Frozen Girl

Frozen Girl

I saw a picture that haunted me pop up on my Facebook feed last week. I gazed at a teen girl’s body, literally frozen in time.  She fell asleep and froze and her body stayed just as it had been for thousands of years—preserved. There was even blood inside her body, reported the scientist.  I am haunted by the white male scientist hovering over this girl in the picture, staring at her as specimen, as scientific experiment.  She is girl frozen in time; she is in vulnerable sleeping position. And he hovers over her in hazmat suit ready to examine her.  This is not sacred.  This child did not give you/us her permission. You/we violate her with our prodding gaze.  I yearn for her to rest.  I yearn for a new environment for this frozen girl where she can be free from his/our gaze.  Please, let her go.  Let her go.  Please, let this frozen girl go.

Interlude.

And that frozen girl is also me.  The girl child in me was frozen in time when she was taken from me, violently ripped from me against my will, without my permission, and without my spirit even being there inside my body.  I am that frozen girl.  And she is just starting to thaw and peak out from her entrapment.  She is resting now.  That girl is me.  She lives inside me, and I find her when I take the time and space to listen.  And, I am afraid of losing her again.  I am afraid of her re-freezing.  I want her to stay with me.  I want to dignify her in all the ways from which she never had access.  To clarify, she didn’t have an environment for rest.  She didn’t have an environment for rage.  She didn’t have an environment for joy.  She froze.  I froze. 

Several days after the picture popped up on my Facebook feed, I googled key words, looking for the story about the frozen girl.  I found a New York Times article from 2007 about this frozen girl, who was found in Argentina, an Incan child sacrificed 500 years ago.  I intentionally do not provide the link here. I learned that my memory didn’t serve me entirely.  She was not frozen for thousands of years; it was for just 500 years.  She was frozen with two other children, but we do not see them.  I realize there is a story and I feel both compelled to know her and ashamed about how the story came to be known.  You see, she was violated when she was sacrificed and then violated again 500 years later, as she was exposed and as the scientists and us, as the audience, came to “discover” her, to look at her to learn from her by what could be ascertained by and in her body. 

I don’t know if I want to research this girl.  Do I want to read all the reports, or even one of them?  I am wondering whether I could write about this girl in a different way. But would I ever be immune from contributing to her violation?  I don’t know whether researching her story would bring any justice. I just keep feeling like we should leave her.  Just leave her to be.  Stop your gaze through words, image, or research.  When is it too much, to know?  When do we need to stop inquiring?  Here, I think about Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang and their praxis of Refusal:

Refusal is not just a “no,” but a redirection to ideas otherwise unacknowledged or unquestioned. Unlike a settler colonial configuration of knowledge that is petulantly exasperated and resentful of limits, a methodology of refusal regards limits on knowledge as productive, as indeed a good thing (Tuck and Wayne 2014, pg. 239). 

Perhaps the harder, yet more honest thing to do is explore what this chance glimpse brought up in me.  I can tell you my story and I know, even as I do not know her story, that we are connected.  We are girls, violated.  And she is brown, Indigenous—while I am white.  These power frames create new forms that I can never enter or commiserate across, even as I want to care for her.  She is separated from me by more than 500 years. 

When I write about my frozen girl self, I often imagine a cave and I feel as though she’s been trapped inside for years.  Can my metaphor & imagery and her reality find kinship somewhere in my words and art, today?  I don’t need to tell her story to rectify and dignify her existence.  Can I connect through a mutuality of intention and recovery? I don’t have to know all about her.  (Similarly, I do not need to share all of the details about being sexually abused from my little girl self for me/you to believe me and dignify the frozen child in me.)  I do not need to know all the details about her violation to believe her, to love her, and to hold her up.

And I know that many would rebuke at a white 48-year-old American claiming kinship with a 15-year-old indigenous girl sacrificed and frozen 500 years ago.  There’s a part of me that also bristles at my claim.  I am declaring a connection through fire.  I understand the divide that I cannot move across and yet, there is something akin, something in my own affect that I learn from her.  There is something about the fire in my belly that ignites when I look at the image of the white male scientist prodding her.  Maybe it is not kinship.  Maybe that word is too strong.  But I fight for the girl in me, and I see the girl in me when I look at her.  What is that? 

This excerpt is drawn from the book I’m writing on radical kinship and childhood.

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. (2014). R-words: refusing research. In Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities (pp. 223-248). SAGE Publications, Inc., https://doi.org/10.4135/9781544329611

"Out of the Box"

She told me that her mother in Brazil felt my work spoke to her; she liked how my art moved “out of the box.”

