#ThankyouPrinceton

Reblogged from Free Bird

"The problematic terms 'Asian-Pacific American" (APA) and 'Asian-Pacific Islander" (API) not only offer no recognition that Pacific Islanders already constitute a pan-ethnic group that is distinct from Asian-Americans, they also efface Pacific political claims based on indigeneity. For example, indigeneous Pacific Islanders who have ties to islands that were forcibly incorporated into the United States (Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa) have outstanding sovereignty and land claims, based on international principles of self-determination, which get erased by the categorization with Asians. Hence the frameworks for understanding the ills affecting Pacific peoples and their political claims are shaped by imperialism and settler colonialism, not simply civil rights. 

"We need to uncouple 'Asian' and 'Pacific' in order to examine these concerns, especially in higher education, where the socio-economic profiles of native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders are severely distorted due to the continued problematic lumping with Asian-Americans."

--Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui

"Where are Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders in Higher Education?"

(via come correct) 

"Students of color are allowed to enter the classroom but never on an equal footing. When they walk in, they are subject to the same racial stereotypes and expectations that exist in the larger society. Students of color do not have the advantage of walking into a classroom as individuals; they walk in as black, brown, or red persons with all the connotations such racialization raises in the classroom. They do not walk into a classroom where the curriculum embraces their histories. They walk into a classroom where their histories and cultures are distorted, where they feel confused about their own identities, vulnerabilities, and oppressions. There is no level of liberal reforms that can alter these experiences for students of color without directly challenging the larger systems in society."

--Margaret Zamudio, Caskey Russell, Francisco Rios & Jacquelyn Bridgeman,

Critical Race Theory Matters: Education and Ideology

(via Tudo Bom(b)) 

Every time I go to the National Portrait Gallery

I am captivated by this bronze bust of Booker T Washington.

Photo taken by me!

For dramatic effect (at least, dramatic for those of us who get more caught up in drama from a century ago than in today's celebrity gossip), the museum places this bust and a portrait of Frederick Douglass on opposite sides of a small wall, spatially articulating their radically divergent viewpoints and envisioned directions. As much as I prefer Douglass's philosophy (though I've learned to at least see where Washington was coming from), I have to say that his portrait is little match for this bust. Sitting on a pedestal that makes him over 6 feet tall, the bust is as imposing as I imagine the man must have been. His eyes are too high to look back at me, and I can't help but feel slighted. Given the sad state of urban and rural public education these days, I am of the firm belief that you could bring Douglass and Washington into the present day and their arguments would change significantly. Bearing that in mind, I can't help but stand firmly rooted there for a number of minutes, measuring myself up to this man, wondering what he might think of me.  

Challenging a Broken Educational System (in Cartoon!)

Words to live by:

"It’s crucial to take a sense of humility into the world. By the time you make it to a top graduate school, almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and more experienced than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited. Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself—and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too."-- Clayton M. Christensen, liberette Magazine

Another website that makes me smile:

http://thanksforteaching.us/

Although my elementary--high school years were mostly filled with mediocre or even some downright lackluster teachers, the standouts, the ones I'll never forget, deserve commendation. These are the teachers who told me to dream higher, who opened my eyes to a world of possibilities beyond my middle-of-the-road imagination. These teachers said, "Write," or "Try," or "Create," or "Find another way." These teachers said, "You can do it. You can do that and more." These teachers' doors were always open. These teachers made sacrifices for me and my classmates. These teachers fixed previous teachers' mistakes and included their omissions. Frankly, these teachers did it right, and I want to write a note for each and every one of them.

You have teachers that you wouldn't have made it without. I know you do. You should thank them, too.  

