On November 20, 2018, I gave a keynote at the Community College of Aurora’s first all-campus in-service professional development day for all faculty and staff on campus. It was a gorgeous opportunity to meet some folks doing important work. The talk was accompanied by images and the text of quotations on a slide deck.
[opening music as people get mingle and get seated]
Thank you for having me here today. Thank you to the committee that decided to invite me here, and for their work to hold this intentional forum today.
I know might not be what you had in mind for the Tuesday before your holiday weekend, but I can’t help thinking: What a luxury to think, to read, to try to communicate ideas that mean something to my spirit.
What a luxury to delve into the practices of working with students—to have time set aside to talk about not only what we do every day, but also how we do it, and why it matters.
I begin with a divided heart. I wish to acknowledge that we are on the ancestral and present-day lands of two Ute tribes and express gratitude that we have been allowed to meet here today, though the land was taken by colonizers. On this Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I grieve at the same time that I am looking forward to the joy of seeing my family and eating amazing Korean and American food.
I grieve for the erasure of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples, the distortion of how Thanksgiving is mythologized. I grieve for how many of our Indigenous students must go to school and play for teams with Indian mascots. I think of how little change there has been, and yet how my Native friends persevere with their activism, art, and dreams.
So I grieve, even as I am filled with joy and anticipation.
I am here today to talk with you about Love. In the past few years, I have become unabashed about stating that I have a Love Agenda.
The way I think of it is that my work and my life must affirm the worth, beauty, and possibility of humane and humanizing educational settings.
I find that I am able to talk about what is and isn’t humanizing, what does or does not fulfill this love agenda, when I examine stories.
Stories define what it means to live, to be, to feel. Stories involve conflict and identity.
In my own work, these stories come from being with people, specifically educators and students, moving with them through their daily mundane work. Some of these stories are very short. Some stories are extended and dramatic events.
But always, the stories draw invisible lines—connecting or separating me, you, us, them.
In most educational settings, the majority of staff and educators are White. In community colleges, as in all the schools where I do my work, students are wildly diverse on so many levels, and are mostly people of color. This difference is very visible, and yet it is unspoken.
When I think about these distances, and the silences in them, I engage in practices to listen and love. I do this because I don’t know how else to get free. I don’t know how else we will get free—all of us. Whether we are privileged in many ways and/or marginalized in multiple ways, we are all hurting to get free.
So I want to read you a story. I first heard this story in a read aloud by my elementary school librarian. I thought I would be bored and that we were too old for story books, but I was wrong.
I try to teach with it whenever possible, even with my graduate students. I wish I had a children’s book like this for Korean Americans.
[Here I read the picture book Tar Beach, by Faith Ringgold (Crown, 1991). I showed pictures of each page on the screen so that people could see them, as I did not have a document camera.]
LOVE
I loved Tar Beach because I could feel the love in every single moment of the story. Love between married people, love of a child for her parents, love for a city, even one that doesn’t love you back, love for the product of your work.
I also loved the freedom.
I am not someone who has dreamed of flying, but I have definitely dreamed of being free, of feeling a lightness in my heart and mind.
I’ve dreamed of being free from my body, which is strong and impaired at the same time.
Thich Nhat Hanh, who is a Buddhist teacher and activist for non-violent social change, has written, “Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love” (Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Love (2015), p. 10).
There are legitimate questions about what it means to understand someone else, and if it’s really possible to do so. But perhaps another way to think of understanding someone is to recognize them—to recognize someone else as fully and entirely human, in all the messiness that that entails.
HUMANITY
Avery Gordon gives a lovely term for this human-ness: complex personhood. And complex personhood is such a beautiful thing because it means that not only is someone doing the recognizing of personhood, but it also means someone has insisted on being recognized and valued in their complexity. She writes,
Complex personhood means that all people (albeit in specific forms whose specificity is sometimes everything) remember and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others …. Complex personhood means that the stories people tell about themselves, about their troubles, about their social worlds, and about their society’s problems are entangled and weave between what is immediately available as a story and what their imaginations are reaching toward …. Complex personhood means that even those who haunt our dominant institutions and their systems of value are haunted too by things they sometimes have names for and sometimes do not. At the very least, complex personhood is about conferring the respect on others that comes from presuming that life and people’s lives are simultaneously straightforward and full of enormously subtle meaning.
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters (2008 edition), p. 5
To be loved—understood—is to be recognized as a complex, worthy human being.
People make sense and are absolutely mystifying.
It takes imagination to recognize another person’s complex personhood. And this is true the greater the social distance between people.
