Education

        During the Friday class, one woman said “I can’t just move on. I can’t just let go. How can I move on if nothing has been changed and I still live in fear?” It was heartbroken to hear someone saying this in front of me, but still, I whispered to myself, “Don’t change your perspective entirely. Add this part to your perspective.” This is the mechanism I have developed through the interaction with underprivileged people. “They are so much more than that.” is the sentence I always keep in my mind. 

       Fraden says, “The eye of every beholder is not disciplined. And this finally is what makes the Medea Project Wild, on the edge, not entirely didactic, and never the same”. This quote sticked out to my mind after I heard people in our class talking about that in theater we are creating “characters” that “exaggerate” the stereotypes of those women. However, I really want to point out that, different people would have different versions of interpretation toward the same performance. And the audiences of the Medea Project, like us being self-selected in this 360, are the people who genuinely care about social injustices.

Three days before the production opened, she could barely speak her letter to her Dad. She had to read it; she couldn’t remember it. She had no attitude. Her affect was flat. I thought this was hopeless, that the performance would be a debacle. But Jones kept working with her; she made her stand with her hand on her hip for the last line: “How do you like me now?” When she was forced to move a certain way, her reading became more intense. By the opening, Garret did thrust her hips and remember her lines. She made the audience listen, commanding their attention. Whether her family (the ones there, the father not) were changed by what they heard, whether she herself was, once the public performance was over, I don’t know.

"These individuals are already objects of research and voyeurism, and not in control of how they are percieved or documented, even if there practices of documentation and research are executed with the best of intentions" (Meiners, 14).

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I keep thinking back to an exercise that we've done as a class as well as in our Friday book meets, about condensing your thoughts into a word or a few. Applying that practice to our Saturday excursion, I have trouble summing my experience in a single point. Enlightening? Overstimulating?  Ambitious? I think I have to go with "tourist-y", close second being "voyeuristic" in line with the quote above. 

I've had a question circling around in my head since our tour guide asked it at Eastern State Penitentiary yesterday: "To what extent are we using prisons to control the rest of the population?" The idea of eliciting fear in a population by constructing a monstrous and daunting prison and making it visible to the entire city of Philadelphia has made me think. It seems to be something of a shaming tactic as well--as we keep mentioning, Tocqueville described the experience of breaking the law in the United States vs. Europe, explaining that because a criminal in the U.S. has broken a law established and agreed upon "by the people," he is automatically alienated and labeled an enemy of the community.

"Graffiti artists don't consider themselves artists." Wait, what? Under this logic wouldn't the term "graffiti artist" be an oxymoron? Already this tour seems strange, I can sense conflict before we've even pulled away from the museum. "They just want recognition." Again, what? Isn't that what all artists strive for anyways? I missed the part where recognition was a bad thing. Upon looking at permission walls, "now graffiti artists can use their talent in a productive way." What are you talking about? Since when is art supposed to be productive? What even makes art productive? As we drive past one of the first murals in the area, painted by members of the community, "early muralists were pretty primitive." Okay, you did not just go the "primitive" route.

       I started to have this contradicting feeling after hearing people talked about their comments on the mural arts trip and that organization: On the one hand, the tour guides were davaluing the graffiti by emphasizing the illegal "nature" of them and by defining them as an act of vandalism. On the other hand, I was fascinated by the qualities of those mural arts and moved by the powerful meanings expressed in them. The organization knows which materials can avoid mural arts fading out, such as parachute cloth (maybe I spell it wrong) and some special paints. Each of the project has theme in it or story behind it. And the organization can gather a substantial amout of incarcerated people once upon a time for a new project. 

i found meiner’s introduction a repetition of things i already know (of), but it was sometimes excellent to have some of that knowledge reframed and connected. for example, i know the issues of the pic and of the school-to-prison pipeline; in fact, i’d say you cannot have a full understanding or definition of the pic without understanding the school-to-prison pipeline. but i have never thought to consider the person in the role of educator in these scenarios — i have only focused on the “victims” of the system (i.e., the students) and the system itself.

I have long worked with issues of privilege, especially having to do with race, and continue to work on how these are part of my own and all of our lives (in my view) in a profound and really inextricable way, both because of how deeply they’re embedded in our individual and collective psyches and also because of how they likewise shape/invade/annex so much of our institutional and otherwise socially structured lives.  I’m thinking of James Baldwin’s “Talk to Teachers” here, and especially the idea that if the lives of people of color are premised on injustice and on lies, so is my life as a white person premised on all this as well.  This becomes most glaringly evident to me when I think about (and sometimes act in relation to/support of) my (white) children’s life opportunities, which