2nd 30 Day Letter Challenge: Day 30--Letter to a Place that Feels Like Home

Dear Princeton University,

I suppose the easiest way for me to say this is that nowhere (with the possible exception of P's house the summer after my sophomore year of high school) has ever felt like home to me the way you do. Professor Glaude, who I have never actually had a conversation with but feel close to thanks to AG, stresses the importance of being able to feel ownership over you, and unlike many of my peers, I have never struggled with this. I never mumble that I go to "a small private school in Jersey" when asked what college I attend; I speak your name proudly. Less two brief academic freakouts during Freshman Year, I have never felt like I don't belong with you or like I'm not enough for you. Less one incident involving a bunch of students from other institutions and a bunch of anonymous comments on the Prince's website and one precept full of jocks, I have never felt anything but accepted by you and all your various representatives, even if I'm not what they expect when we first meet. 
I love my friends from my life before/outside of Princeton, and many of them will be integral parts of my person til I am dead and buried, but sometimes I feel like you have given me people who get me in a way no one else ever has. With you, I can get closer to a person in 2 months than I did in 14 years of living in Mays Landing. No matter the season, turning onto Washington Road from Route 1 and driving through the trees that line the road makes me feel like all is right with the world. You are beautiful in both the exquisite, ornate, timeless sense, and the modern state-of-the-art setting-the-pace-for-the-rest-of-the-world sense. You've taught me so much about myself. I've tried being various people here, as I settle into who I actually am, but I rarely if ever feel like I have to try to be anyone but me. I can be unabashedly nerdy. I can also be more ethnic than I had ever been previously, and get in touch with an urban side I'd never had before. I don't feel like a walking contradiction when I'm with you. I don't feel weird.
I've been told that I glow when I'm talking about you. My first words whenever anyone asks are invariably I absolutely love [you], and it is the truest of truths. I'm not going to lie: you are undoubtedly the hardest thing I have ever done, though probably not the hardest thing I will ever do, and you are worth every minute of it, even the bleakest. You are my life. There is no way for me to convey to you how validated you made me feel. There is no way for me to tell you about the panic attacks I had for months during the spring of my Senior year in high school as I felt like an idiot for not having applied to any safety schools that wouldn't have been painful to attend, and no way for me to explain that on that fateful first day of April, 2008, I sobbed with something greater than joy sitting in the computer chair in my mom's office after reading the word Congratulations, feeling as though everything I had endured in my life had combined with a hell of a lot of luck to get me to that exact moment. I don't know how to say thank you in a way that even approaches appropriate, besides the facts that I will a) donate to you in increasingly large amounts [maybe not an incredibly noticeable increase every year, but an increase] every year from 2012 until I am dead and buried, b) be fully decked out in my orange and black at reunions every year from 2012 until I am dead and buried, and c) providing that I don't have any children, you will be the greatest recipient in my will. Any conference, event, anything you might want/need my presence for, I am yours. And even all of that isn't nearly enough, but reciprocity is impossible in this circumstance. You're in the process of giving me an entirely new world, more than anyone in my entire family could ever have dreamed.
I know that when I walk out of the Fitz-Randolph gates on June 5th, I won't be leaving you forever. Like the director of the Honors Program at Columbia told me on my visit, I am a Tiger. Now and tomorrow and for the rest of my life. I still don't know how I'll manage it without breaking down, though. I'll never be without you and your resources, I know, but I still can't imagine life without you surrounding me. With centuries' worth of alumni, though, I guess you'll always be surrounding me...

May the rest of our life together be as glorious as these past three-and-counting years have been,

Maya 

So something y'all might not know about me

is that my Google Reader be POPPIN. I've never been a magazine or newspaper kind of girl, but I subscribe to 81 blogs and counting. Though my little corner of the blogosphere isn't really that big a deal (12 followers, I'm sorry to tell you that I do this more for myself than for any of you. Please don't be offended, I still love you.), I do lots of lurking and some occasional commenting on blogs that are followed by hundreds of people. And one of the blogs I've picked up most recently is The Black Snob. And I love it. And they have these tote bags and I'm very strongly considering buying one, because I think it's just about the best thing ever:

