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Right now I’m thinking about a few questions so many white people ask around race and racial justice, the one which is burning me now, and always, but especially now is the ever popular “how do we discuss race without shaming or guilting white people”. This question seemed nonstop this year at HGSE from so many white peers, and every time it was shot down or reframed or challenged it grew back. White folks who are even remotely interested in anti-racism, Shame is when the nature of our (in)actions are revealed to us, guilt is when the nature of our (in)actions are revealed to those around us. The question isn't how do we make whites not feel these things, but how do whites act upon these feelings as they are a reflection of the beginnings of some kind of awakening process? To create a dialogue which seeks to shield whites from shame or guilt is to never call into question unequal systems of power which allows whites to exist in a state of constant dominance, one wherein our freedom and comfort are predicated upon the oppression and discomfort experienced by folks of color. Furthermore, to ask this question is to both center the dialogue once again on whites and whiteness insinuating that the goal of social movements is to create comfort for whites at the expense of POC (which is exactly the goal of white supremacy) as opposed to reaching equity for historically aggrieved communities. To ask this question is to position whites as primary visionaries and knowledge producers, it is to position white morality as the most human, and therefore trusted moral compass (asking that all progress adhere to this morality), though it is this morality which murders unarmed folks of color with impunity every day. It is this moral compass which kills and kills and kills and with which grand jury after grand jury finds no guilt. White supremacy isn’t just as simple as a public lynching, it is the instinctual place from which white people experience, imagine, and question (or don’t) the world. To ask this question is to ask to that we are not made to leave the imaginary. The white world is an imaginary one with real consequences. As Claudia Rankine says, “because white men can't police their imaginations, Black men are dying”. The distance between one’s internalized sense of superiority which asks a conversation on race to be centered around white comfort, and the execution of Philando Castile is the length of a barrel. The distance is so fucking short, y’all. Who has the right to exist? Whose humanity is most valued? Philando Castile's execution allows for one’s priority in conversations on racial justice to be figuring out how not to feel guilty. That is what comfort allows, this comfort is built on the dead. Our sleep is built on the sleeplessness of folks of color. This single question was asked so much this year at Harvard it was baffling and sickening, especially coming from a host of some hundred future or current educators. Whiteness cannot imagine a world in which it is not the apex, the center, the objective-this question which seeks to redirect and immobilize progress only proves that. If you feel guilt or shame that is the feeling of seeing yourself honestly, if even just a glimpse, for perhaps the first time. This feeling is the feeling of the white moral compass beginning to bend. This is the feeling of realizing you are being seen, that POC are not in fact objects and are indeed agents and subjects and * holy shit * humans and knew what you were about long before you did. This feeling is the feeling of being discovered. And if we cannot bear to be discovered, if we cannot bear to discover ourselves, then justice will also remain shrouded and unrealized. If you feel guilt or shame in a conversation about race ask yourself why-do not ask a person of color-ask yourself how dare you believe the conversation’s purpose was to guilt or shame you, that somehow even on the topic of black and brown liberation the conversation is still about us. If you feel guilt or shame then realize your real self is facing your imagined self. What does a socially constructed lie do when it sees itself? Do not turn away. Take a good hard look and don’t look away. Step into those feelings and use them as fuel. Destroy the White Imagination. Destroy White Instinct. Destroy White Comfort. This comfort, this instinct, this imagination kills, and kills every day. Remember Philando Castile and Alton Sterling next time you think about asking how the conversation could be different to avoid your feelings of shame and guilt. Think of Rekia Boyd and Renisha McBride and Tamir and Trayvon and Eric and and and. Think. Think long and hard. We gotta reveal our real and imaginary selves, we need to close that gap. We are 600 years late in facing ourselves. The time is always right now. Rest in power and peace #PhilandoCastile #AltonSterling  Michael Lee is a Norwegian-American writer, performer and educator. He has received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, & the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. He as worked as a dish washer, a farm hand, a traveling performer, and a youth counselor for teens experiencing homelessness. He recently graduated with his Ed.M from Harvard University. He lives in Minneapolis. You can help support his writing HERE.
