BLACK BACCHANAL
VERSES ON LEARNING, SURVIVAL, AND BECOMING…
Assemblage on learning and surviving in verses, on refusal, a black gaze, praxis, and ritual.
BACCHANAL OF VERSES
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LOOKING CARING REFUSING BEING TRANSFORMING BECOMING FUGITIVE BECOMING ABOLITIONIST. REJECTING LEARNING AND CREATING “PRODUCT” FOR CAPITALIST CONSUMPTION, BECOMING AND BEING ….CHANGES AS BOTH INNATE HUMAN AND EVEN WHEN BLACKNESS IS FRAMED AS NON OR SUB HUMAN. REFUSAL /NON PERFORMANCE A PEDAGOGY OF BECOMING. THE PERPETUAL STATE OF BECOMING. A BACCHANAL - A SCANDAL.
Engaging This Work Imagery
Verse
Accompaniment
I am a deeply somatic learner. I have not come to that by accident. It is a hard fought assertion. I am moved to learn, inklings of connection in content, cultural affirmations, curiosities known and unknown drive how I make sense of the world. Visual information, content that engages the senses, and calls us into deeper more intentional reflections, questions, and callings into the rabbit hole of what we don't know we don't know are exciting to me. I have spent years punished, and shamed for not conforming to a teachers style of learning or representing information. I don't seek to replicate that behavior, steeped in the white ivory towers of academia, and the faculty who hide behind the ivory doors with banners of soft politics. Instead to invite others to engage in this Bacchanal ( used in the Caribbean to describe an argument, some form of confusion including collective or to describe a scandal) is by falling down the rabbit whole of your choice, choose the imagery or not, choose the verse, or not, choose the adjacent accompaniments, or not, choose to
engage them all or just sit with it all or some, let it flow through and pass, and grab at the things that excite you, frustrated you, spark your curiosity, and invite connection, discourse or dialogue. I support it all, and I think the best learning, the most beautiful becomings, are always on our OWN terms. Welcome to the Black Bacchanal of fall 2021.
On Refusal as Ritual and Fugitivity as Freedom
As I document “proof” of learning or something like that, I keep feeling called to ideations on refusal and fugitivity. I am reminded of the deep trust that teaching and learning requires of us, and as I have shared before I am holding learning/teaching, to terms that feel as foreign as they do familiar and oddly awkward, as these tender things worthy of protecting, but also not needing of policing and forms of academic surveillance. I am felt continuously challenged by policed learning and at the same time I am learning to aslo create spaciousness for the part of my learning and all the moments of stasis and flow that come becoming, growing, and being changed by learnings is also the act of refusal, and fugitivity as praxis and reclaiming of our dignity and self determination within learning and education. Throughout this documented refusal and fugitivity as ritual I am also holding it as essential praxis required to root out white supremacy, the cops in all of us, and all the ways we are pulled to be deputized to police by the state and its extensions including institutions.
01
Verse
Feel the LOSS fully. SEEK solace and comfort. Make SALVE like honey for the wounds. Seen and Unseen. FIND inspiration in yourself, in others, in the world, in the mundane. Take ACTION from this place of grief, grounded grief. FEEL all the things, let it metabolize and PASS through. Breath, Breath, breath. I CAN’T BREATHE. Breath, breath, breathe, REPEAT. REPEAT, REPEAT.
A Beautiful Human.
Malik Alim who we heard on the podcast was a Chicago community activist who played a huge role in the movement to end cash bond in Illinois. Just a few weeks before class started he drowned after he was thrown off an inner tube while swimming with family in Fox Lake. He produced the Bill Ayers episode and many others on Educating for Insurgency ft. Jay Gillen Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers that we listened too.
Story about co loving black children and building the village….doing Jari’s Hair
“I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library is open, unending, free.” —Ta Nehisi Coates
Abuela and the libraries were the beginning. Abuela because she is the woman who politicized me early on. Not because she knew of Franz Fanon or Ella Baker, she doesn’t, but because she knew her name, shared her struggle and built a life based on love and self-determination. Abuela because she survived devastating emotional and physical violence at the hands of an alcoholic who forced her to flee with her children from her beloved Puerto Rico to the United States. She had nothing and built everything. She taught me to survive. She taught me to love myself and to love and see others. She affirmed that doing so authentically, even when it was hard, would give me strength. That it affirms our power. She taught me there are people who would try to take that power and that I would have to fight to maintain it. She loved my brown skin and also understood the struggles it would bring. She prepared me for it with love. Her name is Rita, my abuela, and I love her eternally. Libraries because in some of the most difficult times in my life it was a place to go for the wayward wanderer in me, a safe sanctuary amongst the stacks. Warm, quiet, calm. A place everywhere and nowhere and all the places in between. A place to ruminate, a place to liberate. Class lines crack in clandestine corners, and both inquiry and interrogation live amongst the abundant shelves. Libraries are institutions of great equalization. If education is as Frederick Douglass states in his memoir and the ability to think freely for one's self, are a necessary condition for freedom to exist, then we can consider libraries the bridges to the beloved .
