AESA Symposium Paper

Enclosed within are the reflections/narratives we will share at the annual American Educational Studies Association conference on November 5 regarding our work in the PrESS Network.

Reflections on the new school year

As the new school year gets started, I wanted us to open up an area of the blog (at Bob's urging) for reflections from the classroom. Many of you have just begun your first year in a school--hopefully, we can use this space to support each other as we try to get a handle on our teaching/pedagogy.

History and the Future at a Crossroads: Milton Brown

Like many of you, I have been glued to the television screen witnessing in biblical fashion the moral unraveling of U.S. American cultural mythology. The graphic and telling images of human carnage have forever shredded the socially constructed masks of Christian and Constitutional fealty to a belief in the sanctity of all human beings we have worn since 1776. We stand naked now without the rhetorical makeup of “one nation under God,” “government of the people, by the people and for the people,” and justice for all. We have “flipped the script” on the political illusions of First, Second, and Third World self-serving international rankings. Maybe Tom Friedman is right after all about the world being flat, but for the wrong reason. The fiasco in New Orleans has made it clear to all that there are no more superpowers—real or imagined.

Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath is not a New Orleans and Gulf Coast tragedy alone, it is a uniquely U.S. American one. In fact, Hurricane Katrina is not the real tragedy at all. The lack of what bell hooks calls a “caring community” stewarded by truly compassionate leadership is what defines the source of the real tragedy. That old communist nemesis, Fidel Castro, just a few years ago provided such immediate and effective leadership in the face of a category five hurricane that he evacuated over 1.3 million Cuban citizens without losing a single life. All Cubans were Castro’s people, no matter their color, age, infirmity, or political disposition. In the wealthiest, resource-rich country on the face of the earth we allowed hundreds of thousands of our people to suffer the most egregious human indignities and what may ultimately be thousands to die needlessly. George Bush, a christianist conservative failed to save a single person. Hurricane Katrina victims survived in spite of him and others of both political parties and at all levels of government who failed them and the rest of the U.S. American people. The contrast could not be more telling.

For far too many Americans, only certain human beings stand at the top of the cosmological pyramid, individualized and sustained by God’s grace. That those human beings of power and privilege are more often than not self-identified as having been made in God’s New Testament, Reformational image—white, male, heterosexual, Christian, and of propertied and monetary means—is the asili, or motivating force, for the human denigration and social disgrace that has occurred recently in New Orleans. That those who deem themselves to be superior—and their racial and gendered surrogates—believed their own delusional hype and acted accordingly is the cultural fabric of the real tragedy in all of this.

My truth is that they just didn’t care! They didn’t care about the poor, differently abled, and elderly people of all colors who they knew for decades would be subject to the direst of human circumstances if a hurricane of sufficient force ever crossed their path. I believe they cared even less knowing that most of those who would suffer the brunt of the devastation were not only poor but Black. As Jesse Jackson so profoundly stated in rejoinder to a reporter’s query about the role of race in the unconscionably slow federal rescue and recovery response “Americans have an infinite capacity for Black pain.” Jesse’s comment, while prophetic, was too narrow in scope. The historical and contemporary evidence is clear that those made in God’s New Testament, Reformational image have an infinite capacity for anyone’s pain who is different from them. While they are not alone in their indifference to human and social injustice, they stand alone, at least momentarily, at the pinnacle of universal moral and spiritual shame for all the world to see..

It should be obvious that I do not speak here of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Wolfowitz, et al, alone. To focus on them to the exclusion of the U.S. American social/political ideology of a “will to power,” a Manifest Destiny, if you will, that encompasses us all—republican and democrat, womyn and man, Jew and gentile, Black, white, and all other racial designations—is to skew our perception and focus and to inexorably chain us to the culturally socialized patterns of scapegoating and moral obfuscation. We, the American people, elected Bush and Cheney and with conscious acceptance embraced their henchmen of draconian politics and practices. We, the American people, excused their absurd misdirection of truth that propelled us into accepting their predetermined plan to invade Iraq. We, the American people, swallowed whole their lies about Saddam Hussein’s involvement in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We, the American people, even continue to misguidedly embrace Colin Powell who sold his soul to a corrupt political ideal rather than fulfill his moral duty of allegiance to the U.S. American people. We, the American people, countenanced it all in the name and spirit of the U.S. American way—republicanism as democracy; illusion as reality; racism as history. Where are you, H.L. Mencken, when we need you most?