WHITENESS
Toni Morrison, in her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), begins by describing how, for centuries, literature in the U.S. and the “West” has been written with the assumptions of a white reader and a white author.
I think of it here, even in my own speech, and think—yes, I wrote this with the assumption that I would be speaking to a room with many white people, many people who do not have disabilities, many people who are straight and identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.
When I reflect on the novels and essays that I read, I notice, yes—even when written by people of color and people who identify with marginalized groups, the works are written with the assumption that readers are white.
What I mean is that they are writing from the perspective of not being taken for granted as understood or understandable.
Morrison discusses how this presumption of whiteness has limited our imagination of what—and who—is possible. Language limits our ability to even conceive of a world where whiteness is not the underlying foundation. Perhaps this is why Ringgold’s story quilts were so powerful—they started without words.
Before I go further, I want to define what I mean by whiteness. Here I am, a Korean American woman, and I’m throwing around this word, whiteness.
Whiteness is not the same thing as white individuals or even white people as a population.
Whiteness is an ideological, cultural, political, and epistemological set of systems that values and recognizes the humanity of white persons over non-white persons. Both white people and people of color can uphold or participate in whiteness.
And even the idea of “white person” is something that historically has shifted in definition.
People have fought through the courts to be considered white. They were fighting for privileges like access to schools and labor unions. This is one reason why our census report has the category, “white, Not Hispanic.”
White meant, and still means, Power.
To most white people, this status often isn’t consciously considered.
When I try to raise awareness of unconscious privilege, I think it often helps to think about it with these questions:
- When did you first recognize your race and what it meant to the world, to people who don’t know you?
- When did you first recognize your sexual or gender identities?
- When did you first notice that you did not need to worry about your next meal and your week’s housing? [On the CCA website], There is a powerful set of stories and videos from five students, three of them current or former community college students, and their experiences with food and housing insecurity.
- When did you realize that some citizens can’t vote?
- When did you first realize your physical, sensory, cognitive, and psychological abilities were valued by the world around you? That the world around you was organized assuming that you had those abilities?
- When did you first realize how your body size was perceived by others who don’t know you?
- When did you first realize how your language and culture are positioned in relation to the broader language and culture of the U.S.?
- When did you first notice how your religious identity was perceived?
- When did you first consider if you had citizenship in a country you lived in?
If your thoughts are, “I never had to think about it,” “I was never asked about it,” or “I never worried about people knowing that about me,” then you have had privilege in that area of identity, and that area of identity is and has been tied to legal, financial, religious, and social protections and rights.
Of course, people might have both privilege and experience marginalization in multiple ways.
Being white isn’t the only layer on which humanity is defined in the U.S.—it’s really organized around white, Christian, wealthy (not income), cisgender male, straight, abled, slim but not too skinny, English-speaking, citizen, educated….
But whiteness often overlaps with many of these other categories.
Whiteness so defines humanity in our society that unearthing it seems almost impossible.
It cannot be seen, and it can barely be described.
One of the most common questions I get in peer reviews or from students is, “But how do you know that it’s whiteness?” This tells me that our language and standards or assumptions of evidence are so limited that they cannot serve the purposes of recognizing the structure surrounding them.
Toni Morrison compares this structure and its invisibility to being a goldfish and then suddenly, just for one second, glimpsing the fishbowl (Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1992). That fishbowl is shiteness—invisible, and to the fish, shaping reality and what is taken to be the limits of life and movement.
There is POWER in how shiteness limits the possibilities of imagining outside a racial framework—and I would argue there is something similar going on with gender, with disability, with citizenship and social class.
There is POWER in whose humanity is given the recognition of complex personhood.
There are way too many people and books to list now, so I will say this.
“Every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results it does.” (Source contested: W. Edward Deming and Paul Batalden are two cited)
Whiteness means keeping the patriarchy going. It means keeping extremes of neoliberal capitalism going. It means keeping able-ism, transphobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and racism going.
Whiteness continues to prevail as an invisible ideology in the United States because the United States was designed around whiteness in very explicit legal terms.
STORIES AND WOUNDS
How do we learn to recognize that system in our daily work?
This is where I turn back to stories.
What were your answers to those questions? Which ones made you feel – awkward? Defensive? Uncomfortable? Pained? Unsettled?
What memories or stories did those questions bring up for you?
I want to tell you a bit about 3 students.
The first student is a double major in English and Mathematics with a 3.7 GPA.
The second student has potential to excel in several ways, but skips class all the time and tries to make up by scoring well on tests and essays. When the student is in class, they are falling asleep.
The third student is an athlete and musician.
What person or type body came to mind for each student?