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One of the things my grandmother, a working class German-American woman from Jordan Minnesota (and one of the most progressive elderly white women you’ll ever meet), has always complained about is the ways in which working class white folks have, for as long as she can remember, voted against their best interests in staggering numbers. We do, it’s true, yet it is only half of the truth. A vote for Trump, like a vote for Bush before him, Clinton before him,and Bush before him, and Reagan and Nixon, and any other number of Republicans or conservative Democrats are of course votes against the economical security of the working class. Yet poor, working class white folks have ensured these victories time and time again. What I have come to realize, is that isn’t so much that these voters are voting against their economic interests so much as they are voting for their racial interests; they are forsaking class solidarity for a racial one. Let’s trace this back a little ways-Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 nearly 1,000 indentured white servants and African indentured servants and slaves rose up against the planter elites. The rebellion was violently put down but raised enough fear in the elites for them to see a racial caste system needed to supersede the class hierarchy. The class differential at the time was so great that not only did poor whites hate elite whites enough to try and kill them, they found it to be more plausible for them to align with free or enslaved black folks and attempt to violently overthrow the elites than they did to attempt to work their way out of economic exploitation. After Bacon’s Rebellion, between the Virginia Slave Codes-which stated that slaves could be whipped, branded or maimed for simply associating with whites-and new alluring benefits provided to white working poor and indentured servants, the poor whites began to distance themselves from African slaves and gravitate towards the elite with whom they still had nothing in common save skin tone. In cementing the racial caste system, the slave trade exploded and the construction of whiteness became more defined by ownership, both of stolen land and the stolen bodies forced to work this land; the domination to acquire such ownership and the subsequent fear of losing it also became inherent to white people, and the evolving white imagination and pathology. Derrick Bell, founder of Critical Race Theory, writes that “slave masters then appealed to working class whites by urging that their shared whiteness compelled the two groups to unite against the threat of slave revolts or escapes. The strategy worked. In their poverty, whites vented their frustrations by hating the slaves rather than their masters, who held both black slave and free white in economic bondage . . .in a nation where property is viewed as a measure of worth, many whites, possessing relatively little property of the traditional kind - money, securities, and land - view their whiteness as a property right” (Bell, U.C. Davis Law Review, Wanted: A White Leader Able to Free Whites of Racism, Spring 2000. Pg 536). The white elites continue to exploit working class whites while convincing them that the reason their lives are not the lives they want, or have imagined for themselves, are because of people of color. As the US grew, and more people from around the globe immigrated to its shores, the list of scapegoats grew larger-and once on that list one never seems to get off-black folks,indigenous folks, the Chinese, then the Japanese, Mexicans, Southeast Asians, Muslims, particularly, as of late, Iranians, Iraqis, Afghans, and Syrians-the list is by no means comprehensive, it grows and grows and evolves as whiteness requires. Additionally, whiteness absorbs who it must in order to maintain its majority and dominance (i.e. Irish, Italians). The task of European immigrants wasn’t simply to distance themselves from their own cultures, but to enter the roles of dominators over people of color so that that could prove their whiteness, now solidly defined in opposition to and dominance over people of color, and yet it remained that poor, working class whites seldom made it much further above the bottom of the societal barrel than working class folks of color. Nearing the 21st century, Derrick Bell bell writes too of North Carolina’s Jesse Helms’ 1996 re-election bid for Senate in that “Fear and resentment of blacks led many whites in North Carolina to vote to reelect Jesse Helms . . . his support for economic measures advantage the rich while burdening the lives of poorer whites - the very constituents that provide Helms with his electoral victories . . . The leadership of both the House of Representatives and the Senate hold their powerful positions in substantial part because, like Helms, they convinced whites that if elected, they would preserve the racial status quo. Having done so, congressional leaders can ignore the nation’s need for health care, environmental reform, effective schools, and a decent minimum wage. They need not acknowledge the tremendous, and growing, gap in wealth and income” (Bell, U.C. Davis Law Review, Wanted: A White Leader Able to Free Whites of Racism, Spring 2000, pg. 534). Now, again and always, we are watching one of the most quintessential American dynamics play out during these primary elections. Working class whites are choosing between class solidarity and whiteness. While some are undecided between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders (both candidates offering polar opposite economic change), the vast majority have been simply duped into believing the economy is being destroyed by "illegals" and "terrorists". Trump's rhetoric is vague enough he doesn't have to provide any details and consequently the lack of detail acts as rallying cry and anthem. His rhetoric feeds off the fears that conservatives have been supplying to white working class people since after Bacon's Rebellion. Recently, just before the Minnesota Primary, a white nationalist group made robocalls to Minnesota’s Iron Range on behalf of Donald Trump. The Iron Range, which has fallen on intensely tough economic times with mines shutting down and unemployment skyrocketing, particularly among working class whites. Now, regardless of how the range will or has voted, the fact that white nationalist groups are making calls to this area ahead of Super Tuesday, and not to-lets say, the Twin Cities-is very telling and shows just what game they are playing, one which has been in elite’s deck of cards since America’s inception. The message, called in by The American Nationalist Super PAC, reportedly said, "I am William Johnson, a farmer and white nationalist. The white race is dying out in America and Europe . . . our government destroys our children's future, but don't call me racist. I'm afraid to be called racist. It's OK to give away our country for immigration, but don't call me racist. It's OK that few schools anymore have beautiful white children in the majority, but don't call me racist. Gradual genocide against the white race is OK, but don't call me racist. I'm afraid to be called racist. Donald Trump is not a racist, but Donald Trump is not afraid. Don't vote for a Cuban; vote for Donald Trump. This call is not authorized by Donald Trump." Yes, this was literally something that rang out into people’s phones across the Iron Range. And still, Trump refuses to speak out against the KKK or other white supremacist organizations who support him. Trump, who has promised a wall to keep out Mexicans, Trump who has promised to ban all Muslims from the country, Trump who has promised he will bring back jobs and make America great has struck the chord of fear of the economically exploited working class. Whites who, often, own little but their whiteness are now having to decide, once again, which is worth more? Working class whites know deep down that Donald Trump and those like him throughout history are the ones which have kept us down. Despite what we were told and what we came to believe it wasn’t Chinese factory or rail