O.J., Michael Jackson, Minister Louis Farrakhan, young Black men in urban centers, and even liberals—who by definition must be white since Blacks are almost always only Black—are momentarily shelved as the coded images of colorblind racism and other forms of social injustice. The “God’s image boys” have taken their rightful place alongside Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Trent Lott and Bill Frist, whose collectively muted and temporary retreat gives even greater emphasis to the magnitude of their shameful pretense. Robertson’s call to have one of U.S. America’s perceived political enemies assassinated seems to have been answered. In an ironic twist, he and the “God’s Image Boys” became the target when the sinister union of whiteness, maleness, privilege, power, and Christianist fundamentalism, camouflaged in conservative Republican ideology, was exposed to national and international observers. Jesus, my Sephardic Jewish brother of color and poverty, must finally be smiling. After five hundred years, he just might get his religion back.

In light of the U.S. Americaness of the tragedy continuing in New Orleans today, we cannot continue to be above it all at our “old alma mater on the hill.” We cannot merely take in a few discarded souls, feel good about ourselves, and continue to do what we have always done. The social masks of indifference have come off us as well. We, too, stand naked and ultimately accountable to a mission statement of high ideals that require and demand sufficient will and resources to make it real.

The under-reinforced levees of cultural competence and social consciousness at BU are no more sufficient than the physical ones along Lake Ponchartrain to hold back the surging waters of insidious racial ignorance and historical social indifference. Bellarmine, in some striking ways, is like the French Quarter and the Garden District in New Orleans—a cultural respite for far too many educational tourists habitually oblivious to “human suffering in the world” that exists around almost every corner they so arduously choose not to turn. Caps, gowns, and degrees, momentos to be cherished as unfortunate reminders of a time unfettered by a clarion call to consciousness, speak poignantly to a mere symbolism of educational excellence and the inevitable exploitation of race and class privilege. The Princeton Review’s ranking of BU as the eleventh least politically active university in the nation should be less a cause for dismay than a call to reality, conscious reflection, and purposeful action.

Hopefulness lies in the fact that more of my colleagues at BU than I can recall at any other institution where I have been, from the President all the way across the campus, are truly committed to the noble ideal of social justice. Though their voices are most often muted by institutional culture and tradition as well as by the deafening silence of others for whom social difference and social justice may be less compelling ideals, these conscious activists are a testament to the inordinate possibilities of hope and dream. From the most senior member of the Board of Trustees to the youngest freshmyn, we must galvanize our resources in a struggle to transgress the debilitating push of fear of that which we think we know about the unknown (not the unknown itself) and the tranquilizing pull of the socially reproduced status quo. We must resist excessive institutional politics of propriety (e.g., Bellarmine’s traditional image) and boldly sail from our “safe harbors” toward a new reality, toward a new Bellarmine. It is not that the old Bellarmine is not good enough; it is that the old Bellarmine is not nearly enough.

If we are to shore up the cultural levees within Bellarmine as we most certainly must do in more geographical ways around New Orleans, then it must be done with the most critical and comprehensive thought and planning possible. Bellarmine’s Strategic Plan for 2006-2111 cannot be like the myriad studies done for decades before Hurricane Katrina visited the Gulf Coast—a well-crafted document that lacks the will of leadership at all levels to provide the funds and human resources needed to ensure that the life-centering and life-sustaining provisions within the plan be fully implemented. An unfunded and under-resourced mandate is no mandate at all. To do so would be to render those different from the dominant group at BU to an experience of marginalized indifference of Katrina-like proportions. If that happens, it will be on our watch and on our consciences.

It is our duty to bring soul to BU. Not the racially trite notions of soul that limit our spirituality to stylistic rhythmic expression, but the kind of soul that flows from a union of institutional mind, body, and spirit. The kind that inspired that six-year old boy in hurricane-ravaged and government-neglected New Orleans to, with blind faith, lead five other children, all younger than him and some who were even strangers, toward an unknown destiny. His innocent courage speaks eloquently to that which is possible if we seek our own salvational innocence and moral courage by just letting go. The door of hope and possibility has been opened for us. We have no choice but to walk through it with conscious determination and unrepentent resolve. If not, then we have no one to blame but ourselves for what Cornell West warns “awaits us in the 21st Century.”

