For a lot of my childhood, I thought that just being nice to everyone would absolve me of my privileged innocence. I started to understand why this was wrong in college. After two years in an environment where so many around me had been unwillingly born into systems designed to limit their rights, I understood much more clearly that if we want to claim to love and accept all people, we have to make sure that we are working actively toward change in measurable ways.
To those who challenged me (and continue to do so) - thank you. I owe you an immeasurable amount of gratitude for pushing my beliefs and convictions to where they are today.
Spread some love today, and not just to people who look like you and believe what you believe. #strongertogether
I don't normally talk about my birthday being on 9/11. It's a complicated set of emotions - how am I supposed to be happy on a day when our nation remembers tragedy? From the familiar grimace of someone learning my birthday for the first time, to being reminded every third or fourth time I am asked for ID - my identity is, in a strange way, tied to that crisp Tuesday morning 15 years ago.
September 11th is not about me. Well, it is in a very small way, but it isn't. And that's okay.
It was my 12th birthday, and I was in 2nd hour Social Studies when we heard. Our teacher, Ms. Schureman, turned on the TV and we sat glued to it in silence. We didn't understand it in the same way that our teachers did, other than knowing something was very wrong.
It is only with 15 years time that I'm starting to develop a better understanding of these events. A little over a year ago, we studied the collapse of the towers in our Structures course, and I spent 2 hours after class going down a Youtube rabbit hole of 9/11 news coverage. At first I felt almost guilty watching it - what kind of American wants to relive that day? Looking back, 12-year-old me had no idea what was really happening. But as of my past few birthdays, I often find myself trying to comprehend the chaos that would come to change so many things. I read an article today that started to articulate how I feel about the whole situation: "What It Was Like to Be 10 Years Old on 9/11".
My favorite line is the conclusion, because I think it perfectly sums up how much I feel like I have learned about the world and myself in the years since 2001:
"sitting here in this grown-up body in my grown-up apartment a hundred worlds away from the kid I used to be, I feel the exact same way I did then: sitting in front of a computer screen, trying to make sense of the senseless, and knowing that nothing I do or say ever will."
Two weekends ago, I visited the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero for the first time. I ran my fingers over the names engraved into the bronze parapets of the fountains and listened to the water fall down into the void. As a student of the built environment, I often find myself struggling to understand the sheer magnitude and complexity of architecture - how all of these tiny bits and pieces are joined together and somehow order themselves to form the places in which we live. And then I think back to the feelings of that day, and how disordered and confusing it was because all of the pieces of so many things were all of a sudden not working in the way that they were intended, and everything changed as a result. The disorder, the uncertain and the unknown gripped us that morning, and shook deep fear into our lives.
In the weeks right after, I remember riding through my neighborhood and seeing American flags draped over the railings of front porches. I remember understanding in those moments - we live in a special place. Only more recently do I better understand that this special place we inhabit comes with a heavy responsibility - we make sense of disorder, we realign our strategy, and we push ourselves forward the best we know how.
I come from a homogeneously white community. I went to a mostly white high school. My family attended a homogeneously white Southern Baptist church while I was growing up. I went to a predominantly (overwhelmingly) white institution for my undergraduate degree. Up until June of 2012, I hadn't really experienced any environment where I was cognizant of my race - because I hadn't ever really been forced to come to terms with it.
It wasn't until 2012, the summer that I started Teach for America, that I began to understand just what cards I had been dealt, and how these cards gave me an automatic Wild Draw Four in the UNO card game of life. Before that summer, I never saw the pattern - that every time I played that Wild Draw Four, I somehow drew another when it came time to replenish my hand. I could Skip my way through traffic stops, Reverse my way out of wronging someone (intentionally or not), and leave someone else Drawing Two whenever I needed things to swing in my favor.
I still remember sitting in those initial conversations and circumstances, somewhat confused and unsure. Should I feel guilty? How can I get other white people to understand this? What is my responsibility in this situation? What microaggressions have I perpetrated? I didn't know that some of these questions would be still on my mind today - four years later.
First, however, let me say: I am as guilty as any other white person of perpetuating racial inequality.
- I have had moments of incredulity when trying to understand why pants need to be worn sagged.
- I have been in disbelief when my students had a full-blown fistfight over a sheet of notebook paper.
- I have remained silent upon hearing other white people use the n-word with careless abandon.
- I have laughed at names that seem nonsensical or have what I deem to be spelling errors in them.
- I never thought to ask why there were never more than 2 students of color in my advanced and AP high school classes.
- In high school, I wore tan-colored foundation on my face to a Halloween party because I decided to be MC Hammer, and that was the darkest "makeup" I could find at Walmart. I didn't understand why upper-middle-class-Kentucky-Walmart didn't carry darker makeup. (**this one makes me cringe/writhe with embarrassment/shame the most**)
This is not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.
I couldn't see the difference, or what was wrong with the way that I was acting. Needless to say, two years in Chicago as a white teacher in a black school on the south side changed a lot of things about how I saw myself and how I understood the world.
It took me a minute, but I began to understand that school was the only safe space for my students, and that maybe I wouldn't be very concerned with learning geometry either if I were worrying about which blocks to avoid on the way home, if I would get to eat dinner that night, or if I would be able to help my family pay my mom's hospital bills.
