The New Democracy Starts In The Classroom
In my tradition, the holiday season pours lush, fecund evergreen, poinsettias and holly red into the room. Sprinkled with the winks and blinks often submerged into the abyss of green, the white lights peek and glance between the needles. The chorus of purple-wrapped tinseled railings muted the brown wooden banisters as they were faded by the off-white decor. The permanence of the blue sky was challenged only by the black of night, whose presence set the stage for illumination.
But this season was special in the way it painted and poured different colors into the polychromatic canvas. The colors were familiar but not in the order of tradition. Splashed, splattered, and dripped between November and December, they were in different places, occupying nooks and cracks where color took no form that I could easily recognize, and it felt unsettling.
The unexpected homegoing of an elder this November brought me back home for a weekend. In the past, homegoings were experienced from the wooden pew. My sisters and I were asked this time to serve as flower bearers. In romanticized white, we carried the sprays of flowers to the body and then out of the sanctuary to join our family members at rest.
In December, with white in the background, another shade of purple was added to my cinematic palette. The latest version of The Color Purple had summoned blood memories of my father and mother's people to the fore. Panels of their silhouetted recollections, both known and unknown, were now embraced in the timbre of my father’s voice.
In the blood of memory is the embodiment of what it feels like to be disrespected, humiliated, and shamed. In the blood of memory are the triumphs and the traumas, poverty and abundance, solitude and community. In the bodies of those who were pulled from lunch counters, accused of fraud, plagiarism, or theft, held at gunpoint by vigilantes, victims of moving borders, displaced migrants, those humiliated in classrooms, or condemned to ugly with deeply brown skin, these memories maroon the lifeforce—arresting the breath and darkening and deepening it from holly red to carmine burgundy.
I read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison the last week in December. A banned book sentenced to being “too close” by the women elders in my family, it is the story of race and identity, whiteness, anti-blackness, and beauty. Pecola's overwhelming need to be seen, heard, and loved drove her to a panic and frantic psychosis of self-hatred because she was not white.
White supremacy has its haunts. It also has its haints— how my grandfather would name an unwelcomed, restless spirit. The too closeness of this haint kept the spine of this book unbroken, without crooks and creases. While the grip of this haint was loosening, it was still strong enough to control the constricted flow, creating dark patches of purple on my mother's skin. This, too, is my blood memory.
Blood memory is the sound that choreographer Alvin Ailey uttered to describe the creative source of his work. With the stage as his canvas, the divination of Black bodies fan, stretch, bow, lunge, and leap, conjuring the spirits of ancestors through bodies. As mediums, they held a portal between the past and the present, connecting us through and to a time beyond the present moment.
We all have blood memories. They source our creativity and intelligence when we learn to read them. They anchor our identity and create our lens for seeing and understanding the world. Culturally, we create traditions to hold on to our memories and connect to our people and past. This is core to the human experience. But tradition and our allegiance to the past must not be the only practice of cultural preservation.
Social and technological progress should create more and more space between being ‘buked and scorned and the “trouble all over this world.” And while powerful forces are working to bleach the blood, the messiness of the blood memory can still connect us to our ancestors, our common land, and each other. Breathing life into the memory need not be to imitate, reproduce the past, or engage in social mimicry. We breathe life into the blood memory to connect the past to the present. When we can breathe life into the blood memory, it can become a creative force that expands our collective cognition, humanizes our intelligence, and reorients our relationships with ourselves, each other, and our shared land. We can preserve our culture by designing anew.
What will it take to breathe life into our collective blood memory?
How can schools become the lungs that breathe new life into memory, transforming the color from maroon to poinsettia, holly red?
How can schools help us come more alive, learn what it means to be human, and connect to ourselves, gifted with the wisdom of our ancestors?
First, we have to hold the contradiction that schools are proposed to reproduce culture and society and transform it simultaneously. Wisdom guides us to the appropriate weighting for the time. A culture that has broken our relationship with each other, our land, and ourselves has been able to scale to our detriment. Our economic system discourages cross-racial solidarity in the name of tradition and nationalism and encourages exploitation of the earth, animals, and resources for personal comfort, further disconnecting us from ourselves and our blood memories.