workers, it wasn’t Japanese miners, it’s never been Mexican ranchers or apple pickers, it certainly was never slaves or the indigenous peoples we displaced as we terrorized the plains and burned the fields down to ash as we pushed further West. However, oppressed communities of color have always been more within reach of the economically exploited white working class than the white elites have been, easier to blame, easier to stop, to steal from, to kill. Despite a deep seeded hatred and fear of the bourgeoisie, a deep love of and admiration for the capitalist also exists, and as we yank our bootstraps harder and harder, though we do not move, we dream of him and his table. While many working class whites have chosen and are firmly invested in either their whiteness or class solidarity, there is, at this very moment, a working class white family sitting around their table trying to decide who to vote for. They are struggling to decide what to invest in, whiteness or class solidarity. And in Trump's promise of white supremacy there is a belief, rooted only in the white imagination and in hope-the poison that is the American Dream-that, despite his capitalist, dominator rhetoric that perhaps he will pull the working class whites up, reaching down like some filthy hand of god and bring us from the bottom of the well. It is this dream which has prevented significant racial solidarity among working class communities. This idea of true class solidarity course not as simple as a Sanders/Trump binary (Sanders' Marxist understanding of race is problematic in its own right, and reifies whiteness in a different way, one which is vaguely reminiscent of the New Deal which offered widespread economic reform, but failed to address racial inequities and thus left people of color largely out of the following economic boom), but it is this moment in American Politics-in which there is significant unrest among working class people,particularly whites-that there is opportunity for true class solidarity and a workers rebellion. The modern American worker's rebellion does not come as the result of a presidential candidate, it comes as a result of a collective orientation towards the rejection of capitalism and racism, and in this presidential election the lens is widening showing us the unrest of the working class, the power of that unrest. The topography of power is always visible if you know which dynamics to look for, but during this moment it is staring us back in the face and, again, a significant portion of the white working class does not see it. Or refuses to look. There is a belief, it seems, if we choose Trump, he will choose us and the tables and the ballrooms we have been promised for four hundred years, and have come to believe we deserve because of our race, will finally be ours that, finally, this time, we need but work a little longer, and give one more good yank of our bootstraps and we will be rich too. We have largely always sided with the rich elites before siding with working class communities of color from whom we attempt to distance ourselves as a means of more sharply defining our whiteness. We swear, we are all the next Trump, the next Rockefeller, and none of us are poor or have been. We are White, after all, we are only briefly stunted millionaires.  Michael Lee is a Norwegian-American writer, performer and educator. He has received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, & the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. He as worked as a dish washer, a farm hand, a traveling performer, and a youth counselor for teens experiencing homelessness. Currently, he is an Ed.M candidate at Harvard University. You can help support his writing HERE. When I saw that Macklemore had released White Privilege 2, I was skeptical to say the least. I mostly listened to it, because I saw the absolutely incomparable Jamila Woods was singing on it. Given the amount to which Macklemore has spoken out against white privilege while not actually actively challenging his own white privilege, and the system of racial dominance which constructs that privilege, I didn’t know what to expect when I listened to the song. This piece was inspired by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib and his piece in Fader, you can find more of his essays and poems here Shout out to Jamila Woods for her vocals in White Privilege 2, you can learn more about her and her work here, and check out her newest song “blk girl soldier”  Michael Lee is a Norwegian-American writer, performer and educator. He has received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, & the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council.He is an Ed.M candidate at Harvard University. You can help support his writing HERE.According to Michel Foucault, “racism is the social distribution of death”. Within an economy of pain such as ours, one built upon bodies and the destruction of those bodies, we have to acknowledge a social distribution of death is predicated upon the devaluing of one or multiple groups of people while simultaneously placing not only greater value upon the distributors of death, but also bestowing unto them the power to take life and the seemingly unquestionable moral authority to judge unto whom death should be distributed. While the devaluing of folks of color cannot be ignored in any conversation regarding justice, there is the necessary second half of the discussion which is not as often focused upon: the idea of dominance over and ownership of black and brown bodies is as inherent to whiteness and white supremacy as is a value system constructed by race (or more accurately, a value system which constructed race). In thinking about Black Lives Matter and police violence, it is necessary for us to explore the violence and ownership inherent to whiteness, and the ways in which white supremacy bifurcates our world. As Frantz Fanon writes in The Wretched of the Earth, “The colonized world is a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations . . .the official, legitimate agent, the spokesperson for the colonizer and the regime of oppression, is the police officer or the soldier” (3). The devaluing of black and brown bodies cannot be separated from American history. And the present cannot be separated from the past. The violent, oppressive, colonialist interests upon which the United States was founded are the interests by which we find ourselves now being propelled into a future grimly reminiscent of the past. This devaluing of black and brown life is as prevalent now as ever, indeed it is what has given rise to the recent Black Lives Matter movement, which (and I hate I have to still apparently clarify this) does not mean other lives do not matter, but that black lives ALSO matter and as much as all other lives-a fact which has been debated in blood and in law by the State since its inception. Whether this devaluing of life has come in the form of slavery, sharecropping (slavery), Jim Crow, the prison industrial complex (slavery), educational inequities or environmental racism (most current example: Flint Michigan), or simply day to day micro aggression and interpersonal interactions (to name a few) the relationship between the dominator and the oppressed within a colonialist society has been endlessly reified, reformatted, and repackaged to fit the times. As Aime Cesaire says in his work Discourse on Colonialism, “between the colonizer and the colonized there is room only for forced labor . . . relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production”(42). America shows again and again that black and brown lives are protected in accordance with their ability to be or produce capital and entertainment. Beyond that they are expendable. In thinking the value of lives and the State sponsored ownership over bodies, I want to look at two stories of police killings that are nearly identical in nature save the race of the police officers, the race of the victims/suspects, and the legal and public response to the deaths. In 2012 an unarmed black couple fled police in Cleveland. Despite a senior officer ordering officers in