It took me a minute, but I began to realize how I possessed an endless my list of family members that could readily assist me in financial hardship, compared to how some of my students will navigate college and beyond as financially independent individuals.
It took me a minute, but I began to understand why my roommate, a person of color, was upset when people called him articulate.
It took me a minute, but I began to understand why I was able to sign a lease for an apartment in Lincoln Park without any prior background check or application... on the same day as the apartment showing, and that it so happened to be the day that I was the only one of my three roommates that could go apartment hunting.
Because none of those things would have even crossed my mind before the year 2012.
As we have seen this past week - we (white people) cannot continue to collectively turn a blind eye to the way things are in America. I cannot keep refusing to argue (because "it's not even worth the fight") when people close to me insist that we should be saying all lives matter. We cannot keep loving black culture while murdering black people. We cannot stay silent.
Speak up, friends. While our generation may not have actively created this mess, we are long overdue to fix it - with actions.
"We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying, that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't." - Clint Smith
how do you handle a friend that has cut ties with you? what is my responsibility to keep up with people? how is it even possible to keep up with people across the country?
today is the birthday of one of my friends that i met while we both were teaching in chicago. this guy had a tendency to take things a step further than i ever would, but he is generally funny and likable. but after TFA i haven't really spoken to him. i'm not sure if that's a me thing or a him thing, or a male thing, or a millenial thing, or all of these things combined. but i also feel like it's not like he has reached out and i have ignored him or anything - we are just not in the same place anymore. our friendship has become less convenient. kind of sad, but true.
i feel this way about a lot of my "friends", usually to a lesser degree that what was previously discussed, but to a degree nonetheless. it's almost like a lot of my friends - from high school, from college, from TFA - have drifted away due to geographic distance, but even when we are close it's not like it used to be. so much of friendship is proximity, and i think the idea that i'm getting to is that because my location has spent so little time being fixed in the last year, I haven't really felt close to much of anyone in a while. i'm still in this transient stage of my career, where i'm just now getting my architecture-legs (think sea legs, but building buildings), and i'm moving around without any real roots - in a state of constant transplant from pot to pot. and it's not that i'm not thriving in a particular pot, but it's like i have to be re-potted every 4 months against my will in order to end up in the pot that i can eventually call home. this evolved into a weird plant metaphor, but i don't hate it.
i got two job interviews for my fall internship semester this week. one is in seattle (!) and one is back in chicago. this period of time inspires a great deal of anxiety for me, which is certainly due to the amount of uncertainty.
where will i work? what city? what firm?
how will i measure up to other people that are applying?
what sets me apart from them?
where will i live when/if i get a job somewhere?
who will take over my lease in cincinnati?
so many variables.
the firm in seattle has a particular emphasis on educational architecture. a friend of mine actually worked there last spring, and encouraged me to apply there. he told me, when i told him that they contacted me about an interview, that i should have a stance on education and leverage my background as a teacher-turned-architect.
this got me thinking. what is my position? what would have made my situation better? it seems like there are so many factors that played into the environment, and that the building itself played a somewhat minor role in my students' lives. but it was their refuge from the city blocks that they had to traverse each day. it was their space, no matter what it was.
firstly, the school i taught in was originally built as an elementary school in the 1960s. it was a simply organized building - each of the three floors was one long hallway running north-south with classrooms on either side - maximum 15' wide, including a row of bright red full height lockers on either side. the gym was about half the size of a normal gym, and the auditorium and cafeteria were tucked away in various corners. during the few months of the year of sweltering urban heat (August, September, and maybe a bit of June at the end of the year), the building was cooled by portable air conditioners (on wheels the first year/in the window the second), but these air conditioners ran so much that you almost couldn't blame them when they stopped blasting arctic air three times a week. stairwells were glazed with glass block windows from the first floor all the way to the third. as the sun moved across the sky, the classrooms on the east side of the building would gradually warm up, though the west side of the building would be pelted with warm rays during the heat of the afternoons. we shared the building with an elementary school, so our students were limited to the first floor entry/administrative offices, about 1/3 of the second floor, and the entire third floor.
-what if the hallways had been appropriately scaled for high school boys?
-what if the light hadn't been beaming through classroom windows, gradually warming students that were wearing blazers, dress shirts, and khakis?
-what if classrooms were big enough to accommodate overcrowding?
-what if there were enough chairs such that students didn't have to sit at my desk, or at the table by the overhead projector?
-what if the school wasn't tucked away on a side street surrounded by abandoned lots and housing projects?
i could probably list about 30 things here. but what if?
i'm not really sure why, but it seems like i am increasingly surrounded by BS.
why is it that people feel the need to state and restate and restate again?
i'm not sure if it's due to our human egos, but that might be a contributing factor. i'm certainly not claiming innocence in this phenomenon.
"Talk less. Smile more. Don't let them know what you're against and what you're for." -
I don't necessarily agree with the last part, but it seems like we are all caught up in this rat race of proving who is the smartest.
Some people say that I'm kind of a quiet person - I've come to the conclusion that if I'm quiet around you, that's not a good sign for our relationship. It means I don't feel comfortable voicing my opinion. People can be exhausting.