The relationships required for optimal well-being include healthy relationships with the land and the natural world, the self, and others. That said, any campaign for racial justice without environmental justice is not incorrect, it's insufficient. Climate change activism without racial justice risks perpetuating white supremacy in its ignorance and isolation. Racial justice and environmental justice are not two distinct campaigns. They are the same. If we buy into the narrative that the white people fight for the earth and the black and brown people fight for humanity, we miss the point, and the colors of the seasons fade in loneliness. It is through acknowledging and honoring our shared connection to the earth that we can become grounded in our humanity.
This cosmic separation does not have to be our fate. With shared awareness and frameworks we can make a different decision and change direction. Our classrooms can become the spaces where we break not all the traditions, but surely the ones that prevent our collective growth. This is intelligence at work.
Our lessons could create spaces to evaluate the impact of small personal moves. Learning standards could be redesigned to assess the conditions for optimal well-being for those who live at the bleeding edge and evaluate the impact of our traditions. Assessment of skill and technique would be integrated into individual gifts and passions and directed to relevant challenges of the moment. Bodies in the building would learn the necessary skills to connect to their ancestral blood memory and transform the trauma and triumph into right-on-time intelligence—the humanized cognition needed to rise gracefully and radically to the challenges of our time.
Our classrooms can be designed to breathe space between the memories of the past and opportunities of the present. But we need collective will and intent to move differently together before action. This is the meaning of speaking and designing the future with a key awareness of the memories and histories that came before. We recognize that now more than ever, language and discourse have an insidious power to influence and control ideas, beliefs, actions, and, ultimately, culture. In order to write a different story, we have to use a different language. We need to replace our current hegemonic discourse. This insidious power is so great that it has made the walls of our schools and classrooms so rigid that they may not be able to hold the expansive volume of this new collective radical breath without cracking.
So, we learn to breathe elsewhere.
This new breath is the hope and dream of the blood memory, the creative force to fuel new ways of being and thinking that center wholeness and optimal well-being. This new breath requires us to assess the fitness of our current systems, and where they are unfit, we move elsewhere. This does not have to be disrespectful, violent, dramatic, or even public, it simply requires us to reset our expectations to preserve our well-being quietly. And then from there, we start building and designing anew.
Designing a new future requires us to wait no longer for the most powerful to change, even though we know this change is required. Designing a new future requires us to show them the way to change. To do this, we must first change ourselves. With this in mind, we must study nutrition and science not to get a good job but to learn how to nourish ourselves and our loved ones without hurting others. In turn, our proficiency in math and science is not to secure a firm place in the professional class but to design new ways of living sustainably sufficiently without wasting natural resources—transforming our relationship with land and ourselves. We must learn the meditative arts as a way to remind ourselves there are more than five senses, and that our bodies have ways of knowing and perceiving the natural environment that enhance our literacy, sense-making, and relationships. We will learn multiple languages to share our knowledge, invite others to be a part of the conversations, and speak words of inspiration that encourage others to design the future with us. In this way, we design new learning spaces together.
We shall self-custody our learning and credentials to redistribute power throughout the learning systems and design new ways to heal ourselves that privilege the relationships and information that will create a new world. We will exchange goods and services in economies of grace and be in better relationships with ourselves and each other. We can create new knowledge and new economies, and then we return for the others, welcoming them if they are ready.
The new future does not start over there. It starts right here. We have to imagine and design a new culture together. We do not and cannot wait for someone else to build the future we want. We are the designers—teachers, students, young, old—all of us are designers. This is what equityXdesign is all about. This is what it means to dance differently, in living color.
My grandmother was famous for saying time and tide wait for no man. Since her birth in 1915, the sea levels have risen, and the tide is both impatient and intrusive—moving more inland yearly. The earth is warming, and there seems to be less and less mental space to think and move differently. The water of my ancestors' wade in is threatened now by flash floods.
One of many sayings, these words are a part of my blood memory, each day revealing new dimensions of meaning. As time passes, the colors of seasons should change. Not so much that we no longer recognize them or they become disconnected from our memory, but just enough for us to collectively recognize that change is not only coming but has arrived.
Perhaps the colors are not required to stay within the lines of the past but are unleashed and able to assume the form needed for the moment—they can drip and splash, lunge and fan, and fall helplessly into the deepest blue canvas without fear. Then, the colors and hues of the new democracy will emerge—black, brown, white, green, and blue—balanced, nourished, and full of life. Maybe then we can all take a collective breath, exhale, and notice the beauty of the color purple together.