I don’t know what to say. I feel salvation and sadness. I feel free and trapped, but I am here. My own whispers and screams for preservation remain on the walls of the space, in the psyches of the viewers, in the presence of our moment. The artifacts, the art, the lingering moves across image and particle, eruption and splash.

I wonder what to make of it all.

And “out of the box” captures the essence and liberates and explains. As she shared how her mom took in my work across screens, while sitting in space across landscape and ocean, she got it. My work moved her and she shared the words, the words to describe what happens to me when I create art. It happened to her mother.

I could see daughter in my mind’s eye with phone cast toward wall, toward art with gentle slow sweep, a caring gesture to uplift mother across ocean. I could see and feel mother as my work brought a sense of escape, freedom, connection.

And this story told through daughter makes it all worthwhile. I was scared. I was petrified to share. I was petrified to put my art on wall. It felt exposed. I felt exposed. To be viewed is scary. But to be seen is everything.

Untitled.

I want to write my ass off and not have to justify my voice. 

I don’t want to prove anything.  I want to give credit to those people and experiences who have shaped my thoughts and intentions.  I want to look deeply and critically at my own assumptions.

But I DO NOT HAVE TO PROVE anything to you.

If you don’t believe me, then, that is your prerogative

But I will write the shit out of it. 

I will write with my entire soul and heart and dread and conviction.

I am not partial. 

I ask you to be kind.

I ask you to be kind with my words because these words are my testimony.

But if you choose to judge me, then I will keep your

Daggers separate and outside my circle.

If you choose to walk with me through the illusions and help me to see another perspective, I welcome you here. 

I am not asking for you to fix anything.  Nothing is broken here.

Just try to understand me and show me where I might consider even more. 

It is not your job to love what I write. 

It is my job to love what I write. 

If you don’t like it or connect to it, don’t try to stomp it out. 

Just let it be. 

I am asking for feedback but do not ask me to prove myself. 

I refuse.

Stranger Fruit: The Legacy

Stranger Fruit: The Legacy*

April 16, 2021.

“Hands. Show me your hands. Drop it. Drop it.”

Hands up!

Hands are up!

The boy’s hands are up!

I am screaming now.  Take us back in time.  Move us back in time.  Stop.

The boy’s hands are up.  Don’t shoot him!

Time stands still.

But it doesn’t

It is over. 

Adam’s life is over.

And the still image of baby face, boy, child, with hands up makes imprints. 

I will not watch the video. 

But the grainy still image is enough. 

Adam Toledo: 13. Stop. Brown face

Anthony Thompson, 17. Stop. Brown face

Tamir Rice, 12. Stop. Brown face

Travyon Martin, 17. Stop. Brown face

Aiyana Jones, 7. Stop. Brown face

Emmett Till, 14. Stop. Brown face

Hannah Ocuish, 12. Stop. Brown face

And there are more and there are more and there are more…

I can’t find all the names! 

INTERUPTION: April 20, 2021.

STOP KILLING OUR BLACK AND BROWN CHILDREN!!!!

I add the name:

Ma’Khia Bryant. 16. Stop. Brown face. 

And the old school movie reel plays, click, click. 

Click. 

Jagged images move us back through time.

White Crowd.  White Spectators.  White Murderers.  White White Whitewash.  Stop the clicking.  Stop the Film.  Stop watching.  

Consuming Black death Is death to All.  Our collective soul is burning.

We die with each image.  We cease breath.  We ALL cease breath each time, “I can’t breathe” plays. Click, click. Rewind.  Click, click again.  

Giggles heard across shadows of time

Skittle bag on ground, weighed down by half-full, pieces, rainbow pieces, sweet. Left. 

“Adam played with Legos and rode bikes with his siblings”

Half-finished Lego structure, relegated to basement or 

Stop. 

And the pain as toe steps on lingering Lego on Carpet. The pain. 

A Lego.

Like dust that blows across history swirling and swirling around us

They are disappeared

White gaze and then gone

Gone to record

Gone to community

Gone to family

Gone.

“And Black Children Are Six Times More Likely to Be Shot to Death by Police.”

“The lawyer said that the shooting, while tragic, was justified given the nature of the threat.”

Like a manic murder that most of us white folks say, “this can’t be happening” even as we consume and consume and consume Black life.   IT IS HAPPENING!!!!!!  I am screaming. Black and brown children are consumed by us.  STOP.

