It is a wednesday

Key pieces about students: 1. They are incredibly proud of their ethnic origins. Not all of them explore all of their ethnicities, this is dependent on if their parents are involved in their ethnic communities. However, in various conversation that I had with the students, they often asked questions about history and cultural information on the different cultures. 2. All of the students who participated in my project labelled themselves as multi-racial, mixed, black and white. They often admitted that what they said was contextual. One of the things many of the students dealt with on a nearly daily basis was the question "What are you?" or "Are you mixed?" This is not news to anyone who reads up on mixed identity. It is a broken refrain, because we want to categorize things. It is part of our nature as a way to make sense of the world. As I and others have said before mixed people challenge this and make people uncomfortable. 3. The students in my study the high school they attend is relatively supportive and the students did not report any experiences of overt racism and I observed none. That said, I observed teachers repeatedly single out certain minority students for behavior I observed all students regardless of race or color. Students brought this up as well. As well, I observed and heard stories of repeated micro-aggression both from students and teachers. I would even argue that the questions in point 2 above are micro-aggressions that these students experience every day. 4. Not all teachers participate in this subtle acts of institutional racism, but because micro-aggressions are so subtle and seem so innocuous, but build up over time, everyone is complicit. I think that the onslaught is so constant for most minorities that you build up a wall of tolerance and begin to not pick up on the smaller ones and only see the more overt ones. When I talked to students about how people spoke to them and gave examples, students were more able to see these occurrences, not only toward them but also toward other students. So, I am sure that some would argue, that by my bringing the issues up I am creating them. That is why these types of isms (these do not only happen to minority students although some other groups deal with much more overt discrimination) are so institutionalized, they are hard to identify. While I have been sifting through my data, I asked myself the same question, am I making mountains out of mole hills? So I set out to understand the concept better, as I saw it as something that would be integral to my thesis. The notion of micro-aggressions first came into play in the lat 1970 when a pair of academics looked at small racial assumptions in television ads. They found that these were very real and quite frequent. 5. While I was in the school I had teachers who wouldn't go on record come to me and tell me that they observed frequent and repeated acts of discrimination with minority students. I certainly observed over the course of the year that a few students I knew were punished much more harshly if they were not white, either suspended and or expelled. I also heard teacher vehemently talk about how they disliked students who had transgressed school rules, even on things that are not acceptable but incidents of typical teen boundary crossing tests.

So now on to thoughts.

I just noticed that people are actually looking at this blog. I don't think about it too often, but now that I might be able to get a real audience. I spend so much time thinking about mixed race issues, even though I myself am not mixed race, just bicultural. I am starting to understand this experience as a bicultural one. Students who are mixed often fit in, don't have a hard time finding a social group. Just like their family it is some place where they feel welcome, where they don't stand out. They live in homes that experience the same joys and sorrows that other families do. I am not sure if black and white mixed race people grow up in disproportionately single family homes, with white mothers. My experience many of these children do live in single parent homes. But then statistics show that more and more children overall grow up in single family homes. As a society this is still seen as a bad thing. Instead of finding ways to support women and men who find themselves alone with children, society vilifies people for being that way. We make it hard to live on a single income, hard to maintain health insurance, hard to find safe and stable place to live. You have to work hard to find a good school for your students, and then when you are working to make ends meet you struggle to find time to make it to school functions for fear of loosing your job. Then we knowingly bring children in to a highly racialize culture where people don't treat brown people fairly. so what happens when they are labelled in this world by the color of their skin. This color makes them stand out since brown comes in many shades, but they all get the same label. We have labelled everyone of African American origin black. But this belies the cultural differences that exist between communities. Instead we have a notion that there is one monolithic way to be black or white. Yet, as many researchers in race studies note, whites have the ability to pick an ethnicity. You can be Irish, French, Danish, because you can trace your ancestry. You weren't ripped from the soils of your land and enslaved, if you survived the horrific voyage across the ocean. Once you reached the "New world" your family, language, culture was sublimated and ripped away, so that everyone became one "morass" of blackness (I use this term deliberately, as white slave holders didn't think of their African slaves as people but as chattel, but this is far from how I think of people in this culturally diverse nation). Yet historians have found and witten about various cultures that have developed around African American groups, people who have held on to various traditions, like for instance the Gullah or the various metis and creole cultures across the southern parts of the US. Furthermore, this blanket grouping implies that new cultural norms and expectations are not formed in communities. Yet we use terms like Minnesota nice to describe the polite but distant way that people living in Minnesota interact. Or that New Yorkers are brusk and direct. Historically Africans created communities for themselves that have withstood the test of time. Some of their cultural developments gone mainstream, for example hiphop music has changed music as we know it. Whites have adopted high fives, using the word man just to name a few examples. So how does this connect to the mixed race students and individuals. Well, one of the problems faced by researchers of this topic, is that mixed race individuals do not form one cohesive group, but then again neither do blacks or whites as per the arguments above. Mixed race people are as diverse as any other group in the US.

Death and writing time.

So yesterday I found out from Joan, that Julie B died last week. I have been hit really hard by it. I never expected, it maybe I feel bad because I hadn't talked to her in a long time. I let the money thing get between us. Not that I feel like I owe her. Maybe I do feel that way. Now on to my writing. I have been stuck quite a bit. Mostly because as Hrafn put it I keep looking at the forest, and not writing about the trees. If I work on the trees then the forest will come. So I need to write the trees. A story about each of the kids at least. Although I think there are more than that in the data. I made the survey for the parents. I think it is fine, so I am going to send out the emails. I really want to be done with the paper, so I can do something I am more interested in, like teaching and writing for real. I don't want to be an academic, it is too lame, the games people play. They are so disconnected from the real world. People like D.Ch. who fly into a country tell them what they need to do to fix their ed system based on a month long observation, inaccurate statistics, interviews with people in the system who have stakes in it. And we can't even create an equal and strong education system for our own students and we think we can make recommendations on how other countries should improve education. This is of course one of my long standing objections to my academic department. But I am realizing that this is more true across the U. I don't think that there are many intellectuals to be found in the academy. Most people are too concerned with their own small field of research and not much else. Another thing is that I don't feel like I have accomplished anything beside raising Tay. I want to write articles, but I don't trust myself enough to get out there. I feel tired all the time. And nothing seems to help all the time. I don't feel like it is my allergies or that it is my depression, but it could be. I haven't like anything I have written either. It feels all old and tired, like everything has been said. Oh ho, this is depression. I need to get more physical activity and the sun lamp going, it is keeping me from working on my writing.