Milton Brown is an adjunct faculty member of the School of Education at Bellarmine University and Chair of the Multicultural(ism) Task Force

Reflections on Katrina: Adam Renner

I had hoped to be able to include more coherent thoughts by now, but I still haven't reflected all the way through this issue yet. I preface my comments with these thoughts in mind to acknowledge they are evolving and that I am seeking constructive feedback.

It's been awhile since we, as a country, have faced such a natural disaster. From here, it is difficult to really gauge its effect, only able to live it vicariously through the media--a pretty helpless feeling, given that we rarely ever get the whole story through our news outlets.

I want to be critical of the relief efforts; I want to be critical of the evacuation efforts; I want to be critical of the preparation for the hurricane, but I first want to acknowledge that other than sending money (which I will do through collections here at BU), I've not done much, personally. Second, I want to acknowledge the incredible acts of courage and, no doubt, selfless compassion that have (and will continue to) occur throughout these unfolding events.

This second issue, I guess, provides as good a jumping off point as any. Because what it does is highlight is the difference between the structural and the individual. While the individual acts of courage and compassion will comfort many; while the US citizens will rally around each other in the face of a disaster (as we also did on 9/11/01); and while these individual actors will only see people (not color or class or citizenship) in the face of immediate, dire need, much of this could have been prevented had more structural considerations been made ahead of time.

It is becoming pretty evident that no evacuation was possible for the city’s poorest (who also tended to be the city’s people of color). People with cars could get out of town. People with families out of town or credit cards had places to go to safely sit out the storm. In a recent editorial by Michael Parenti, he recounts Cuba’s experience with last year’s hurricane that devastated the island. The Cuban gov’t was able to evacuate 1.3 million people (10 % of the total population) from the wrath of the hurricane before it hit, losing no lives in this natural disaster. Why didn’t we have the same plan in place? Our death toll will probably top 1000.

It also appears the relief efforts have been feeble, ill-planned, and disorganized. Certainly, a plan must have been in place. While getting supplies to some in the matter of a few days, given the circumstances, may seem like good turn-around time, I certainly wouldn’t want to the be the one waiting. Some are still waiting more than a week afterward.

Finally, it is clear that city planners had been worried about this levy situation and had continued to seek more money from the federal government. As Parenti and Maureen Dowd (in today’s CJ) points out, their budget continued to be cut. It was so sad to hear from an engineer in the Netherlands (which has a vast portion of their land below sea level) talk about the kind of money they have spent on their infrastructure, figuring that its better to spend the money now then spend so much later in dollars and lives if the big one hits. But our country falls easier prey to the nature of the market economy, often gambling—and it has often been at the expense of our most vulnerable, those without a voice in the gambling decision. Now, as we watch the poor and black faces on the news, will we be moved to do more structurally (once the news coverage dies down) after we give, individually? I was left with a hope after 9/11/01 that we might all take stock and make some changes. I’d be foolish to say I have seen any kind of substantive change. Am I foolish to think change is possible this time?

Dr. Renner is the Chair of the Graduate Education Program at Bellarmine University

Reflections on Katrina

by Tamara Butler

Last night in Berkeley, at a gathering of poets and attentive listeners, an elder Black man, "one of Berkeley's most beloved Slam Poets", took the stage and with a quivering yet eloquent voice spoke of his family, of his home in New Orleans. Baritone and raspy this voice spoke of his solitary state here in Berkeley while his many children, brothers, and sisters were dealing with the the woeful ramifications of the hurricane. He reckoned himself "a solitary pecan tree" whose branches have "spread far and wide". He said when he first heard of the evacuations he called his sister and asked, "What are you going to do?" She replied, "We're gonna stay. We're gonna ride it out." He told us that she takes care of their elderly and enfeebled step-father, 87 years of age, who insisted, "We've survived hurricanes before. I'm not leavin!" He called one of his sons and asked "What are you going to do?" The son, his youngest, replied "I'm goin g to the airport." He said,"Everybody laughed at my son; said "He crazy!". But that's just what he did. He went to the airport. And you know what? He was the safest out of all of 'em. Let them laugh, I said but he was the safest 'cuz once the storm hit they couldn't throw him out." For three days after that he couldn't get any news of his family because phone lines were down. He was beside himself with worry for three days. Until finally he received a call telling him that his family was alright.
You could feel a collective, "Thank God" rise from the hearts of those listening. As he walked off stage a young Caucasian woman ran up to him and threw her arms around him. He accepted this comfort graciously. As he drew near me, I extended a hand to him. He grasped it with the same urgency that one would a life-saver. I was too overcome with emotion to utter a word. I simply enclosed his hand between both of mine and held and with sympathetic eyes, tried to fill the space between us with as much love as possible.
The ironic thing is that the storm hit the day I had decided that it was time to plan a trip to New Orleans. Now, I fear, it is as Frederick Smock wrote, that the New Orleans of our imaginations is lost to us, forever. I grieve for the city and for the people I will never know.

