Political Science

I.

We opted to attend Mia Mingus's lecture during the first two-thirds of class. As it turned out, the lecture was hugely relevant to our discussions across the whole 360 cluster. A few highlights from my own notes (to which I'd love to hear your additions):

I.

To remind you where we've been, here are the notes from last class: /oneworld/arts-resistance/course-notes-monday-october-26. I think we really went deep into many of these questions and I hope we can build on our discussions of the specifics of SNCC as well as more general discussions of freedom, resisting the prison industrial complex, and inequality.

[I've also attached the schedule as a PDF.]

Monday 11/2:

The Legacies of the Freedom Struggle: The Student Movement

Read: Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (PDF here)

Watch: Freedom Summer (Link here)

EXPERIMENTAL ESSAYS:

1.         Rosa                                                                          3. Kieres

2.         Madison                                                                    4. Tong

Monday 11/9:

"Who gives a fuck about Tocqueville?” It was March of 2015. Anne, Jody, and I were sitting in a restaurant near Jefferson Station, drinking wine. This was our third or fourth meeting in the planning stages of our 360 cluster and I had just revealed my initial cut at a course to be titled “Arts of Freedom.” A couple of other patrons turned their heads at Anne’s question.

Surprised, I stammered a response. “Well, Tocqueville coined the term ‘arts of freedom’; his portrait of early America shows the country at its best and at its worst. This lays the groundwork for confronting the structures of slavery and its aftermath as well as how these might be resisted.”

I. Orientation

I'd like to start again with some free writing in response to a prompt from Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom. Here's Ella Baker (quoted on p. 93):

“My basic sense of it has always been to get people to understand that in the long run they themselves are the only protection they have against violence or injustice . . . People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but themselves.”

Write in response, drawing on events and readings (and anything else) in the past week.

II. Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom

I. 

We had a great discussion of the Socrates Cafes on which I will soon prepare some general comments to "googledoc." One theme that has stayed with me: how the space was saturated with power relationships that were, in a sense, contradictory: many of us felt out of place and as if we did not have equal influence over the conversation; at the same time, however, many of the non-360 folks acted and spoke as if they were intimidated by us, suggesting that they saw us as in control of the space. How can we deal with these conflicting perceptions? What would have been a better way to structure such a conversation to resist the assumptions (and feelings of powerlessness) on both sides?

II.

DISCLAIMER:

I am in no way a professional poet, nor is this an incredible polished poem (by any stretch of the imagination). There is no doubt a lot that could be made more clear or logical. It is very much an edited train of thought, either about myself or about situations I’ve seen other people in. It is a processing of emotion and a reflection of the stigma we subconsciously internalize in every day life. 

“SOMETIMES”

Sometimes, the right

words are the wrong ones for

the right reasons

but the wrong people

say them

no one tells them off 

it’s hard to see the 

discrepancy of the story

“I’M NOT A RACIST”

You can shout it

http://nyti.ms/1QL5bg3

One of Tocqueville’s aims in Democracy in America is to explore and examine how democracy could be incorporated into other countries apart from the United States, where it supposedly originated. I could not help but thinking several times while reading this book that when we yell, “Show me what democracy looks like” and then people respond “This is what democracy looks like” I hope we are not referring to Tocqueville’s ideas about democracy, specifically his notion that instilling the practices of Christianity into the government will make all citizens equal under the law, which has openly condemned and limited people’s rights, has led to genocide, millions of deaths, and was ultimately created by white men.