Race

Back to camp for two weeks of a break. Only four kids showed up. I worked the Bad Work Ethic and walked around talking to people and chillang. It is at an amazing brand new community center, they have a dance room, gym, pool tables, classroom, recording studio, computer center, rooftop garden, classes, camps, kitchens, etc. in a poor, black part of town. I rode my bike up some side streets on the way home and rode by some funky spots. It makes me realize how goddamned big this city is and how you can live here for a long time and not know the half of it.

I feel like I do know a good portion of the city from the days when I was a roving science teacher. I went to a lot of schools on the south and west sides (traditionally black and some neighborhoods really poor and struggling) and I wonder would I have had reason to go there otherwise? Race is always so much on my mind these days. It was pretty drastic today. Riding through all black streets on the southside, then meeting my friend for mexican food on the all white northside... sometime it's too much.

We had our first meeting of the capoeira group. It depressed me. Same people didn't show up. One guy basically said he didn't give a fuck about making the group more unified ("y'all are gonna do what you want to do anyway...") and another schmo made a lot of remarks that seemed racist and really representative of a huge chunk of mainstream thinking to me. "Black people don't pay [for class] and white people do" "It doesn't matter if a white person teaches capoeira. If someone doesn't want me to teach them they can leave." "Black people will drive all over the city to see a Ludicris concert but they won't drive to the north side to go to an arts event." "If people really want to come they will make effort."

It's soooo important to me that those teaching and leading capoeira know the
history and have some sense of their place in it as whatever groups they identify as, especially white non-brasilians.

And there's all of this "pull yourself up from the bootstraps" thinking in his comments. Privilege talk in a straightforward way. It bothered me. It bothers me that the white people in the group are attuned and accustomed to leadership roles and it bothers me that the black men in the group aren't. It's a total reflection of the white supremacist societywe live in, I think.

I'm constantly trying to deconstruct my own thinking and see it from a racial perspective. I don't know if I'm getting it right. In fact I know I'm wrong so much of the time. And if someone doesn't feel oppressed does that mean they aren't? And how do you work that one?

I don't know if this link will show up, but it's some random powerpoint I found on line of Jackson and Hardiman's Social Identity Develoment model. I wish I could credit it to the right person... its a little sum-up. Thank you stranger who made it...

My brain is tired. I'm stressed and depressed. I had a minibreakdown this weekend when I went to a club for someone's birthday and it was good reggae (my favorite) and all I wanted to do was go home and crawl under the bed. I was thinking about Atenco and the desk job and racism and how if I can't work to change this little capoeira group I'm in, how can I possibly change any big things? and how hateful people can be and what am I doing not being a teacher when I'm not realy doing anything good in the world and there are so many Mean Motherfuckers (it didn't help that I also saw a man chasing a car with a baseball bat after talking to the Palestinian grocer who was watching the Lebanese president make a speech)- it just all seems too much sometimes. I'm desperate for inspiration these days.

PMSing anyone?

There is inspiration on my classmate nina's site www.kunimoto.org
She has pretty pictures (I can't seem to download anything on this blog tonight) and smart things to say.

I'm going to go to sleep and hope I wake up motivated. I did buy my favorite yogurt. Am I a capitalist pig if I love this brand? They are supposed to be all 'sponsible and shit. And taste so good. And it's my mom's name. That has to make it legit, right? GOODNIGHT!