Education

This summer, my family temporarily moved my grandfather into a senior living facility. While visiting him, I noticed that most of the staff, especially the CNAs and Med Techs, were black, while most of the residents (including my grandfather) were white. The overwhelming racial difference between those who served and those who were served made me uncomfortable in the way that it evoked the relationships between blacks and whites that have existed throughout the history of this country, from slavery to sharecropping to "the help" to our current prison system and even other services besides senior care. I (as a white person) was especially uncomfortable whenever I had to call or tell my grandfather to call for someone to come help him.

I spent this summer researching black liberation/power theory and creating a digital library of texts which theorize power. My research aims to show the deeply connected relationship between theory and self-making, and how theorizing about power and race works to inform and shape our experience of the self and others. My fellowship revealed the blurriness of existing in the text itself—reading is so self- reflexive, and it became difficult to distance myself from the work I was doing.

Toward the end of the summer, I went to see Anna Deavere Smith perform her latest piece "Notes From the Field: Doing Time in Education." Smith is an incredibly skilled performer with a unique style; she interviews hundreds of people who have some relationship to a certain conflict or situation, and performs their words as a series of monologues. This piece was a collection of monologues related to the school-to-prison pipeline, and those featured included leaders of the NAACP, Bree Newsome, teachers in the Philadelphia public school district, formerly incarcerated people, James Baldwin, and many more.

tw: domestic violence

i spent 10 weeks of my summer living in batten house, doing a program with 9 other students + my own internship. it often felt like a co-op - we were all students of color doing some kind of service-based internship. a lot of us were either international students or people who didn't come from the US. i interned at a domestic violence organization in bryn mawr that did hotline counselling and court advocacy work. the former required me to actively overcome my anxiety of talking to strangers on the phone and gather everything i had learned about emergency hotline counselling. the latter required me to forget my personal barriers and actively engage to survivors of domestic abuse. 

This summer I spent a lot of time thinking about being Asian-American and my proximity to whiteness. Being Asian-American in a town that’s 95% white means that sometimes your race is made invisible, and other times you are the most visible person in the room. And there’s a lot of tension between those two modes of being seen. This summer, people admitted to me that they “forget that I’m Asian.” But I was also called an “Oriental” and I was accused of eating dogs (ugh). So, it’s a confusing experience.  

Over the summer I waited tables at an expensive pizza place. The restaurant was in the "up and coming" U Street Corridor, where I could literally see the gentrification as I walked the few blocks down 14th Street from the bus stop every day. Corner stores were tucked in between brand new high rise apartment buildings; the area that was once referred to as "Black Broadway" boasted a soulcycle and several new age-y yoga studios. Middle class white people sipped Bloody Marys and ate brunch where the 1968 race riots had broken out. And I was serving $20 artisanal pizza with prosciutto and Maryland blue crab on top. (A large crab pie was just under $50 and served 2-4 people.)

This summer I worked on an object catalog for a private collection of African American art and artifacts. I have decided to make my life’s work oriented around shedding light on the disenfranchisement of the Black identity through the arts. The arts have proven to be an important tool towards creating an accessible form of communication amongst the Black community be it through the reproduction of Soujourner Truth’s portrait sold by herself and fellow abolitionists to support her lectures, Jacob Lawrence’s paintings that catalog the great migration of Blacks from the South to the North post emancipation, or Dread Scott’s performances in honor of Black acts of liberation.

So, in thinking about race and how I come in contact with it everyday, is almost a laughable statement. Dare I say, insulting. But in order to recognize this is I have to realize the way my body is labeled in our society and more so our community puts me in a position that I cannot over look race. It is constantly in my face and influences how I navigate spaces. I haven't been granted the privilege to not think about it. 

This story is about race because my family is black, so inherently anything I say about them will be about our experiences as black people.

I described to one of my friend’s parts of my summer like a womanist poem. The day after graduation I went to Trinidad with my mother to visit my grandmother. My grandmother was staying in my aunt’s house so she could be taken care of by my cousin, who just had a baby girl. We were all taking care of each other, which made it a womanist poem. The men, my uncles and cousins, came and left. It was the women who stayed in the home and made sure everything ran well. We all had a role and it was beautiful.