The tragedies of this year were made possible by America’s long history and obsession with anti-Blackness, racism, white supremacy, violence, and capitalism. America’s schools, populated by Black, Brown, and Indigenous children for centuries, have ensured the wrath of this rage. With this amount and scale of oppression, we argue that there is no need to (re)imagine or reform.
"I look at the last few months and realize this is what growing up in a global crisis looks like for low-income families. Being in quarantine made me realize how much I have been robbed of my childhood and that I’ve been an “adult” for the majority of my life." -Stevia, Chicago IL
Rabbit whole around schooling black children during the previous pandemic, early 1900’s Jim Crow de facto segregation, discovered the Rosenwald Schools. Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute and Julius Rosenwald, philanthropist and president of Sears Roebuck, built state-of-the art schools for African-American children across the South. The effort has been called the most important initiative to advance black education in the early 20th century. Attending a Rosenwald School put a student at the vanguard of education for southern African-American children. The architecture of the schools was a tangible statement of the equality of all children, and their programming made them a focal point of community identity and aspirations. By 1928, one-third of the South’s rural black school children and teachers were served by Rosenwald Schools When a 1954 Supreme Court ruling declared segregation in education unconstitutional, Rosenwald Schools became obsolete. Once the pride of their communities, many were abandoned or demolished. In 2002, the National Trust joined forces with grassroots activists, local officials, and preservationists to help raise awareness of this important but little-known segment of our nation’s history, placing Rosenwald Schools on its 11 Most Endangered Historic Places list. Of the 5,357 schools, shops, and teacher homes constructed between 1917 and 1932, only 10–12 percent are estimated to survive today. The National Trust is providing technical
assistance, grants, workshops, and conferences to help save these icons of progressive architecture for community use.
Rosenwald schools in Frankfort KY
The restored classroom of Pine Grove School in Richland County, South Carolina.
02 Verse
Where do the bad kids go. We go on space adventures to parallel universes where black futures and possibilities hold us in the blanket of the stars, and galaxies held within us. We burn bright as we navigate worlds where blackness is abound and we are the glimmers of light that creates galaxies of new life, new learning, new ways of being. When we land on our home planets we lift our ears and heads off solid surfaces and carry the sounds of other worlds in our the glimmers of infinite curiosites that twinkle in our eyes.
Designing Spaces for Black Futures
Designers
Stakeholders
Environment
Aesthetic classism, “experts”, unteachable, helicopter in, also holders of industry possibilities.
STUDENTS STUDENTS
Drop in design fails to incorporate the realities of the communities and spaces schools and learning sites exist within. How can both natural landscape but also social need and impact inform the design of learning spaces.
YOUTH YOUTH YOUTH TEACHERS TEACHERS EDUCATORS EDUCATORS COMMUNITY COMMUNITY.
I purposely name this as designing spaces for black futures rather than black learning or black schooling etc. In reflecting on the design of education spaces I specifically hold the loss of intentional black learning spaces but also the possibility that is constructed when we architect for those most held on the margins, most isolated from education historically and in the present. As an educator and lifelong student I have never in any of the learning spaces I have inhabited been asked about designing a school or learning space, similarly I have also never asked students in any environment I have taught or co constructed learning in community spaces, how they would design. I do think they are formal and informal elements to that, including community agreements, and the physical plant of schools but also the surrounding community and landscape. How can designing the physical environments of learning and making meaning be collaborative, inclusive and anti oppressive.
Understanding the BIPOC Student Experience Is Critical to the Future of Education —Sophomore from Brooklyn, identifies as Black “One building looks well-funded, which makes me think that the students who go there must be 'well-funded' themselves.... I'd assume the education within the building is top-notch, which also means the atmosphere might be competitive. The [other] school seems like your average high school.... I'd think that the students there are people who I could get along with, more average folk. I would want to go to the [first] school because it seems like a quality school. However, feel like I would fit in better with the students [at the other] school.”