Best,
Tamara

First Reflections

by Lynn Bynum

New Orleans is my home. It is where I was born, where my sister was born, where my parents were born, where my grandparents lived most of their lives. It is where much of my family still lives – or did until a few days ago. It’s where I visit at least once a year – where my son, husband and I spent the 4th of July weekend so we could visit family, especially elderly aunts and uncles.

The New Orleans I know is different than that of a tourist. Certainly, we enjoy the pleasures of the French Quarter and the Garden District, of the restaurants and the shops. But it’s a schizophrenic city, too, for it is truly a city of “haves” and “have-nots.” The vast majority of the have-nots are the African Americans who have been displayed on television in such stark circumstances, the “forgotten” people who are still just a heartbeat away from the centuries of slavery followed by segregation that I so vividly remember as a child and my parents fled so that we would have greater opportunities to achieve. So many of these folks you’ve seen on television are just simple people who lived in abject poverty that makes the eastern hollers of Kentucky and West Virginia look like the suburbs.

My family is safe, thank God, but they have lost their homes and businesses for the foreseeable future. They have the resources to rebuild. Most people will not. Imagine people who have lost what little they had managed to accumulate and who do not have the resources to re-build. Think about the fact that the city and state issued “voluntary” evacuation orders days in advance so that the “haves” could leave town. Not until Sunday were the “have-nots” told to evacuate – and the city/state knew all along that 100,000 did not have the means to evacuate. And where were FEMA and Homeland Security? Did they stock the Superdome, the site of last resort, with necessities like water, food and toiletries? No, after all, this was for the “have-nots.” Where is the justice and righteousness in that?

The city I know and long for has nothing to do with buildings and ambience. It’s the people – American refugees – that I think of and pray for. They have lost so much.

Lynn Bynum is the Chief Human Resources Officer at Bellarmine University

Hurricane Katrina - First Reflections

Friends:

As I feared the first day the levees broke, Hurricane Katrina will turn out to be the worst environmental catastrophe in modern American history, far dwarfing Hurricane's Andrew and Camilla and equaling, if not surpassing, the San Francisco earthquake of
1906 in its destructive impact. The flooding, and physical destruction of a historic American city, coupled with the complete destruction of homes, stores, businesses, roads and bridges along 80 miles of Mississippi coastline presents a humanitarian challenge of unprecedented proportions, with consequences that will be felt for years by those who lost loved ones, homes, businesses, jobs, and any sense of comfort or security.

But this catastrophe also reveals, far more than September 11, how deeply divided our nation is and how far our social fabric has been strained, not only by the war in Iraq, but by
policies which have widened the gap between rich and poor and left many poor people in
American feeling marginalized and alienated

When the fully tally of the dead from this storm and its aftermath, which includes those who will die from diseases contracted due to heat, starvation and contaminated water as well as the storm itself, we will see what TV photos of rescue operations are revealing-that the greatest loss of life, and the greatest suffering, was occurring among Louisiana and Mississippi's black poor. Look who we see wading through the floodwaters in New Orleans streets, look who we see lining up to get into the Superdome, look who we see being taken off roofs. And look who we see being arrested for "looting" Unlike September 11, which revealed a city united in pain, and grief, and determination to rebuild; this crisis reveals communities which are profoundly divided by race and class, and in which the black poor in particular, bear levels of hardship which far exceed those of any other group.