White folks, TAKE RESPONSIBILITY.  One white man’s action is SHAME on all of us.  We all pulled that trigger.  Don’t cover your ears, close your eyes, or escape to fantasy. I speak to myself here as I speak to all of us.  I am speaking to White folks, to those us of who study and teach race and childhood.  It is time to do more, to yell louder and to use the power we have unjustly been granted in our institutions.  We sit at the tables.  We hold the reins and the whip.  Listen.  We hold the lash.  It is time that we recognize the power we have unjustly benefited from and speak and act.  We must speak, act, and ABOLISH THE POLICE.  The institution must be torn out from its roots.  The root system lingers and we must dig and dig and dig with all of our might.   It is time to build community safety through ways that respect ALL life.  BLACK LIVES MATTER.

*Thank you to Gaylene Gordon for the title of this piece, in reference to Billie Holiday’s 1954, “Strange Fruit”.

The world is different.

I woke up this morning and just as the day started to break open my consciousness but in a slow way—a gentle way, a meandering way

I remembered—I saw the light glow from the window.

Snow

Lots of snow. 

And the joy of this extra light/glow started to rise up in my spirit. 

And no sooner did the reality of snow hit me 

That I hear Kaia babbling away—sharing uninterrupted commentary about the snow, snow, snow. 

Such joy

Such excitement

As if I could bottle this up as an elixir when we all need it.

To gently ease our troubles.

Snow!

And it struck me as we played outside and cleared the covered walk

The world is different.

We are different.

Blanketed in glistening glowing snow. 

The walk becomes an adventure and there are new discoveries to be made

In the visage

Snow covered hills and untouched glory

We make prints

We make gentle marks

Our existence. 

Before any annihilation or quick eruption from the plow—the clearing

We make gentle marks.

We explore freshly fallen snow crest

Adventure. 

My whole world is new

Our whole world is new under the blanket. 

Abolitionist Childhood Now.

Here’s a link to an invited blog post with Youth Circulations:

Abolitionist Childhood Now.

Innocence will not save us.

I’m a little ashamed to admit that I found myself susceptible to one of those Facebook adds.  “Oh, those pants are cute and they look super comfortable!”  I put the pants into my cart.  Low and behold, a request to enter my email popped up to receive 20% off!  I entered my email and found the discount.  I went back to my cart and started to check-out.  At the top of my screen appeared: “With every purchase, you save a child.”  WTF?!?  I felt simultaneously furious and ashamed.  I quickly hit the red X at the corner of my browser.  Gone.  

This is racist, ageist, capitalism at play!  Hey you, elite privileged (read: white) adult: with your purchase, you just saved some imagined (read: Black or Brown) poor suffering child from a far-away land.  Poof: all personal responsibility for harming children or enabling children to be harmed is gone.  You are free.  You saved a child.  So many of us in this racist ageist capitalist circus will feel ease and comfort believing, “With my cute pants, I’m saving the world.”  The mirage continues.  The circus continues.  Children keep dying.  

The children are not responsible for our collective future!  The children show us a mirror to the present, past, and future in their vulnerability to the harms that we adults continue to inflict on them and on us.   Adults: you can deny accountability over and over again, but we are in charge.  We make the rules. We cannot tell children that it is up to them to make the world right.  How unjust!  We feed them poison and then ask them to make everything better.  They do not have access to the kind of power needed to make things better.  We have access to that power.  

Let me be clear: I believe that adults learn our greatest lessons from children, from paying attention and relearning what it truly means to live with conviction and to experiment.  Children play.  They are not innocent.  They play.  That is what we crave and desire.  Children watch the world very closely and they are constantly learning from us—our violence and our care.  Children also resist. They take to the streets to force us to face our hypocrisy and with courage, they demand justice for one another and for all of us. Children have always been at the forefront of protest.

As childhood scholars, we look for children’s voices and I love children’s stories.  These stories bring life and joy and pain and beauty.  I will continue to listen and learn. But we must be real.  These stories will never free them or us without adults dismantling the violent institutions that continue to mistrust, misbelieve, and mischaracterize children.

Children may not have all the ugly words yet for the harm we create, but they are not innocent.  This so-called innocence that we say we are trying to protect in our children is what we imagine, desire, and crave.  Because without knowledge, we can pretend that we are not responsible. But friends, we have always experienced harm.  Children experience more harm than adults with higher rates of poverty, food insecurity, and susceptibility to environmental degradation.  Do not delude yourself in thinking that there is some sort of innocence out there that will free you or your children.  Innocence is a scapegoat that lets us ignore—lets us refuse accountability—for the many harms we continue to perpetuate in our world. 

