Time outdoors and along hiking trails is especially important time to me. As I’ve written previously, it’s time to consider the steps involved in making change, including learning to tread alternative paths. It’s time to slow down, notice beauty, and appreciate life, even in the roughest of conditions. It’s also time to do important intrapersonal work toward disrupting biases and internalized inferiority + superiority. It’s possible to consider activities like hiking ... Read more ...
Racial Justice
These posts address racial justice, whiteness, white supremacy, and intersectional (in)equities. Posts ask: How can we act on a commitment to racial justice? And on related commitments to social, gender, economic, environmental, and other forms of justice?
“Pedagogical Too-Muchness,” Or a Call for Shaking up Schooling
This year I turned 39, and it’s my first in which I won’t be returning to school. I’ve spent my life in academic settings—as a child and adult, as a student and teacher, as a researcher and writer. Many of my friends are teachers, too, so I understand how August brings both angst and anticipation for the upcoming school year. Recently, I’ve been having conversations with friends about syllabi and course designs. I’ve been reading social media posts about the start of ... Read more ...
Naming Trauma as Trauma
As part of my research on epistemic injustice, I’ve been thinking about the power of naming: the power of having the linguistic resources to identify, describe, and call out varied experiences, especially experiences of injustice. Systemic oppression works in a way that denies the ability to name experiences of wrongdoing. When experiences are named, they can be acknowledged and addressed. To me, this is part of the power of the word microaggressions: the word allows ... Read more ...
Countering Resistance Fatigue with a Both/And Approach
In the past few days, I’ve seen countless posts detailing “the horrors of this administration,” the latest of which include separating families and imprisoning immigrants. I’ve seen friends describing their embodied physical and emotional pain, including pain from complicity and always too-small actions. I’ve seen friends accounting their own family stories of separation, as the history of state-sponsored violence against Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) is ... Read more ...
A Barrage of Microaggressions
Some years ago I began recording everyday microaggressions toward learning to recognize racism, which is so often coded and which whiteness has taught me not to see. This recording project aimed at building a repository of common microaggressions to teach with and practice interventions using Augusto Boal’s theatre of the oppressed. The project emerged from conversations with colleagues of color, who shared how often white colleagues failed to believe their experiences. ... Read more ...
5 TED Talks for Developing Emotional Literacies for Racial Justice
Today marks the final day of the 40-day practice I’ve been leading for a local, predominantly-white church on developing emotional literacies. We’ve been focused on building and strengthening emotional awarenesses, knowledges, intelligences, and response-abilities for racial justice. As part of this practice, I’ve been sharing resources, including TED talks that provide language for understanding emotional literacies. In this post, I share five of these talks that are ... Read more ...
What Is Justice?
What does it mean to strive for justice in everyday life? This question is front and center for me most days, but especially now, as I'm teaching two undergraduate courses focused on justice and as I’m offering a 40-day practice for a local church on “Building Resilience for Racial Justice.” These teaching spaces—the university and the church—are predominantly white and marked by whiteness that obscures understandings of race, racism, white supremacy, and systemic ... Read more ...
Do Vegans Kill Spiders? Recognizing Fears and Others’ Right to Exist
During the holidays, I visited family in Tennessee and Florida, where we encountered multiple spiders. They were doing what spiders do in houses: walking along baseboards, in and out of shadows, with seemingly little or no interest in human co-habitants. From growing up in the Tennessee mountains, I’m familiar with spiders. I’ve studied which spiders’ venom is likely to impact humans. I’ve encountered black widows, watched for brown recluses, and investigated spider ... Read more ...
Going Public as an Educator
I’ve been investing recently in spell-casting and other contemplative practices that help identify and manifest inner desires. I’m investing in these practices, as my whole being (still concussed from a recent fall) is craving a more embodied, experiential way of doing education. I’m investing in these practices, too, because the quiet winter months invite the sort of introspection that helps me know myself and my commitments more clearly. In the spirit of spell-casting ... Read more ...
Reading Martin Luther King, Jr. as a White Woman in the Work for Racial Justice
Each year, celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) Day in the United States brings new opportunities for mis-appropriating, mis-remembering, and mythologizing Dr. King’s legacy and the broader Civil Rights Movement. White people get the history wrong in many ways. Each year, celebrating MLK Day also brings new opportunities for re-reading Dr. King’s words and re-seeing the work that he—and so many people working for racial justice—have envisioned. MLK offers visions ... Read more ...
