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         When talking about Mary Louise Pratt’s Arts of the Contact Zone, we, members of ESEM 026, were uncomfortable with sharing our thoughts on our classroom as a contact zone. Thirteen of us sat there, some avoiding eye contact while others shuffling in their seats. We were not quite ready to become a social space “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power…”(Pratt 34). New to Bryn Mawr and new to each other, we had not yet established the patterns I observed year after year inside and outside of my middle and high school classes.

            We encounter new people and new situations on a daily basis. It comes with being human. Most of these encounters are shallow and meaningless; they are brief and do not impact our lives in any way. Sometimes, after repeated encounters with the same person, a more significant connection can occur. In Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild and Other Stories for example, the main character Gan encounters T’Gatoi at a very young age. He develops a connection with her despite their different backgrounds and her supposed dominance over him. As time passes, Butler describes this connection as more of a codependent one than one of superiority and inferiority.

A Classroom is not a Family

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

On a Saturday afternoon, my dad drives our Honda Odyssey down the quiet, safe street. My mom, brothers, and sister sit in the car with us. Orthodox Jewish men talk together and their wives push strollers as they walk home from Sabbath services. Here in Amberley Village, there are big lawns and lots of white Jews. On the other side of the train tracks, in Roselawn, there are a lot of black people, some “prostitutes”, and sometimes gunshots at night. When it snows, there is line between Amberley, where the streets have been cleared, and Roselawn, where the streets are still covered in snow.

Identity Memo

Han Yu

Even before I attended public high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I knew the statistical racial makeup of Cambridge Rindge and Latin. This, to me, is a perfect indication of the atmosphere surrounding race in my hometown. Our numbers were something to be proud of—something we had drilled into the minds of kids should they ever be quizzed on “diversity issues” by family members or friends from neighboring towns (even now, I struggle to suppress the urge to include the numbers, as if it could prove something about me, about where I come from). Caught up in White Cambridge Liberalism and committed to studying large-scale, historical examples of racism and injustice, I conveniently ignored the everyday injustices that were happening all around me.

            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.

”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.