But if I purchase this bag, which given my proclivities towards shopping, is very likely, I will have to come to terms with something I've been trying to deny about myself for the past few years. I...might be a snob. If not an out-and-out snob, definitely a little bougie, a little uppity, maybe even a bit elitist. I don't always play well with others, particularly others who have had less opportunities than me--I want to, I try to, but it can be hard for me to relate. [I broke through to the kids at the school I worked at last summer with the fact that Renegade is my favorite rap song. They grudgingly accepted this as proof of my cultural legitimacy.] It's not that I don't value those who are less fortunate than me--on the contrary, I'm a sociologist--the people who get fucked over by society are my bread and butter, literally. I know that I'm an exception to every single rule in the book and if even the tiniest thing in my past had gone differently I wouldn't be where I am. I am thankful every day for the circumstances of chance and happenstance that got me to where I am. But still...I'm here. And I don't know what it's like to be anywhere else, really. 
I feel pretty similarly to the guy who wrote this article--I can shoot the breeze with professors and high-ups at financial corporations like my mentor last summer in Chicago, but what to talk about with the plumber? I guess what I'm trying to say is that sometimes I feel disconnected from the larger world...all that ivory tower shit and whatnot. It's the same thing that happened at the Black Solidarity Conference when I wanted to come together with this group of people I identified with and feel like a part of something bigger than me (I love that feeling), but I couldn't because I felt so isolated from everything they were pushing for. It's the same thing that happened at the one and only MCIC (Multi-Cultural Interest Club...our closest thing to a minority-focused group) I went to in high school, at the beginning of my sophomore year; the advisors were trying to convince students that the SAT was worth taking and I had already broken 700 in one of my scores. 
I've talked to some friends at Princeton about this and they say their families got them used to interacting with quote-unquote "regular people", statements that just highlight the degree to which I've always felt isolated from my family. The vast majority of the people who are related to me live in the South and are practically strangers; the small bit of family I grew up with always treated me as different, causing me to self-isolate. Part of it was being an awkward age--my mom's oldest, I'm only 11 years younger than her youngest sister, and as she was the first of my grandmother's five children to have children of her own, there's no one my age in my family (besides two step-cousins in Georgia)--but more of it, I think, just stemmed from a sense that no one knew exactly where I had come from. So they gave up on trying to convince me to play basketball and gave up on trying to convince me to run around outside and let me read. No team sports for me. Very little interaction with others as a child outside of school, in general. My imagination was my childhood playmate, which led me to grow into an adult whose greatest activity is mental.
I often wonder who I would have grown up to be if I Ms. Lambkin hadn't realized that I wasn't a troublemaker by nature in kindergarten, I was just bored. If they hadn't bent the rules to let me start SEEK (Special Educational Experiences for Kids, a program my elementary school did) early. If I didn't have the kind of mother who was willing to take the bus to the library with me and help me carry home huge stacks of books. If I had been involved in some activity that wasn't primarily populated by other students who were very similar to me in their academic focus. If my friends hadn't been pre-screened by simple virtue of the fact that we were in all the same classes for 8 years. If my mother was as lax with her expectations of me as she has been for my siblings. Would that alter-Maya be able to relate? Could she shoot the breeze easily with people who don't consider themselves to be intellectuals? Would she have been friends with black people before Princeton? Would she draw fewer distinctions between black people here and black people "out there"? Would she have said less there instead of fewer? Would hip-hop be a choice rather than a crutch? Would books be a chore rather than a joy? Would she still be curious or would she feel like the questions she can't answer aren't worth knowing? 
On my thesis-reading-list right now is Charles Horton Cooley's Human Nature and the Social Order. On page 7, he says,

"We are born with the need to assert ourselves, but whether we do so as hunters, warriors, fishermen, traders, politicians, or scholars, depends upon the opportunities offered us in the social process."