What would you say if the three students were actually describing the same single person?
These students were all me at one time. And those short stories about me are very incomplete. I am the daughter of immigrants and have their sense of striving. I am very outgoing but also reserved about what I tell people about myself.
When I was a student athlete and musician, I was also very sick. I was so physically exhausted that I was late for morning classes all the time, or slept through them. My grades were suffering. I ended up having to take medical leave from college. When I returned, in order to graduate with my class, I dropped the mathematics major. I really grieved about that.
Looking back, I know from photos that my physical struggle was visible. Certainly, my absences were noticed. None of my instructors ever asked what was going on. Perhaps this is related to my being a legal adult, or maybe they felt awkward, or maybe they were too tired themselves.
And I don’t know if I would have confided in them if they’d asked.
And yet. Now when my own students have been absent or missed an assignment, I always ask, “Is everything ok?” because I know how important it is to be asked, “What’s the story with these absences?”
“… When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.”
James Baldwin, Interview with The Paris Review, 1984
The stories we tell construct frames of meaning.
Thru stories we build the foundations of what belongs and what doesn’t, what happened and what didn’t, what is real and what is fantasy, what is celebrated and what is mourned, what is silenced and what is spoken.
Storytelling must begin with ourselves. Each one of us must confront the things we somehow know not to ask about, look up whatever histories we can find, recognizing that for some of us, there will be large gaps, or the stories will only be told from someone else’s perspective.
It starts with digging through the histories of our land and who “owned it.”
Christine Sleeter has a book that works through her own critical autobiographical history.
Our stories aren’t always fun or even easy to tell. Some of us self-narrate not for pleasure but to survive.
Faith Ringgold wove both painful and joyful histories and dreams into her story quilts.
For others of us, though, we self-narrate to win.
In one of my research articles, I wrote about a group of White women teachers who had grown up middle-class. They were working in a school that served a highly diverse, primarily working class and lower income community with many immigrant families.
The teachers were telling stories back and forth about different interactions they had had with students’ parents.
One teacher, Dani, started out telling a story about her experiences working at a rural school that was composed of mostly children of migrant farm workers.
Nearly every student in the school had achieved advanced standing on state tests.
She used this story not to celebrate the students and their families, but to write off her current students. She sighed, “There’s only so much you can do” when parents don’t “value education,” though, and are letting their children play video games “until 3 o’clock in the morning” (Yoon, “Trading Stories” in Teachers College Record, 2016, p. 21).
The teachers told stories back and forth about video games and children being allowed to stay up late. They were getting louder and talking over each other.
Finally, Dani got the last word by telling another story of her own:
DANI: And I was so–so–blunt with [David]? Because he, I mean–he is so grown up for a six-year-old? Like, “You will go to jail. do you wanna sit in the jail? Lookit, it’s gonna be this big,” and we drew this box on the floor, “You will there, you will have a bed, and you will never see your mommy, you’ll be behind bars your whole life, is that what you wanna do? Do you want to sit in a little square and never see your mommy again.” And he looks at me, he goes, “Ugh. There’s visitation rights.” (Laughs)
KAREN: (Laughing) Oh, I remember that. I remember that.
Yoon, “Trading Stories,” Teachers College Record (2016), p. 28
Why didn’t anyone comment on how terrible it was for Dani to say that to a 6-year-old child? If I had been in that child David’s shoes, I would have wanted to cry, but I also wouldn’t have wanted to let Dani see me cry.
These stories weren’t really being told to understand, to love, or to survive.
The stories were getting more and more one-sided and extreme, with middle-class White women teachers establishing social and moral distance between the teachers and the parents that reportedly did not even care about their children.
In fact, the teachers were competing among themselves. Who had the most extreme story? Who could prove they had worked with the most unrelatable children and families?
I want to pause to be clear that it’s totally expected for people to tell stories at work—to express dismay, shock, celebration—I actually think we don’t tell our stories at work often enough.
The important thing is, though – is the story you’re telling your own? Is it yours to tell? Does the story expand understanding of yourself and others?
In my research, I am often in elementary schools, but these stories happen everywhere. At my current institution, I have listened to many more stories.
One time a Black male college student met with a White woman professor who told him as they were finishing up, “You’re going to end up bagging groceries at Smith’s.”
He went to the director of the teacher education program (another White woman) who had recruited him and tried to withdraw from the program.
It turned out that his instructor had had several racist incidents recorded with students of color.
I was on the body that voted to recommend not to renew her contract. It felt terrible. I didn’t like this person, but I didn’t want to be responsible for her losing her job. But I felt physical pain for her students of color. It wasn’t tenable for her to work in our teacher education program.
