This was very exciting to meet the artist, to have him present. First I would light to shed light on how simple his work is, through his photography he is able to work as a counter-narrative to how black bodies are represented. It was also amazing to see it all come together, the colors that people used, it was all just wanderful. It was evern better to see these black faces, surrounding a space that historcially the werent allowed to be in... plastered in this spaces to take up the right kind of space. I also really liked the video, it was edited in a way so that the people speaking, seemed to finish each other sentences... that evoked sadness from me. 

            I was honestly stunned and caught off guard throughout Kris Graves’ talk, looking at his powerful photographs and the video on macroaggressions. He was very honest, funny, thoughtful, and political. The depth to which he portrayed black people and their complexities in the Testament Project was powerful. The people were portrayed as complex beings with multi-layered personalities who are real and alive. Their physical bodies testified to a resistance- being, embodying, and presenting and being presented with enriching colors. In this day and age, the physicality, the bodies name a permance and a resistance to genocide and the destruction of the black body. The emotions and visceral responses that he is able to evoke in people is moving.

As a young child I loved to play with dolls, I even started to collect them. But one thing that I realize now is that I hadn't before is that none of my dolls actually looked like me. They were tall, blonde, busty, and blue eyed; everything that I was not and am not right now. But I remember growing up thinking that they were so beautiful and that I was waiting to look like my dolls when I grew older. As I grew older I didn't magically start to look like my dolls, which caused me to feel uncomfortable in my skin. Playing with dolls that didn't look like me effected the way I saw myself and had put myself down unintentionally.

where to begin?

i have a lot of feelings and a lot of memories and i just read calamityschild's post and that stirred up a lot of emotions (in case you're reading this, c, it was in a good way, and i love you and your posts v much) and basically i don't really want to talk about this. i don't want to talk about race. i don't want to talk about education. i don't want to talk about my experiences right now.
but here i am. and here we go.

i'm writing this immediately after a conversation with my friends about that ~infamous~ post in the ride share facebook group. i'm thinking about how we have an honor code with basic tenents of healthy competition, trust, mutual respect, individual potential, etc etc. i'm also thinking about how easily that gets misconstrued - today a white girl said, "honor code. be respectful." is response to a Black girl who was confronting her racism. it blows my mind how people will steal your food from the tea pantry but turn right around and say you gotta confront a trump supported/sympathizer respectfully. how!!!

//

As I sit here writing this post, Im sitting with all my roomates, who are black students, in the BCC. The BCC stands for the Black Cultural Center, which is basically a house dedicated to Professor Ira Reid, Haverford's first black professor. Of all the spaces I've lived in, including boarding school dorms, this has been the most comforting to me. It honestly feels like home. 

After class today, I've been thinking a lot about the disconnect between multiculturalism as an educational movement and an actual acknowledgment/discussion of structural racism (like we were describing for our theoretical fifth graders). Multiculturalism assumes that restructering our curriculums to include multiple narratives is enough to enlighten students - expanding your syllabus from Shakespeare to Shakespeare AND Alice Walker; teaching not just Europe in "world history" but Africa, Asia, and (pre-contact) America as well. And while multiculturism makes some strides, allowing students of color to see themselves in these narratives, it doesn't name the structures at work that excluded them in the first place.

For some context: I went to elementary school at a K-8, "alternative" public school. This meant that some classes (1/2, 3/4) were combined grades, and some had two head teachers in the classroom (my 6th grade class was taught by a married couple). As 7th and 8th graders, we had "Humanities" class in place of History & English, and our curricula alternated between "Justice and Dissent" and something related to questioning "American identity" and race in the United States. There's a lot to say about the way race functioned in my elementary school education, some of which I've already mentioned in class (discipline and the beginning of tracking, as well as the masking of systematic and institutionalized racism behind socially conscious curricula, for example).

When I think about my education, the first thing that comes to my mind is never race. Race is actually never the first thing I think about when I think about my identity anyway, but in particular when thinking about education I focus most on what posed the biggest problem for my peers and teachers. My selective mutism (they didn't see race, after all). I did not talk in school. Since kindergarden, from the moment I stepped on the bus in the morning to the moment I stepped off in in the afternoon, I did not communicate verbally with anyone. This 'social phobia' that I (have?/had?) have caused a lot of problems for me academically and socially, but I had no support from my parents or my teachers. My parents don't believe in mental illnesses, so I didn't get treatment when I should've.

            This summer I went with my parents to Vancouver to celebrate my brother’s college graduation. One day, we decided to go to Vancouver Island and have lunch outside of the Farmer’s Market. It was a sunny day and there were children playing and running around the tables where people were devouring salmon, crab, lobster, turkey, and any of a variety of vibrant, fully juicy fruits. The indoor market had been rumbling with bargains- trying to persuade vendors that their grown produce, hand-crafted lotions, clothing, and jewelry was not worth what they had been asking. That their time, sweat, energy of crafting their land into purchasable goods were not were the price they were asking.