I agree with him 100%. I know that with any of countless slight changes in my history and those of my parents and their parents etc. I could have ended up on the management track at Wawa store 488 as my career as opposed to my job, or I could have ended up a hustler, a dealer, something worse. I could have gotten a two-year degree in something that would turn into a skilled job, and scoffed at the idea of a liberal-arts-college with a degree that doesn't technically mean anything. I don't blame the people that do, but the system that withholds from them the same opportunities it conferred to me, and above that I recognize that even in a world where everyone starts on the same line, not everyone wants or needs a life like the one I lead. I'm okay with that. I'm okay with choice as long as it leads to fulfillment. 
But despite all of that, I still don't know how to interact. One could look at my education life history (they're really one and the same until I finally get that PhD) as a process of gradually weeding out persons whom society would not deem exceptional in any way. A removing of the masses. I want to be able to dance with a guy at a party and not have him instantly know I go to Princeton as opposed to one of the 10 other schools that are represented. Sometimes I wish I had a diction and a set of mannerisms to fall back on that let me blend in in places like the South Side of Chicago. I wish I had ever felt like I truly belonged in any circles other than the ones I currently frequent. I want to find a way to at least visit peacefully without any inner turmoil.
But at the end of the day, I will never want to be anything but "bougie, brilliant, book-reading, Chai Bigelow brand Lemon Lift tea sipping, uppity, degree-earning, ignorance-eviscerating, talented, tasteful, witty, saddity, uncompromising, revolutionary, daring-yet-caring, in-your-face..." Does that inherently make me a snob? If so, am I allowed to embrace it? Does it have to have a bad connotation? Most of those qualities aren't bad! They're things I strive towards! Can I flip the script somehow like people do with nappy and bitch and the other n-word I don't tolerate?
Can I buy the bag?

2nd 30 Day Letter Challenge: Day 17--Letter to a Politician: Freddie D and my thoughts this 4th of July

Dear American Politicians,

This letter contains excerpts from Frederick Douglass's 1852 speech, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" 

1. "This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations."

 So today I ask, is America still young? 235 years is much longer than 76, but cannot hold a candle to thousands, as Freddie D suggests so eloquently. So do we still have time to work things out and became a nation whose values are not, in any way, hypocritical? Do we still have time to develop the backbone to stand for things we believe in rather than fall to popular opinion? Do we still have time for popular opinion to become informed? Do we still have time to care, to see the bigger picture, to remember the meaning of the word democracy? Or has our window for greatness closed? If all the masses do to observe today is barbecue and drink and watch some fireworks, who will remember the gritty history and the gritty details of the present? Sometimes I feel like we as a nation are hungover after having gotten drunk on our own ideals, and now we're too out of it to do anything but lay in bed with a cold compress and watch it all play out. We need to wake the fuck up and do something. That's the meaning of independence. In that vein:

2. "We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence."

 Next I say that having never really experienced any other part of the world, I am patriotic almost to a fault. Though I hope to do some traveling eventually at some point, the US of A is the end-all be-all for me, and I'm okay with that. There's nothing I'd rather be than American. There is nothing I would rather be than a black American, but that means that, like Freddie D all those years ago, I would like to call attention to the things America overlooks as we celebrate ourselves today. He calls attention to the peculiar institution of American slavery:

3. "I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;" I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just. But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light?"

I would like to call attention to its lasting effects, as well as to the lasting effects of the fourth value this country was raised on: 'life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness[, and patriarchy].' I want to ask you, America, whether you are celebrating poverty and the disproportionate percentages of women, children, and people of color [and their women and children most of all] who fall below the poverty line in this country. I want to call attention to the wage gap between men and women. I want to call attention to the fact that, according to multiple very-well run audit studies by one of my professors, Devah Pager, it is easier for a white man with a criminal record than a black man with no criminal background to get a JOB in this country, and that was BEFORE the recession hit. I want you to remember the founders' cries of "No taxation without representation!" and ask yourself who exactly our legislators represent. Is the nation's best interest those of its richest or its poorest? America, are you celebrating our failing public schools? Our inability to truly separate church and state and recognize love in all its forms? The tightening and tightening of border control and anti-immigration sentiment in a land that once proclaimed 

"Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" --Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus", mounted inside the Statue of Liberty

America, have we EVER truly been the land of the free? Certainly not when my man Freddie was talking to you, certainly not now while we have the highest incarceration rates in the entire world. Certainly not now when getting caught with a bag of weed can lose not only your liberty, by sending you to prison, but also silences your voice (as many states ban ex-felons from the ability to vote), and makes it impossible to break the cycle of poverty and self-destruction (as you cannot receive federal financial aid or welfare).

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival."

So I ask you, how much has changed? I don't want to feel like I've abandoned my people--American women, American children, American people of color--by wearing my red, white, and blue today.


Maya