pursuit to stand down, they continued following the couple down a dead end. The couple reversed the car, police claimed they were attempting run them over and 13 officers (all but one of whom were white) fired a total of 137 bullets into the car killing Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams. I want to repeat that. 137 bullets were fired by white officers into a car killing two unarmed black people. Michael Brelo (white) was the only officer charged, in what would be a 3 year case (though he was eventually acquitted), climbed onto the hood of the car and fired 15 final bullets through the windshield after all other officers had ceased firing and the car had long been still. Think about all of that for a moment. Last November In Marksville Louisiana four officers are led on a high speed chase in pursuit of a white man, who was wanted for domestic violence, and his 6 year old white son. The car enters a dead end and reverses, just like in Cleveland in 2012, two police officers, Norris Greenhouse Jr. and Derrick Stafford, fire into the car killing the child, six year old Jeremy Mardis, placing his father in critical condition. The firing officers were both black, the suspect and his son were, as I said, both white. The officers were charged three days after the child's death with 2nd degree murder and attempted 2nd degree murder and could face life in prison. Michael Brelo was not charged until May of 2014, almost two years after the slaying, and was only charged with voluntary manslaughter (up to ten years) of which he was found not guilty, five other officers were charged with dereliction of duty (a misdemeanor) two years after the killing, all of whom were also found not guilty. We have two nearly identical accounts of police chasing after a vehicle with unarmed suspects, in both cases the vehicle enters a dead end and the driver reverses the car, in both scenarios, it is purported, with the intent to run officers over forcing them to fire in supposed self defense and the responses could not be more stark. Ultimately, the black police officers were readily charged and then tried as guilty in the court of public opinion, as I am guessing they also will be in court this coming Autumn, not because their actions were more or less egregious than the actions of 13 officers in Cleveland, but because within the State, founded upon white supremacy, these two blacks agents of the State are readily expendable should they step outside of the colonialist interests of the State. Furthermore, we must reach again for Fanon and meditate on his reflection that the colonized are “declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values” (6). The State, essentially, declares that Greenhouse and Stafford do not have the moral authority necessary to decide this child’s fate, nor did they have supreme ownership over or the right to his body, in the eyes of the State that white child’s body was his own in a way that the bodies of folks of color are never truly considered theirs. It is the function of police as the enforcing arm of colonialism to deal out death and violence as a measure of policing, of control, and of protecting the institutions of whiteness and their property, both business and bodies. Yes black officers kill civilians too, clearly as we have examined here, but they are still acting within and for a system designed to uphold whiteness and white supremacy, and when officers are finally charged for any killings they are almost, invariably, black or officers of color. This is not to suggest that Greenhouse and Stafford should not be charged with murder, they should, and so should the thirteen police who murdered Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams. What is being propagated is that only whiteness allows for the ownership over bodies, and thus their fates, but also that whiteness imbues an institution and its agents with the morality, and ethical fortitude, to judge the fate of these bodies over which ownership is assumed. The lack of outrage, and accountability, when white officers steal bodies is rooted both in a devaluing of black and brown life as well as in the idea that whiteness provides us the “right” to take what we want, whether it is someone else’s culture, or name, or identity, whether it’s someone else’s land, neighborhood, home, or community, or whether it is someone else’s body. Someone’s life. The endless non indictments of white police officers killing and brutalizing communities of color are rooted both in a larger disregard for black life and black bodies, but it also rooted in the deeply held American value that white people have the right to take, and take, and take, because what in the world isn’t ours? Isn’t everything? The video was recently released of young Jeremy Madis' death at the hands of the police. I, like other videos of death doled out at the hands of police, will not watch it, I do not need to see him die to know his life mattered. The difference is that his killers were charged within days, the video did not need to be released to the public until a year later, streets did not need to be filled with protestors demanding justice, because the general public and municipal opinion was that his life mattered, his life mattered and the black officers who killed him did not have a right to take his body. However, what history tells us again and again is that not only did Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams' lives not matter, officer Brelo and others had a right to their bodies and their lives, and the act of murder was not only allowable but necessary under the sanctions of the State. Rest in peace Jeremy Madis. Rest in peace Tyre King. Where's that All Lives Matter crowd now?  Michael Lee is a Norwegian-American writer, performer and educator. He has received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, & the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council.He is a recent graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. You can help support his writing HERE. It doesn’t even mean the work you are doing is actually good work, in the same way a white person working with youth of color in a service or philanthropic capacity doesn’t by any means disqualify them from being racist. One of the ideas we have to get beyond is the idea of someone being inherently moral or just or generally “good” because of the nature of the work with which they are involved. First we should interrogate the colonialist history of philanthropy within the construction of the United States. One of our most violent, detestable presidents, Andrew Jackson, was also a self proclaimed philanthropist. Jackson (who referred to indigenous peoples as “savage bloodhounds” and “blood thirsty barbarians”) famously killed 800 Creeks, including women and children; he and his soldiers then made bridle reins from the flesh of the dead. Violence such as this led Jackson to the presidency in 1828. As president, conveyed here by Ronald Takaki in his work “A Different Mirror, “Jackson Claimed his goal was to protect the Indians from the ‘mercenary influence of white men.’ Seeking to exercise ‘parental’ control, he regarded himself as a ‘father’, concerned about the welfare of his Indian ‘children’. But if these ‘children’ refused to accept his advice, Jackson warned, they would be responsible for the consequences. ‘I feel conscious of having done my duty to my red children, and if any failure of my good intentions arises, it will be attributable to their want of duty to themselves, not to me” (Takaki, 1993. Pg. 82). Takaki goes on to quote Jackson as saying, “Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country, and Philanthropy has been long busily employed in devising means to avert it” (82). What we have to understand is that the very need for service work and philanthropy comes out of capitalist and colonialist contexts. The same people in positions of power within these philanthropic industries historically either directly construct(ed), or benefit from, the context of oppression and violence which necessitate services in the first place. In the case of Andrew Jackson he very literally committed some of the worst atrocities against indigenous folks in our country’s history and then later positioned himself as a caretaker over the same people against whom he committed calculated acts of genocide. The colonialist model of philanthropy: destroy a people’s way of life, then make them dependent upon you for their continued survival, be both villain and savior. This is the spirit in which American philanthropy was born. Let’s fast forward to today. I worked for a non-profit serving homeless youth in Minneapolis for nearly six years. These were some of the best years of my life working with some of the best, most caring people I have ever met. I also met some of the most selfish, self-serving, and low key racist individuals serving primarily youth of color. This reality must be interrogated. First, the stats: around ⅔ of homeless youth in MN are youth of color, the youth we served at the specific shelter at which I was employed were, at any given time, about 85% youth of color (most often black youth). The administration and board shared roughly an equal percentage of white representatives-this statistic matches the national pattern of nonprofits which see around 84% of leadership as being white. The fact that the demographics of administrations are almost exactly inverse of the demographics served should be reason for pause and deep reflection. I once was speaking with a youth about oppression and racism, this particular youth was a 17 year old, queer black womyn. She said to me she had never experienced racism. I asked her how many youth were at the shelter (20), I asked how many were black (at the time all the youth living there were black). I asked her why there weren’t any white youth there, her answer was that white people were better at making money. I asked if that were really true, and if so why might that be? Was that inherent to white people or had there been certain historical advantages in place which assisted white people in their acquisition and proliferation of capital and material wealth? After a long conversation of unlearning, mapping and remapping local and national histories this young person came to see that the very fact she lived in a shelter, in which not one other white person lived, as an experience of racism. Thus, the shelter’s very existence was the result of capitalism and systemic racism, not mere unfortunate, un-identifiable, events in the lives of individuals tied neither to past nor present racial and class politics. One of the things I heard many white administrators and board members say about our work was that we hoped to “work ourselves out of a job one day”. This was said most at fundraising events; it was a nice idea, one that was fun to say and fun to believe. I even said it for my first few years of working there. I even believed it. However, the work was responding to the effects of systems of oppression. The work was not addressing, pushing against and re-imagining the systems which result in the majority of homeless youth being queer youth of color. The work was direct care work with youth experiencing homelessness, with survivors. That work needs to be done, and will need to be done for the foreseeable future, and is work I will likely return to in some capacity. However, the questions of “who should be doing this work?” and “how should this work be done” must be asked, additionally we cannot pretend this work is inherently actively engaging in a radical reimagining of a society which requires service work. A society which requires a homeless shelter is an inherently unjust society. A service organization which depends upon unpaid internships and volunteers (who can afford to be unpaid interns and volunteers? Generally young, privileged, often white, college students or just as often elderly, retired, white folks) rather than investing in paid employment for the immediate community is an organization not dedicated to reimagining systems necessitating service work, but one which positions the “clients” as capital and job creation for the ruling class. The organization serves as a means to further advance the financial and professional lives of its interns more so than its clients. A service organization dependent on money from rich donors outside of the community is not committed to reimagining systems as the ruling class is positioned again as the gatekeepers to wealth and socio economic advancement, rather than developing alternative funding sources within the community committing to the proliferation of the local economy. A service organization whose administration is not, at the very least, representative of the immediate community it serves is not dedicated to reimagining systems necessitating service work as decisions made are still made from a disparate positionality, one which must report to wealthy donors before those it "serves". These notions might be a grim and pessimistic way to view non-profit work, but it is the reality. No one enters the work with these intentions, but doing work and how the work is done is where the difference lies in defining whether or not one, and the work, is truly good. Thus, I do not position anyone as inherently good for doing “good” work, least of all those of us who benefit most from systems of inequality. Especially when that “good” work can, and often does, quite literally reify the power dynamics which created the need for that work in the first place. I routinely witnessed and pushed back against white co-workers working harder for the white youth we did serve, or youth of color who fit more conveniently into a white, middle class respectability realpolitik. I saw white staff fighting to keep a white girl housed despite her sexually predatory behavior, while having just pushed for putting three black youth back on the street for smoking weed on the shelter’s property. I saw white staff, and staff of color, position vocal, rambunctious, disruptive youth of color as violent and disrespectful while positioning vocal, rambunctious, disruptive white youth as “having been through so much”. The latter statement was not untrue, but it was equally true of all youth though often unequally applied. Now, put any one of us as social workers at a dinner party and when it is discussed what we do for work, we will each be championed as “selfless” or “generous” or “courageous” without any inquiry into how the work is being done. The subject matter of a lesson plan or the nature of the work does not transcend pedagogy or interpersonal relationships. Some staff members were very much selfless, generous and courageous-are those I look up to most in this world-and they did the work in a way that truly fought back against institutional, ideological, interpersonal and internalized pillars of oppression which constructed the social ecology requiring the work; on the other hand, others were closer to the opposite of all that and behaved in a way which reified these systems and power dynamics, and yet to the world we were all doing equally “good work”. We were all “good”. Though we weren’t, not all of us.  