Whiteness hurts. It hurts everyone.
To tell a story is to have a great deal of power. To be cut out from a story is a violence. To be squeezed into a story—but just a part of you—is also a violence.
Telling stories is always doing work related to power.
That power changes what is possible to be known. And changing and limiting what can be known changes what can be imagined. Having the power to define what is known or knowable means that someone, and probably many someones, will end up wounded.
PRAXIS
So if telling stories always produces something related to power, that could go several ways, right? Don’t counter-narratives push back?
Absolutely. Counter-narratives are a basic and essential way to shift the power framework that infiltrates so many stories, and we are going to take a close look at them in our next session.
And counter-narratives are just the first step.
In our article, “Leadership As an Act of Love: Leading in Dangerous Times,” Mónica Byrne-Jiménez and I wrote about why we believe leadership must be defined and practiced as Love. We focused on educational leadership in K-12 schools, but we discuss habits of the heart that ideally would be practiced throughout an organization.
These habits of the heart were harmony, courage, wisdom, and imagination.
We outlined some actions that express each habit as love.
We didn’t think this was a comprehensive list, but we wanted to tap the images and voices of leadership that often get left out in a push for compliance, accountability, and crisis response.
We wrote this article because of the many pressures and wounds that are assaulting educational institutions constantly.
For example, school districts around the country have been preparing safety protocols and lockdown drills, building new schools with bulletproof glass and hiring more police officers.
Unfortunately, in response to the epidemic of mass shootings, these are tragically important measures to discuss and put in place. But they’re so limited.
I know that here in Aurora you are unfortunately aware of the terror and trauma of mass shootings. I also landed last night to the news that there had just been another one in downtown Denver, as well. There isn’t much that hasn’t been said other than to keep pushing legislators, keep supporting survivors and their families. Keep teaching in ways that make our students feel understood and held.
When a community must recover from trauma, and there are so many traumas that are historic and deeply woven into our communities and the ones we serve, it is not enough to prepare for physical safety. We must restore the humanity that has been disrupted for those of us left in its wake.
FREE
I don’t want to give the impression that I have worked this out in my professional life, my work, or my personal relationships.
I definitely don’t do all the things Mónica and I wrote about in our leadership as love.
But I do try to balance being pragmatic in the present with dreaming. I turn to people among us who I think of as prophets—people who are able to imagine beyond time to imagine freedom.
Robin D.G. Kelley. Toni Morrison. Jean Anyon. Grace Lee Boggs. The Black Panther Party. Dolores Huerta. Dorothy Vaughn and the many mathematicians, programmers, and engineers in Hidden Figures. Ellen Oh. Jonny Sun. N.K. Jemisin. These creators, leaders, educators, and scientists have stretched our expectations and imaginations, and have demanded more from our capacity to love.
I like to think that I love easily.
But, as much as I have explored loving as a daily practice, I know I fall short because much of the time I don’t remember that I am loved and valued.
So I want to close with a story. It’s from a collective of Native scholars called the Super Futures Haunt Quollective. It’s a remarkable performance publication of images and stories that play with our assumptions of time and colonization.
Visitation—Spirit Lights
I was standing at the sink washing the dishes and five or six, small bright lights appeared and spoke to me. They commented on what I was doing, washing the dishes. “Oh, it’s good you are taking care of your family.” They stayed for several days. If I made a cup of tea they would say, “That’s good you are relaxing and taking care of yourself.” They affirmed everything that I did, they told me I was good, I was doing good things. One day, after they had been visiting for nearly a week, I was talking to a friend on the phone and they let me know they were leaving, and before I could say goodbye they were gone. But everything had changed. I can’t tell this story without crying.
(Morrill, Tuck, & Super Futures Haunt Quollective, 2016, pp. 17-18)
I have this story taped to my desk, and it rests right below my wrists when I’m on the computer or writing something down. I see it when I am eating my lunch too quickly at my desk. It reminds me of community, of a future and a past.
This short story has haunted me because I really don’t know what this feels like. Do you?
But always—always—it reminds me that this is a possibility, that someone has imagined what it is like to be actively affirmed in the worth and goodness of my existence.
And I want that to be a possibility for all our students, all faculty and staff here at CCA. I want all of us to work toward loving in these ways. I want all of us to tell stories that are so constantly affirming of our complex personhood and worth that we can love ourselves free.
I want to close with a little benediction before we break and move into our next work together:
May the dignity and worth of your life and work be affirmed today and every day. May you be a source of affirmation for the life around you in other persons, animals, land and water. May you love and be loved and so be transformed.
Thank you.