—Senior from Queens, identifies as Hispanic or LatinX One [school] looks very professional, where those who attend succeed, whereas the [other] one feels very restricted and [those who attend] don't get far in life.”
https://www.gensler.com/blog/black-lives-and-design-urban-education-in-new-york-city
ANY EDUCATIONAL DESIGN SHOULD INCLUDE STUDENTS, EDUCATORS, PARENTS AND COMMUNITY STAKEHOLDERS.
03 Verse
When we make trouble we are put in cages, when we defend democracy and it shortcomings we are met with trouble, gratuitously violent trouble. So when do we give permission to be a troublemakers, to make good righteous trouble, that is not met with hoses, exclusion, cages, or death. That question in all its complexity can take us from fugitivity to freedom.
What does it mean to label students or people troublemakers. Who gets labeled a troublemaker. Why do kids like those depicted in the book get labeled trouble makers and then pathologized. Diagnosing them out of their troublemaking. What if the approach we took was more tender, that the perspectives of young people…the way students exhibit discomfort in the classroom was seen less as disruption but more of an age appropriate 360 review. What can we learn from the trouble making students engage in, in our classroom and co construct despite everything (testing, exclusionary discipline cultures, cultural incompetency, racial bias) beloved learing spaces informed by students and encouraging of risk taking.
Gratuitous Violence We have to sit in the generational violence of racial cast, racial capitalism, RACISM. We cannot conflate it for economic or class struggles, both matter and have complex relationships to and of each other. From mass incarceration, policing, lynching and all the new interations of how that extends into our contemporary lives is a staunch reminder that you can take all the money in the world, and distribute it evenly to all people in the world and black people would still face gratuitious violence. It may have started as a money scheme, but it has long since evolved from that. Violence changes us at our core, in our DNA as pointed out by ACES.
04 Verse
To teach is to love. To love so deeply that. You can’t teach someone you cant see. Teaching is tender, it requires us to deal with a shit storm and still show up, still hold space, still seek to see students, and still commit to co constructing worlds while making meaning and dreaming beyond. To Teach is to love. To teach is to love.
While working on this I learned of bell hooks passing. This hurts so deeply. bell hook was one of the first educators, authors, thinkers, feminists who I just fell in love with. Her work pushed me, helped me make sense of my own complexities and the complexities of the communities I come from while doing so with care, and history, and hope. I am adding into this section a visual homage to hooks. As well as a nod to lifting up what is so important about human development, about personhood, and about humanity, being that we can hold the will to love, the will to change, the desire to teach to transgress and be all about love despite it all.
“Love is an action, never simply a feeling” - bell hooks
05 Verse
What is human development to the non human.
Being and becoming human for communities rendered non human is complicated. While I appreciate Piaget, and other developmental frames shared throughout the course I continue to wonder what it looks like to assert personhood, and humanity not just in the legal sense but as Sylvia Wynter articulates in her work “On Being Human as Praxis” What is the granular level of human development and ontological blackness that is able to consider human development in the context of the social conditions we live in. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f5e9efa53eea036e019bc24/t/5f5f9126973bac 65ca4b0954/1600098603604/katherine-mckittrick-sylvia-wynter-on-being-human-as-p raxis.pdf
“Love Is The Rule” - Sylvia Wynter
The women and the others as beings and non beings.
06 Verse
For colored girls who deserve safe learning spaces and to the classrooms that will never be enough.
I appreciated so much of the sitting with Monique Morris’s work. Her praxis and care for data, education and her specific work and commitment to holding sacred the lives and experiences of black women and girls speaks to me deeply. I appreciate the commitment to preserving black girlhood, the right to learn and be whole beings despite enduring both gender and racial violence amongst others throughways of oppression. As such I am ending this reflection with a visual homage to black womyn, girls, and femmes, in the world, black, womyn, girls, femmes, wayward, important, being and becoming and beloved.
Cabrini Green Chicago - Black Archives.co
Ruby Bridges
Black Archives.co
“Your teachers / Are all around you. / All that you perceive. / All that you experience, / All that is given to you / Or taken from you, / All that you love or hate, / Need or fear / Will teach you - / If you will learn…” - Octavia Butler
Sharing Is Resistance
Space to share something with me. Thank you.