Michael Lee is a Norwegian-American writer, performer and educator. He has received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, & the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council.He is an Ed.M candidate at Harvard University. You can help support his writing HERE. Everyday America commits unacceptable atrocities in the name of our safety. Mosques and black churches burn, unarmed black and brown folks of all ages, gender identities, sexualities and classes are gunned down with impunity, and the tapes which record each moment continue to roll across the country in a procession of loss, a möbius strip of grief, and yet we accept these things. We accept them, have our coffee, and go to work. It has come to the point where I believe that if there were a video of a cop shooting a black child, and this cop said that it wasn’t him in the video, that it never happened. Though we see it, though the police reports show it, though it was radioed in, and witnesses watched it happen, and his partner confirms it was him- he would get off. Not because he didn’t do it, but because his word holds more weight than the bodies of the dead. For Tamir Rice and his killers, I thought there must be something this time. Never mind the track record of grand juries not indicting police-the chilling video evidence, the past violent and emotionally unhinged behavior of the firing officer would surely lead to an indictment, the fact Tamir was only a child. No. Nothing. Not because the evidence didn’t show anything. It did. But what good is evidence to a justice system designed to do exactly what it did? Upon the non indictment announcement, I immediately thought of Jamar Clark in North Minneapolis. I’m not a Northsider, but grew up in the Twin Cities; I worked for six years only a couple blocks from where he was killed, both in a youth shelter, and a local high school running after school poetry workshops. I was in Boston when I heard Jamar was killed by police in Minneapolis. Before I heard his name, a sickening wave of youth, who have been brutalized by that very precinct that killed Jamar, who I love, ran through my head. Over the next few days, I watched from the East Coast as 94W was blocked, as the 4th precinct became surrounded by protestors, some Northsiders, some not. Across the street from where Jamar was killed there is a security camera that likely picked up the entire event. From day one “release the tapes” was one of the rallying cries. Eye witnesses all agreed he was handcuffed and shot “execution style”, all the while the two officers are on paid leave of absence (vacation). Yes, the tapes from nearby security cameras need to be released to the public, without a doubt. However, I am worried about the emphasis we put on demanding footage as an integral part in our pursuit for justice. Somehow, perhaps because humans are reckless in the way we hope, we still believe that a video showing everything the witnesses say happened will lead to a charge and then prosecution. Yet, historically where is the evidence of this? We saw every second of Tamir Rice’s death at the hands of Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, and once again the tired words were uttered, “no indictment”. The problem with such a focus on video evidence is that it centers the demands around the moral compass of white legal institutions constructed not to protect all bodies equally, but to protect white bodies and what white bodies own. The justice system did not fail Tamir Rice on Monday. It succeeded for the officers. It’s that simple. In the case of Jamar Clark, we can’t hope that if the video is released, that finally the jury and the cops and Twitter trolls and the news anchors and reporters and pundits might just give a shit. After all these years, after all these tapes, so many miles of tape spreading across America like a darkened highways, etched with frame after frame of murder, documenting the endless destruction of black and brown bodies by the enforcers of white supremacy, whether that be police, self appointed neighborhood watchmen, or a civilian with a gun at Florida gas station. I’m not saying don’t demand the tapes, but we can’t hinge a movement on the justice system actually acting justly, even when it has documented evidence. Even when it’s all there, killers walk. The police were not indicted on Monday not because they were justified. No one believes that, not even them. They were exonerated because they could be, because the grand jury and the prosecutor and the defense team and the chief of police, and the police union, knew they could get away with it, because we trust white institutions, made to protect whiteness, more than we trust our own eyes. More than we trust our intuition, our guts, and our heads. Worst of all, we trust these institutions and their agents more than we trust the voices of those who disproportionately witness and experience the bodily harm and terror of the police in this country each day. “How many black voices does it take to convince a white person of anything?” America asks again and again, though it does not answer. It just continues to count. We will always believe a single white police officer, any officer, over an entire neighborhood of black witnesses. Even when we know these words are hollow and weightless we let ourselves believe the lie, then we become it. The lie becomes intrinsic to our lives, how we view and move through the world. It becomes woven into our sense of reality, and to that extent we defend the lie. Actively and passively. By saying Tamir deserved it or by saying nothing at all. As white people, specifically, we defend the lie because we know, either consciously or somewhere deep within us, that this lie shields us. It allows us to believe the world is as fair as we need to believe it is in order to sleep. It allows us to believe we are responsible for nothing. This lie is a fortress in which we sleep, and the sleep grows deeper each non indictment. It grows deeper as malls and roads are shut down and whole city grids swell with a tide of hoodies and iced tea and tears and teargas, and still so many of us don’t stop to wonder, or ask, or question, what is really going on, why is this happening again, in another city? Rather, we demand the protests take on a different tone, that they take up less space, that they shake us a little less from our terrible sleep and the little white picket fences by which it is encased. We accept these murders, these executions (not tragedies for “tragedies” are not preventable and these deaths always are) despite what we know and what we see. I won’t demand any more tapes. Several witnesses all said the same thing about Jamar Clark. As many about Mike Brown. His hands were cuffed. His hands were up. I simply don’t believe in white people's ability to see the truth more than I believe in the ability of people of color to speak it. Every time we demand the tape and that becomes our focus, we are reacting in a way which hinges justice on the moral compass of the institutions of whiteness. We are asking white juries dedicated to upholding white supremacy to feel more for Tamir Rice’s family than for the officers that killed him. We ask them to feel more for what was taken from Tamir than they feel for what the killers have left. The truth is always being spoken, and yet we do not listen. It comes from a local barbershop owner leaving the Elks Lodge across the street the moment Jamar Clark is killed, from the woman who held the party Jamar Clark was at, from a 10 year old boy who watched Clark die close enough he saw the smoke rise from the gun. Ze’Morian Dillon-Hokins said, “Clark was ‘face down when he was shot’ and the officers ‘flipped him over’ after the gun and been discharged.” I will always believe in Ze’Morian’s ability to see the world honestly more than I will believe in a white Jury’s ability to perceive it. Before anyone says anything about him being only ten, remember Tamir was twelve, which is apparently old enough for him to be twenty, and that is apparently old enough for him to die. If Tamir was old enough to die, then this child is old enough to be a witness, to be believed, to be as much an arbiter of truth in the public eye as the cop who pulls the trigger. I don’t believe any movement in the world can, or has, hinged its liberation upon the systems designed to subdue it; demands must center on the humanity of marginalized peoples, not on the ability of the dominant culture or its institutions to acknowledge this humanity. I want a justice system which listens to its people, not silences them and their pain. I want a country whose citizens believe each other and their experiences, especially when those experiences are ones we ourselves have never or could never understand. Yes-give us the tapes, but first give us a police force and justice system more interested in the truth then they are in concealing it.  Michael Lee is a Norwegian-American writer, performer and educator. He has received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and Intermedia Arts. He is an Ed.M candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. You can help support his writing HERE.