Not since the great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 have the economic and racial isolation of the black poor been revealed in such stark relief by an environmental catastrophe. What the images Americans on the evening news reveal about who is dying, who is trapped, who is without food, who is drinking contaminated water and yes, who is looting, should give all of us pause. Is this what the pioneers of the Civil Rights Movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were
by segregation laws

One other thought comes to mind. If the American armed forces, including the National Guard and army corps of engineers, were not bogged down in a needless, unprovoked war
in Iraq, would the response to this catastrophe have been quicker?. Would the levee repair have taken place more quickly and effectively, more food and medicine delivered, more troops sent to preserve order?. When all is said and done, many Americans will question whether the response to this catastrophe was hampered by the strain the Iraq war has exerted on our military's rapid response ability in the United States.

I make these observations not in any way to detract by the heroism of tens of thousands of rescue personnel and ordinary people who have saved, and continue to save lives through their actions. Every one of us needs to give them, and the people of the affected states, or complete support, economically, politically, spiritually, and by any act of personal generosity that can ease someone's suffering.

But we also cannot shrink from what this tragedy reveals about us as a nation at this stage in history. If September 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to
a devastating attack; Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region, and a nation, rent by profound social divisions

Dr Mark Naison
August 31, 2005

New Orleans: A Requiem

by Frederick Smock

The other day, I saw storm-clouds brightened by the evening sun, their bruise-purple and -gray formations briefly illuminated, on the underside, just before the sun set and rain settled in for the night. This was a luxury of weather, in a season of hurricanes, of unearthly winds and supernatural tides – for Hurricane Katrina has just laid waste to the once-lovely city of New Orleans.
I remember visiting a college friend New Orleans years ago. Becky worked as a barmaid in the French Quarter – the only European district of America – and she had somehow acquired the sobriquet “Bubbles.” In a few short years she had become a true denizen of the city. We spent a long night drinking, in bars where comic Dick Van Dyke got his start, where legendary blues guitarists still played, and where jazz history was still being made. Come morning, Becky and I grabbed some strong chickory coffee at the Café du Monde, in Jackson Square. It was a supremely cosmopolitan event, unlike anything else the country has to offer.
New Orleans has been a city of the sacred and the profane. The county itself is organized Catholically, into parishes, even for political purposes. And yet a licentiousness rules – a tolerance for alternative lifestyles, sexualities and philosophies. Such an openness often characterizes port cities, but New Orleans has been supreme among them. One evening during my visit, a young woman in a nun’s habit approached, on Canal Street – she suddenly lifted the black skirts over her head, flashed us her naked body, then walked on. Only in New Orleans!
I worry that moralists might weigh in on this disaster – as some of them did in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, and during the tsunami disaster in Asia – saying that it is a punishment from heaven for sinful ways. Such a judgment would be wrong-headed, of course, if for no other reason than that New Orleans is much too various to be characterized by any venal sin alone.
New Orleans is a storied city. Truman Capote, Lafcadio Hearn, Shirley Ann Grau, Walker Percy, Kate Chopin and many others have written about the city’s unique Southern charms. The Big Easy has figured into many a detective novel. John Kennedy Toole’s comic masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces, was set in New Orleans, and could have been set nowhere else.
It grieves me to contemplate New Orleans in the past tense. But, in the wake of Katrina, I am afraid the past tense is the only responsible one. Witness the sobering facts: At least a million homeless. The city underwater, a toxic swamp. Coffins exploding out of their crypts. Thousands newly dead. Looters rioting. Officials are saying it will take years to rebuild, and who knows what the rebuilt city will be? Very possibly it will not be the New Orleans we have known. A little bit of us would die with the death of this great city, for New Orleans occupies a significant place in our collective imagination.
The warnings for Hurrican Katrina were dire, but not dire enough, evidently. Even President Bush ignored it. On the second day of the disaster, he was in California talking about Afghanistan. On the third day, he did a fly-over of New Orleans on his way back to Washington D.C. We are entering the fourth day of the disaster, and federal aid is only now beginning to move into the area.
Many private citizens did not heed the warnings seriously, either. Perhaps they did not have the resources to flee. We have watched their dramatic rescues, from rooftops, and from highway overpasses, on the news over the past couple of days.
This disaster is so much larger than September 11. New York still exists, after all. And the New York of our imagination still exists. I worry that the New Orleans of our imagination does not exist anymore. And, as much as I grieve for the people of New Orleans, I also grieve for the lost idea of New Orleans.
Let us hope that the city can rebuild, and that it can rebuild to its original design – an uproarious city, multicultural and multilingual, a mardi gras of the mind.

Frederick Smock is poet-in-residence at Bellarmine University.