. You see it all the time: gang violence, Black-on-Black crime, wealthier Latinos who exploit undocumented Latinos....
How can we expect to make headway if we keep our own people down? How can we fight for justice and equality when we're so busy turning on our own? How can we ever free this nation from the ugliness of racism if we're determined to be our own worst enemies?

It's so frustrating. If all of us minorities, in every shade of non-white skin, would get together, if we'd stop fighting eachother as well as our own people, we'd be so much more effective at bringing about profound changes in this country. Do I believe it's possible? I don't know. I'm a bit of a cynic, but, my God, I hope it's possible.

Loosely connected

I've been kicking around a few ideas lately. I probably have enough material for a week's worth of blog entries, so I'm trying to figure out which topic to go with or whether I should put together a mish-mash of everything I've been thinking.

First there's this:


Don't be fooled by the happy merengue rhythm - there's a sharp social criticism in there. The sad thing is how still relevant it is:

"El costo de la vida sube otra vez
el peso que baja, ya ni se ve
y las habichuelas no se pueden comer
ni una libra de arroz, ni una cuarta e café
a nadie le importa qué piensa usted
¿será porque aquí no hablamos inglés?
....
Y la gasolina sube otra vez
el peso que baja, ya ni se ve
y la democracía no puede crecer
si la corrupción juega ajedrez
a nadie le importa qué piensa usted
¿será porque aquí no hablamos francés?"

In English: "The cost of living has gone up again/the dollar falls so low.../we can't even eat beans/nor a pound of rice, nor a fourth of coffee/ and no one cares what you think/ Is it because we don't speak English?//And gas goes up again/ the dollar falls so low.../and democracy can't grow/if corruption plays chess/ and no one cares what you think/ Is it because we don't speak French?"

Second, I spent most of Friday thinking about MLK Jr. Not even kidding. I'd be running copies or teaching or grading and pieces of "I've Been to the Mountaintop" would pop into my head. It helps that NPR was doing a special on Dr. King all week, but there was something about those words, that prescience in those final lines, that gives me goosebumps. The thing is, and it's kinda like the song above, in a sense, that these words could be spoken RIGHT NOW, and they'd pull at me. I'd understand that urgency, the need for change and justice. We've come a long way, yes, but there's a long road still to be walked. This is my favorite part:

Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together. Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.

It's the kind of phrase that echoes in my skull. I'm far from dangerously unselfish, but I want to get there. The context, the gist of his speech, reminds me of my favorite MLK quote, from "Letter from a Birmingham Jail":

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

I believe that. Believe it with everything in me. There is injustice in this world, and as I sit by and watch it, I'm putting my treasured liberties and rights at risk. I've come away with this clear conviction that there has be more that I can do. It's not enough to complain and pray and vote. It's not enough. There needs to be a movement of people working to break these patterns of injustice, this institutionalized injustice. I'm not saying revolution, but maybe. Maybe...

I feel a little like El Che, stringing together my own motorcycle diaries, putting together these moments of injustice, this collage of faces - the faces of every social sin and political issue that has ever crossed my mind - these moments where the world is completely at odds with the Kingdom of God.... This is the pain I think modern Christianity has cast aside: the pain for our fellow man, the pain of seeing selfishness and arrogance reign, masquerading as faith....

I'm coming to my conclusions.

That said...
Third: Every day I feel like I'm seeing myself a little more clearly. I've always said that the better you know God the more you realize how hopelessly inadequate you are, and that's becoming clear to me. I'm selfish, arrogant, blinded. I'm guarded, hiding behind walls that have been built, knocked down, and rebuilt countless times. I'm not the person I'd like to be. But I guess that's the point:

For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength. Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord."
1 Corinthians 1:25-31

Boasting only in Him, and letting Him work....