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The Works Upon Which the Work is Hinged:An Exploration of Personal Literary Game Changers
12/22/2015
The Works Upon Which the Work is Hinged:
An Exploration of Personal Literary Game Changers
Michael Lee
Harvard Graduate School of Education
When I am asked about my favorite books there are three primary ways I can answer this question. I can talk about the authors and books which I enjoyed reading the most, the ones which kept me up all night, the ones I wept during, the ones I threw across the room because they were so damn good-some of these include Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!, Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore and most recently Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. I can also respond by talking about the books or the authors which maybe were not the ones I enjoyed reading the most, or ones I thought were the best written, but the ones I found to be doing something truly unique, something which made me return to them again and again to study their craft-such as Denis Johnson’s Nobody Move, Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, Louise Erdrich’s Round House or Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths. The third way to answer this question, and the one I am perhaps most interested in talking about, is from the positionality of a writer, one which reframes “favorite” into the light of “importance” or “influence” to my own craft. At times the books which pushed my evolution as a writer are within both of the aforementioned categories, at times they are in only one, but they are all of them some of my favorites because they allowed me to be who I am as a writer, they added to the construction of my artistic lens and framework. In this essay I will examine and discuss seven books which changed, clearly, the way I wrote and significantly reoriented my artistic trajectory. This list is not comprehensive, every book I have ever read has to some extent affected my writing, nor are these books are necessarily the books I think to be most valuable to the world, or the ones I think are perhaps the best written, but they were, for me, the perfect books at the perfect times, books which granted me access to a new world of thought and artistic expression. These books, in examining and reflecting upon my artistic journey up to this point, act as signposts showing me exactly how I got to where I am now.
The first book, while I was late to come upon it compared to many of my peers, redefined what I then understood about a book’s landscape, the sheer topography and scope of its world. It was the 8th grade when I read J.R.R Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’, and I read it in one night. It was during this time, my 8th grade Winter vacation, I began to write a fantasy novel entitled, “The 19 Brooches”. Before I read The Hobbit, my novel at the time was taking place almost exclusively in a small town mirrored after a town in Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydian series. I seemed to be unable to stray beyond a few miles from the town within my writing, and yet after reading the epic journey within The Hobbit, I was given permission to craft a massive world within my own book. Before, I wasn’t sure how to write across years of miles or even leagues-I wasn’t positive I could, at that time I believed I had to chronicle the complete day to day life of my characters from waking up in the morning, to going to sleep.
I spent weeks drawing out maps and designing continents and nations within my story. I developed three languages and nine mythical races complete with histories, cultures, and traditions. After a few weeks time I had nearly one hundred pages of histories, languages, maps and races developed and my novel was more than 40,000 words spanning each of the continents I had created. While I was still mimicking much what I was reading, The Hobbit allowed me to remove all fear and boundaries from the geography of my writing. I began to trust my fourteen year old imagination and vision in a new way.
The next year, a freshman in high school, I was feeling rather stagnant in my writing and reading. I had been fully engaged in fantasy books, but was yearning for something deeper than plot and character, my life had grown more and more tumultuous and I needed a way to better understand it; in my freshman English class we read “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” by Salman Rushdie. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories I was able to engage in a fantastical world I was accustom to, and yet I was provided layers of text I was had not received from Lloyd Alexander or J.R.R Tolkien. The number of references and parallels within Haroun and the Sea of Stories to my own world opened up the way I understood the membrane of a book’s ecology, what could leave, what could enter, the dialogue between the world of the book and the world in which the reader was situated. Several of Rushdie’s characters were pulled from songs by The Beatles including a Walrus by the professional title of “I.M.D Walrus” and an “Eggman”. Until that point I had been reading and writing as a means of escaping the world and my reality rather than critically engaging it and using literature to inform my existence and the contexts in which I lived. I began to write more about the world around me, both in my fiction and my poetry, though I still employed magic and fantasy. I retired my first novel and began a second which paralleled the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, but re-situated it in a mythical Northern setting inspired by my explorations of my Norwegian heritage.
The next book which shifted my work was also a part of my freshman English class. We read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which provided me the opposite lessons from Hobbit, but again stretched my understanding of layers within a story. The book takes place in an afternoon and yet spans years within the memories and recollections of the characters. At the age of fifteen I was blown away by levels employed by Woolf, how the book felt as expansive as The Hobbit, and yet happened in one day surrounding a single social engagement. I recall enjoying the poetic language used in the book as well as the way Woolf discussed time within her writing while simultaneously playing with time in the movement of the book. Inspired by the book, I wrote my final essay for the class as an epic length poem about the fragility of time attempting to play with time as I wrote about it wherein the world of the poem spanned only minutes but hinged upon years of personal memories and dreams.
Over the next several years while I read frequently and wrote often, I did not find another book which affected my writing so clearly as The Hobbit, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, or Mrs. Dalloway had done. The rest of my high school years and my first year of college were marked by my addiction, alcoholism and severe depression, insomnia and anxiety. It wasn’t that I was not affected by what I was reading, but that I was so emotionally high, low, or numbed out that it was nearly impossible for me to really engage with what I was reading on a deep level. Shortly after I got sober in 2008 at the age of 20 I began writing another novel about addiction and insanity-a professor gave me the book “Jesus’ Son” by Denis Johnson. I’ll never forget reading Johnson’s description of an overdose as “my muscles grabbed”, perhaps it was because I knew just what he was talking about, but his simple use of a simple verb in a way I had never read changed how I related to language. In that one line he personified the very fibers of his body, provided them agency, used simple language in a magical way which commented deeply on the ways in which addiction becomes us and we become addiction, the ways in which our bodies, down to our muscles are no longer ours. I recall sitting on the porch of where I lived at the time, clean and sober around seven months, having just read that line looking out onto the Spring street feeling as though for the first time I could see who I wanted to be as a writer. I wanted to use accessible language in unique ways, I wanted to show people we had not even begun to achieve what was possible with language.
