For the most part, a large part of our society is never discussed, heard about, or given a platform to speak on. Due to people’s actions, the system’s dismissal and rejection of a group of people, racism, classicism, and many other injustices, people’s voices are not only silenced, but society does not benefit from their knowledge and lived experiences. Even before entering, based on the little I have learned about prisons, I am enraged and frustrated with the lack of power these womyn have over their own lives. I wonder how often different womyn feel fear, what womyn take comfort in, if or when they feel empowered, and how they continue fighting each day.

Students, please use the comments section of this post to complete the assignment for class.  As explained in the syllabus:

Level 1 - If you’re completely new to blogging and reading blogs: Find a blog post that talks about technology, innovation, and/or education in ways that feel exciting, important, and meaningful to you. Post it in Serendip Studio and explain why you chose it.  

Level 2 - If you’re not a blogger but you are a blog reader:Choose one of your favorite blogs that talks about technology, innovation, education, or another topic you feel is related to this course. Post it in Serendip Studio and explain why you follow/read that blog.  

Jody’s Esem conferences:  All meetings in Campus Center

I touched it for the first time. My bare, uncallused feet tightly latch onto the rough, leathery, balance beam. At this point in my life, the balance beam seems both very long and comfortably wide for my size one feet. I look down at my toes which are a little more than two feet off the ground. My head stays down as I slowly lift each foot into the air and back down again, careful not to fall off. The instructor says to do small hops across the beam. My heart speeds up a little as I put my weight into the beam and remove it just as fast. My feet barely lifted off the beam but I have moved forward back onto the familiar, grippy texture.

”And when these factors of race and class and gender absolutely collapse is whenever you try to use them as automatic concepts of connection. They may serve well as indicators of commonly felt conflict, bust as elements of connection they seem about as reliable as precipitation probability for the day after the night before the day.” June Jordan, Report from the Bahamas (1982)

Black Woman =/= Black, Woman

“Even though both ‘Olive’ and ‘I’ live inside a conflict neither one of us created, and even though both of us therefore hurt inside that conflict, I may be one of the monsters she needs to eliminate from her universe and, in a sense, she may be one of the monsters in mine” (Jordan 47).

I am no woman. I hold no sentimentality for that which accompanies womanhood. I am a black woman. But I am not representative of the black woman. This is the mess of it; the murkiness of identity and its many implications. We may postulate and analyze ourselves into oblivion, but the universe shall make space for us, and in return we owe it the decency of getting on without too much fuss.

“I saw them walking as sisters walk, hugging each other, and whispering and sure of each other and I felt how it was not who they were but what they both know and what they were both preparing to do about what they know that was going to make them both free at last.”

“I am reaching for the words to describe the difference between a common identity that has been imposed and the individual identity any one of us will choose, once she gains that chance.”

—June Jordan, “Report from the Bahamas”

“’You are so lucky!’ she exclaimed. […] ‘You have a cause. You have a purpose to your life.’”

“First of all, speaking of race and class and gender in one breath, what she said meant that those lucky preoccupations of mine, from police violence to nuclear wipe-out, were not shared. They were mine and not hers.” –“Report from the Bahamas” by June Jordan