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| Baltimore, Maryland. April 28th, 2015. Mourning Freddie Gray. Photo by Yunhgi Kim. |
When I first spoke with my students about the most recent school shooting, they were mostly silent. Many of them kept their gaze trained on the floor of my classroom. They had that look on their face: of resignation, a slow tumult brought on by the closeness of loss. Some laughed. I don't blame them.
Others, a small but adamant group of students, raged in public about Nickolas Cruz's violence. They have followed the story closely. They read about the shooter's violent past, his obsession with guns, his racism and xenophobia, and his identification with white supremacist beliefs. Their general consensus: he's a no-good fucked-up murderer.
Interestingly enough, my students also don't buy into the "mental illness" claims made by - you guessed it - white men, gun advocates, and bought-and-sold politicians. "They're just saying that to distract from the real problem," Lucy, one of my students, said. Yes, I replied. Women struggle with mental illness, too - why is it that nearly all of mass shooters are men, and nine out of ten are white? Why automatic weapons, racist hatred, and misogynist violence? I got the general sense that many of my students had some answers to these questions, but weren't sure how to articulate them. I find it similarly impossible to explain away the actions of yet another white male mass shooter. Fourteen students and three educators dead. Knowing the facts provides no comfort. How are we to honor the dead, to act in the wake of their killing?
A thought crossed my mind as I look at my students: it could be you, it could be you, it could be you. My own students as murder victims. Tears welled; I nearly retched at the idea of their deaths, perhaps even more so when thinking of the ones who would survive, having to reenter spaces where their friends and mentors were killed, each room an open grave.
Spurred on by this thought, and also in response to my students' unrest, I reached out to my school's Associated Student Body to collaborate on a site-wide action to honor the National School Walkouts that took place on Wednesday, March 14th. The students were meticulous in their consideration of the dead: when the school walked out to the football field at 10:00 AM, the students had arranged empty desks into the shape of the number seventeen: one seat for each victim, with white balloons hovering uneasily above. For seventeen minutes one student after another stepped up to share their reflections upon the necessity for public mourning, especially as an act of defiance toward the racist, sexist, white (male) supremacist status quo. They spoke with humility and authority. Everyone on that field was respectful of the memorial service taking place; many teachers, myself included, swallowed our voices and simply watched, so deeply affected were we by the students' power.
Emma Gonzalez and the other survivors of the Parkland shooting are teaching us, in real time, the power of mourning publicly. Mourning, remember, is shot through with rage. My students understand this - their lives have also been defined by gun violence, although in ways that the national conversation usually ignores. Young people of color in this country, as they are statistically the most likely to be impacted by gun violence, must be allowed the chance to take up space. Adults must support them as they themselves advocate for the reallocation of much-needed resources to their schools and communities, and as they expose those oppressive structures that directly contribute to "gun culture" in the United States (systemic racism, the militarization of the police, ongoing segregation, and the school-to-prison pipeline, to name a few).
There is a long history of youth movements for social justice (1, 2, 3); our students calling for an end to gun violence deserves inclusion in this history.
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I usually hide my vulnerability from my students. They are shown empathy, patience, and understanding, but when it comes to my own emotions, especially in relation to external events, I rarely - if ever - put my sorrow on display. This is mostly because students need teachers to be strong for them. We women educators also have to work twice as hard to earn respect - not to mention the difficulties we face as women in the public sector, which reflects the societal devaluing of "feminine" traits like kindness and emotional openness. Plus, I am only human. I tend to guard my heart fiercely.
But in that moment, as I imagined the deaths of my own students, I remembered something bell hooks wrote in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom: an open and just classroom must become "a context where we can engage in open critical dialogue with one another, where we can debate and discuss without fear of emotional collapse, where we can hear and know one another in the difference and complexities of our experience." This is the power of mourning in public. To show vulnerability, as an educator - to lift the veil of professionalism or political correctness to illuminate struggle, to give credence to difficult emotions - is to dissent. It is a refusal of the conservative ideals of stoicism, individualism, hardness, and indifference. As hooks explains, to dissent in this way is to restore authenticity and power to oppressed or disenfranchised peoples.
Accepting this, I became fully myself in front of them: I cried, butchered my words, stuck my hands hard in my empty pockets, and confessed my heartbreak. Today, nationwide, hundreds of thousands of students and teachers will air their heartbreak in public, channeling their turmoil into productive rage. They will command the attention of government officials, politicians, school board members, NRA lobbyists, pundits, white supremacists, gun manufacturers - all those who most require exposure to the trauma of gun violence from perspectives that they themselves have worked so diligently to marginalize.
#enough #marchforourlives