That next year was a massive year of growth for me as a writer and a person, I moved through book after book after book, writing and reading at every chance I could. My style was changing so fast I felt like I didn’t have any control over my writing-everything felt like a freestyle montage, something like a theatre troupe moving through a city erecting itself around them as they moved, and danced, and sang. The year after, 2010/2011, as I decided to take only one class so I could focus on work and writing, I read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Coinciding with this book was a greater control achieved over my writing-The Unbearable Lightness of Being was, in many ways, a perfect aggregate of lessons gained from the aforementioned books while also intertwining my passion for philosophy with my passions for poetry and fiction.
Kundera, manages to write poetically, play with time, while creating a fictional world that is integrally entwined to the real world and its history, all while seamlessly incorporating personal philosophies of time, love, sex, art, politics, and violence. I had previously been majoring in philosophy, but left it as the major at the University of Minnesota felt masturbatory and poorly incorporated to contemporary questions of justice, morality and truth. Kundera manages to employ philosophy and poetry within his fiction to such a great degree I began to demand more and more from my fiction and my poetry. It seemed to me then that our understandings of genre came from a place of desired precision within a certain mode of storytelling, but also perhaps from a place of inadequacy. A poet’s inability to tell a story, a novelist’s inability to provide consistent surprising metaphors. I became convinced that the membrane of genre is more malleable than perhaps a dominant narrative leads us to believe.
In the Winter of 2012, while living in Norway, I began reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, not only would this book become one of the most influential books to my writing, it would become my all time favorite novel, and in my opinion one of the greatest novels ever written. Marquez was my introduction to Magical Realism, he provided the poetic language and philosophy I so often yearned for in fiction while, unlike Kundera, applied a scope that was reminiscent of Tolkien, my first literary hero a decade before.
Marquez showed me how to craft a magical world without the escapism of fantasy. While One Hundred Years of Solitude is indeed fantastical, it takes no part in fantasy. The heartbreak, the war, the family dynamics are inexplicably real, and not simply because the writing is some of the best writing ever printed, but because every major event that happens is realistic, the world itself is realistic, its history and its people, and yet the details surrounding it all are magical. This magic is never out of place, but allows the reader to realize just how magical our own world is, just how impossible our lives, and our histories actually are. Marquez showed me how to use magic as a tool for exploration and illuminating truth rather than a tool for escape.
Interestingly enough, as someone who is best known as a poet and whose only published work is poetry, there is only one book on my list of my most important and influential books that is a book of poetry. Larry Levis is easily my favorite poet of all time, with the previously mentioned writers and books acting as a foundation, Levis opened the horizon and pulled me through it with his work. All of his books hold something irreplaceably important to me, but his book Winter Stars is the one which changed me as a writer forever. Of the many things that Levis does, his merger of lyric and narrative is one of my favorite. He approaches poetry with the mind and meter of a novelist, and the pen of a poet, he is a wanderer gazing out onto the horizon from the window seat of a train arcing over the world during an endless sunset. He writes in such a way wherein I feel as though I’m on this journey with him, one wherein I don’t always know where I am, but I never feel lost, I always feel as though the destination is just beyond reach, just a line away.
In part, his use of lyrical spinouts has been most influential for me. For instance, he might-in describing a woman’s eyes in a poem-describe the eye’s in relationship to the dim lights of a motel, and then he might enter the motel and describe the clerk, the patrons who stay there, what the walls are like, what music is playing, he then might recall a time he himself stayed within a motel similar to this one he has imagined and what happened there. Levis takes us deeper and deeper into the imagination, into what might be seen as a tangent, but isn’t, all without us ever losing the woman’s eyes, without forgetting where we are in the poem. In so doing he builds level after level and we see, in his poetry, the way our brains really work, and think, and remember, which is to say associatively. What thought do we ever have that is uninterrupted and not affected by memory, or context, or related idea?
Levis, in his long sweeping style, his controlled lyrical spinouts, his perfectly placed philosophies and vivid language allow us to move through time and landscape while moving through the hearts and memories of his narrators and his subjects. Often, in taking the reader far away from his subjects to then return, I leave a poem feeling closer to the the characters in one of his two or three page poems than I ever have in a six hundred page novel. Levis’ work gave me permission to take a journey as a part of my writing process, to wander but not be lost, to follow the associations until they return.
I have become fascinated by his use of lyrical spinouts, within my own writing I seek to see just how far I can take this construction, I want to know how far into a person’s eyes we can travel without ever losing sight of where we began. I want to write in a way that is not linear, because no life is linear, no thought, no recollection. I want to make magic out of simple words, and I want this magic to pull away from and then shine a light onto the world. I want to enter the mind and come back carrying gold and my own heart. I want to leave this place without ever going away, I want to go forever and always come back. I want each word to have its own echo and apogee. If each dark letter here is a shadow I want to find the source of light and then become it; I want to be so honest in my writing that even the lies tell some kind of truth. I want to dig up my grandfather’s grave and give every reader a single shard of bone. I want to locate the moon in the splintered ash of my memory, and guide us all home. I want to write both the map of the world and the fire which burns it. I want to say, we don’t know a thing about language yet-each letter is still a distant planet which we can barely see, though we swear we can feel each word humming at our fingertips. I want each word, even here, to be the smallest vibration against the hands.
Writer. Performer. Youth worker. Educator. What I know is eclipsed by what I don't. Working and writing for justice in all the ways I know how. Radical imagination. I'm coming for whiteness.
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