Mentors
Somehow, you
taught several times a week without ever having your own classroom,
not officially. Even without that classroom, you can't get away from
the label “teacher.” Especially when you are the one person
everyone knows who is unafraid of calling people out, of laying
yourself bare, of inviting criticism in the name of truth. Of doing
all the things they wish they could but are too afraid. Walking into
each classroom is like going into battle.
A sociology
teacher cries to you once a week, not sure what to even do with these
conversations she has in her class. When the kyriarchy is established
again and again but she is but a frail woman herself, she begs to
bring in the big guns. Can't you say no? Sure you can. But you don't.
You come to discuss with us – I don't even know anymore. Maybe it
was AIDs, gay rights, feminism – but probably it was race. A white
man who lives in this privilege but holds his grandchildren at night
who do not get to participate in what he has. Who are twelve years
old and get stopped by the police for simply riding their bike in the
evening: “Is that bike yours? Where did you get it?”
You have a unique
position as a white man- two out of three of the Big Oppressors (just
missing heterosexual)- who understands what he gets from this. Who
understands he can speak on topics such as race, class, and gender
without getting attacked the way a black woman might. People respect
you and it makes you angry, because your very life supports the
systems of oppression and domination you rail against. The kyriarchy
hurts everyone, see? But what you do is leagues better than
remaining silent and complicit. It must be tiring, wearing your
privilege like a wet cloak.
But I don't know
that, not really, and I never will. How am I supposed to write a
narrative about you? Your life is so much bigger than that. I guess
I'll write it about me. Can't look outward? Turn inward.
My heart was
pounding from my seat – always by the left wall, but close to the
front. Hidden but still just enough of a teacher's pet. The things he
said, I just couldn't believe them – the facts I believed, but that
he was saying them, demanding we listen, holding the floor with
quiet ease. I was a new women's studies student, a baby feminist.
Every time I went
to this class (twice a week at night that fall) I left angry. Someone
used some essentialist argument about women staying home or men being
stronger and the teacher failed again and again to correct them,
because everyone is entitled to their opinions, right? So I, at 19
years old, would raise my anxious hand and argue that no, it's not
like that, just because the woman who divorced you made you think so
-
It took too long
to finally encounter a teacher who wasn't focused on facts and
statistics but truth. And not the type of truth that says “everyone
has their own,” but the kind that demands we look harder.
After class I
approached him. “How do I do what you do?” I asked breathlessly.
Looking back, that is the moment I became a teacher as well as a
student. Because sure, Michael said “Well, you can intern for me in
the spring,” but what he should have said is “You will be
exhausted, being like me, you'll never stop learning, you'll always
hurt. But you will keep fighting. This internship isn't going to do
much for you in the long run. I am too busy to really
guide you and be the mentor you want, so you will have to be your
own. You will have to read everything you can get your hands on.
McLaren, Freire, hooks, Lorde, read it all, because they will guide
you. No one can hold your hand, we are all too busy dealing with
people who don't care like you do.”
But I interned
for him in the spring. I sat with him in his office with my chin in
my hand, listening as he ate potato chips and tried to explain in
stilted sentences all of the nonsense he dealt with on a daily basis.
How he ran this office that claimed to care about diversity but just
organizing efficiently was a battle and everything was politics. I
still don't understand a lot of it. But the essence of his
participation in university life as a real educator is something I
couldn't get enough of: his constant questions, his questioning of
authority, how he would work 16+ hours a day, and still answer emails
from students heartbroken over their last breakup.
He insisted that
I really did help him. I researched an idea of his: he wanted to know
how to open an institute for restorative justice. The idea that real
justice focused on not just the victims but the perpetrators as well,
both in crime and in daily injustices, and that each individual crime
had so much more tied to it than just time of shooting, height of
criminal. This idea took root in my brain in the form of an abstract
ideal – that many of the systems that are in place to protect us
and work for us do the opposite, and that the status quo is often
upheld violently.
And so I
continued. I graduated after that internship, a bullet on my resume
saying I worked for a university. A recommendation letter saying how
wonderful I am. I busied myself with moving out of this college town
and on to bigger things – I thought. Then I bounced around, poor
again, straddled with loans, planning a wedding anyway. I forgot. I
forgot a lot of things. I let anxiety consume me, bad habits write my
days.
I decided after a
year of this that I had had enough and would go back to school. This
time, I would be a teacher. I didn't realize until now that it was no
whim. This started the day I, as a budding author and feminist,
walked up to Michael and said “How do I do what you do?”
He wasn't ever going to tell me the answer to that, but I found it anyway: I will
never do what he does. Only he can. I'm going to do what I can which
is this: fight, and love, and teach.
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