Is Weight-Loss Self-Absorbed? Wait...Is this blog self-absorbed?

The answer the latter question could very well be yes. The answer to the former I am still wrestling with, as a feminist, as a scholar, as a buddhist-christian-queer-antiracist-socialist.

One of the things that I'm very concerned about is Arizona's ban on Ethnic Studies and their corresponding immigration battles. I teach about this stuff, particularly in my class on American women writers, where we begin with slave narratives and end with Chicana feminist thought, wrestling with ideas of citizenship and belonging and their relationship to a feminist social justice project. My students surprise me with their insights and their varying relationships to activism and history.

Last week I had students read an interview with a black feminist scholar, Evelyn Hammonds, about growing up in the Jim Crow South and pursuing a science degree at MIT in the late 1970's. In a critical writing response, I asked students to make connections to Harriet Jacobs' Life of a Slave Girl and the idea that withholding education is a tool of oppression.

I was surprised to find that many of my students did not know what the Jim Crow Laws were.

That afternoon, intimidators with gun holsters disrupted a peaceful vigil held to recognize the death Trayvon Martin.

The next morning, racist graffiti was scrawled on the side of our campus Black Cultural Center, a building that arose out of student activism and a push of Black Studies (now called African and African American Studies) in the 1970's.

Meetings were held. Undergraduate student orgs representing students of color created a response and faculty and instructors like myself stood in support.

The next morning, we marched from the Hale Center to the Alumnae House to interrupt a meeting of the Board of Trustees. Afterward there was a sit-in, followed by news of more racist graffiti.

As I was marching with students and faculty, I felt the pinching in my groin and the tightness in my tail bone gradually release. There was a dull pain in my walk but it was overshadowed by the energy of the group's movement--the anger, the frustration, the sadness. And I thought, does it matter that my body is here?

I don't have a thoughtful way to end this blog except to say that I think it did, that it does. I'm reminded of the political philosophy of Stokely Carmichael, who understood that white bodies carried privilege that bodies of color did not. So when he became a founding member of SNCC, he encouraged white student leaders to travel to the Jim Crow South because their presence would garner media representation that the local black organizing was not receiving. These white bodies were meant not to be leaders but to listen and engage. To be present.

And I understand today that there are limitations to the work that SNCC was able to do. And I also understand that we live in a different media culture than Stokely Carmichael but I also know that white privilege still exists. And if I can use it for anti-racist organizing, I will.

But I can't do it unless my brain is working. My body is moving. And I am able to stand/sit/write/speak in solidarity.

Please sign this petition--no need to be a student at my University.