The future is all of us. Children show us a mirror to the parts of the world we do not want to see. We make them innocent so we don’t have to look at the harm we inflict on them and on all of us. Together with children, let’s reimagine and build new and sustainable webs of care.

PTSD is a real thing.

First, PTSD is a real thing, folks—please stop minimizing us when we express symptoms from it.   Second, a disclaimer:  this post is not meant to disparage individual health care workers for whom I feel great compassion.  They are doing the best they can while working under tremendous stress.  Our government and our racial capitalist health care system is to blame for the sense of dehumanization I experienced.

On Monday, I woke up with my right side of my face in partial paralysis. Scary. I was diagnosed with Bell's Palsy and it should resolve in a few months. I feel lucky. My ER experience was tough because as a person who lives with PTSD, medical facilities and especially hospitals trigger a panic response in me.  I know this about myself and I communicated this to the medical practitioners who admitted me.  

As they hooked me up for an EKG, I started to feel light headed and nauseous, the first symptoms of a vasovagal reaction (which tends to end in me losing consciousness, if I don’t have the space and time to lay down and intentionally relax). I know this because it is a patterned cascade that I experience under extreme stress. My wife also knows this because she has, unfortunately, witnessed me go through this several times—about once or twice a year. 

The medical practitioners expressed frustration with me because I was not able to let them complete the vitals quickly enough.  I asked if I could lay down in a different room (there was no cot in this room) for a minute and they said I couldn’t until they finished the vitals.  As soon as they removed the EKG cables, I laid down on the dirty cold floor and tried to breathe.  The nurse said I had to get up right away because they needed to use the room.  I apologized and got into the wheelchair.  As they started to wheel me to a room, I started to get that ringing in my ears and blurred vision and I told them I was going to throw up.  After that, I passed out.  My wife said that the medical practitioner kept telling me over and over again that I needed to sit up straight in the chair.  According to her, my wife held me up so I wouldn’t fall out of the chair and then she exclaimed for them to look at my face, that I had passed out.  I came to with a bunch of strangers in my face telling me I had passed out, asking my name, birth date, etc.—they had moved my wife away from me.  I had no idea where I was and my sense of self came back quickly but in those seconds that felt like ages, I experienced the abyss and panic that comes with having no sense of self or context. 

I share this story because the added layer of pain from PTSD is when folks treat you like you are making up your symptoms or overreacting.  As a childhood sexual abuse survivor, I lived for many years believing that I wasn’t experiencing what I was experiencing or having my pain minimized.  I speak now because I can and because it is important to affirm myself and other survivors.  PTSD is real.  We do not exhibit our symptoms for attention or exaggeration.  Our pain is real even if it appears to others to be disproportionate to the situation.  Again, the dehumanized feeling sucks, but I really don’t blame the individual health care workers.  While a bit of compassion might have helped me to feel less bad about myself and the feeling like I was taking up too much space, I understand that the ER conditions did not allow for the kind of care that I needed.  It is the system that we must change and increased education around trauma and PTSD.

Bees

As if a breath of fresh air is available at any moment. 

 It feels like everything I do and write must matter beyond me.  And this is true but sometimes the most intimate acts can be truly transformative.  Maybe the issue of scale is an illusion; for our bodies are a universe to the atoms within.  Maybe in healing our bodies and our intimate lives, we heal the world in ways that we cannot always see or trace.  Just maybe.  Just maybe it is okay to write about my days with my 4yo child—playing, learning, exploring.  Maybe these movements matter in ways that I will never fully grasp.

Kaia was afraid of bees.  She ran down the sidewalk toward me with a look of panic on her face, shouting, “Bee! Bee!”  (Ironically, her middle name is Bea, short for Beatrice after my grandmother.)   I gave her a hug and told her it’s okay.  

Bees don’t want to sting you. They only sting when they are surprised or you accidently interrupt them. I reminded her about the one time she mistakenly stepped on a bee. The sting hurt but it got better.

The bees are just doing a job and their job is to help the flowers and feed themselves and their hive from the flowers.  We love flowers so isn’t it wonderful that the bees are here?  We need the bees. The flowers need the bees and the bees need the flowers.

I told her that we could look online and learn all about how the bees and flowers work together.  She seemed interested and as we went about our day, she spotted a stationary bee on its back on the sidewalk.  We squatted down close.  “It passed away,” I told her.  “Why?” “Maybe it was very old; I’m not sure.”  She brought her face close to it and was silent as she looked at it intently.  She said, “Poor little bee.  I love you.” 

