i just sent this to dan... i just spent the whole evening writing down a lot of thoughts and this was the most coherent result...
dearest(s)
this has been such a trying week.
there was another fight in my school today. two fights in one week. there were two fights in all of last year..
it's connected to the outside (outside the stone walls of our scholarly edifice). this weekend there was a 'massacre' in mattapan and then a murder in revere - and students at my school have connections to both. homicides this year in boston are three times what they were last year. the murders are related to gangs and drugs and drugs and probably poverty. i don't know how to decipher this mess of race and poverty and drugs and violence. i've been reading about mexico and drug violence there recently but now i'm turning my attention to drug violence in the states, which i know something about but not enough to satisfy my need to fill in the blank spaces of these students lives which happen when they go home. . .
the fights at my school were (apparently - i'm not privy to all the details) also about drugs w an arab student george m. who's probably a drug dealer and certainly an instigator plop in the center of it all ... hopefully reaching its climax this morning with kai h. (young black man) punching george repeatedly to his painful taunts of "hit me harder nig***" i can't write about it without crying
my heart tonight is with kai, or at least the idea of him. we met yesterday but i'd been hearing about him for a while. he's loved at pca, where the more troubled you are, the more adored you are by the staff. i can't get the image out of my head of noreen yarwood an experienced teacher and administrator who i watched as she became aware of the situation and moved to end the altercation and the way she said his name "kai" not with anger but with pain and concern and so much valentia, all in a matter of seconds kai was off of george and walking out of the room (and out of the school) blowing off verbal steam and punching the fist of one hand into the palm of the other ...
pca is sixty-five percent latino (though that's misleading because latino and white and black blend) and fifteen percent african-american, which is really very few black students at the small school ... even fewer men because pca is disproportionately female, the black men at our school stand out, and next week there will be three fewer black men than the weeks before... there are only so many left and from the looks i've seen on their faces today i think they're conscious of that
the racial consciousness the racialized existence of my students has been entering my scope of vision this week more than before . these physical confrontations and my new assignment to "park duty" .. park duty is at once hilarious (picture me awkwardly moving between groups of students who don't particularly want me there, or maybe they do want me there, or maybe they just don't mind me, hearing conversations that i don't care to hear, but.. er, it's my job. fortunately i've learned to revel in awkward situations - so i'm perfect for this position i guess) . but park duty is also maybe serious born in part from the racist attitudes of local business owners who require the school to be responsible for our students during their lunch hour. and there i've seen just that , students reacting constantly to the battery of racism in this whiter slice of chelsea . it's not pretty
admittedly i'm very much on the outside looking in .. refining my sensibilities to this stuff . i can't help search out the causes the secrets behind the daily interactions in my school building. there are a few known "trouble-makers" at pca. one is a young woman named asuasha, who strides down the hallway swinging her braided beaded locks with an addictive smile. she likes to talk in class and doesn't often follow directions and that gets her demerits and detentions. this week she told jemiah - the only black member of the staff - that she doesn't listen to our dean of students straight up because he's a white man. and now i want to know how every student understands their relationships w staff there are two other young women who often get sent to the ssc (stands for "student support center") because they disrupt their classes - both black - both connected to the young men who fell into physical confrontations ... and there's no judgment here. just connections. their behavior in school can't be taken in isolation from everything else in their lives... being black at a school run by white people with connections to violence in a city run by white people . do i think that things would be different if the staff was black ? i think that things would be different if the staff wasn't ninety-plus percent white.... (but i think i know why it might be difficult to find highly qualified brown people to work for such meager salaries ? and isn't that what phoenix is trying to address ? ) and at the same time, the more i read into these racialized interactions, color begins to seem both deeply significant and deeply trivial ... because so much that is meaningful and positive happens daily between people with different skin tones at this school .
o there's so much more i could write. i'm making sense of this place, beginning to understand the school as i hoped i would, as an ORGANIZM, a community... beginning to appreciate the solidarity of my position living in their neighborhood, earning pennies, i even read it in my job description, tutor, one on one, each day five students each get a full hour of my teaching energy and knowledge. third period it's just me and junielle a migrant to boston from puerto rico, and she looks me in the eye and pokes and prods me and sucks me in and bends and molds me too. and it's really good
sorry to write your mind off
love rachel
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