Kaia is no longer afraid of bees. She’s fascinated with them. I too have developed respect, growing knowledge, and admiration for bees. In fact, several weeks after learning lots about bees, watching many youtube videos, and observing bees on our daily walks as they pollinate flowers, we came again upon a dead bee.

Kaia squatted down close and asked, “Can I touch it?” “Yes.” She gingerly laid her finger upon the bee and then we took a helicopter seed and I gently wiped the bee off the pavement and into the grass. She picked up the helicopter seed and lay it over the dead bee.

Intimacy.  Our lives are deeply intertwined.

My new favorite picture of us. This image has nothing to do with bees directly but everything to do with life and magic and nature and interconnectivity.

The hidden ‘labor’ of care in higher education in the time of quarantine by Rashmi Kumari

Post authored by Rashmi Kumari:

A few weeks ago, a twitter user tweeted: “what troubles me about urban education, in the US, is that it is interchangeably used with race.” The tweet got me thinking about my first independent course (of which, I am quite proud of!), Urban Education. I teach this course as part of an undergraduate course offered by the Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University. 

 Wait a second!  Urban Education (do you mean schools for children of color?) 

 And…

 Childhood Studies (does that even exist? What does that even mean? Is it part of childhood psychology? Are you a nursing student? Is it about education?). I am frequently asked these questions every single time I try to explain my doctoral program.

 To some of you, yes, I am interested in childhoods of children of color. I am interested in intersecting inequalities that children (and youth) of color continue to face because of institutional racism, unequal class-structure, gender-order, and of course many other things like geographical locations, immigration status, disability, skin-color, and religion and ethnicity, that compound the challenges of teaching-learning processes in urban schools. 

 So, getting back, I am currently teaching, and transitioning to teaching remotely, Urban Education. My experience so far and my musings amidst the COVID-19 crisis: 

 Several of my class discussions have been around the aspects of structural racism, and intersecting systems of oppression that shape the education scenes for many African American youth in cities. In the past, when I was a teaching assistant for this course, for Dr. Lauren Silver, many of the concepts were new to me. As an international student, from India, the idea that Urban Education would essentially mean race and education was definitely not what I thought of when I consider urban schooling. For the students, on the other hand, it meant to grapple with the idea that institutional racism is more prevalent in school than widely assumed, and it is a lived reality for black and brown students. 

 However, in my current class, I find myself repeating these understandings and oftentimes, I’m challenged by my students’ knowledge and awareness of the topic. I am not going to take the trouble to explain the topics that I teach in the class in this blog post. Want to know more? You are welcome to reach out!

 There is a new challenge to the course now! No – not the COVID-19, but teaching online to students who were forced to vacate their university housing, students who had to face incarceration because they were forced out of their dorms, students who’ve had to work double shift as health-care providers, students who have to figure out child care, school closures, and home schooling their children before they get online for their own classes. 

 The pandemic, and the responses towards it, makes urban education harder for many of my students – the students who do not need a course explaining to them that the system is against them. Their lived experiences of this system instead offer learning for many of us, educators and scholars, in higher education. 

 While understanding the systemic challenges and to continue the process of learning, how do we respond when the “university is business as usual”? – when university demands that there be a smooth transition from face-to-face classroom interactions to a remote learning course. When, as an educator, I am unable to concentrate on any of my impending deadlines, how do I expect my students to continue to submit assignments, continue to keep their attendance up in the remote classrooms, and continue to be involved in group projects and presentations in the time of ‘social distancing’? What about the technological affordances that some students might have and others might not?

 Over the last one week, I have found myself assuring students over phone, emails and other platforms, that their ‘late assignments’ will be considered on time, that I am not going to deduct points for the lateness of their submissions, and that they are not making mistakes by choosing their lives over the course right now. 

 My sociologically trained brain identifies all of this as invisible labor of care that all of us educators and students are engaging in. My cynical pedagogy also questions this labeling of care as ‘emotional labor’. While I understand that it is important to make this care-work visible, I also question labeling the care-work into a category of labor. 

 Is this not the language of capitalism? 

 For some of us who come from not-so industrial capitalist communities, the care work is more organically performed, and we do not see it as gendered emotional labor. How do we continue to perform care by not valuing it against labor but also making those systems of care visible? 

How do we remain open to the emotional labor that this system demands of us while also demanding that this emotional care be supported through systemic infrastructural transformations?  

 Only when there is a reciprocity in emotional care, it can be looked at as more than the mere label of emotional labor.