GREEN FEAR, BLUE SADNESS — JEREMIAH BURNS

Green Fear, Blue Sadness

By Jeremiah Burns

In fifth grade, we made dioramas out of shoe boxes. I remember that some people made a paper scroll, framing the center of the shoe box with two parallel dowel rods. A kind of channeling of our stories was created. As COVID-19 frames distance learning as the current direction of education, I ask, how do we offer students an ear for an integrative sensibility?

Clearly, the internet is what we are relying upon for this new chapter in education, and we need to be mindful of the internet’s viral facility and function. When I suggest, ‘an integrative sensibility’, I am referring to compassion applied to our discourse in keeping with a grass-roots organizing ethos, such as that seen in the Freedom Now! movement. Transforming crisis into an offering to our collectivity, we include the internet, as well as ourselves.

As we are in a kind of box now, how do we expose that scenario as hopeful? We continue. We continue developing an ear for each other, creating our relationships as a matter of needing to give voice to how we are interdependent, and how we are struggling deeply with the effects of structural inequity. We continue, listening to ourselves, to each other, engaging our power to collectively clarify the scenario we face.

Who am I? As an African-American man who teaches as well as delivers food to support my needs and to make a contribution to society, my life is often about being responsive to others, and then finding that being responsive seems also to make collaboration difficult. Collaboration would mean that in meeting customers while delivering food, in learning students’ names in class, I am hearing perspectives that are not based in my responsiveness, perspectives that originally express a sense that we are in this together.

I refer to society’s binaries as well. As I am a man, the confusion and desperation of racism and COVID-19 move me to consider that we cannot escape our common sense; our common sense must be a crucible nourished with knowledge of history and the sincerity of coalition-building. As we, the people collectively recruit the power of compassion, to articulate how I identify with the social binary is to challenge white supremacy, to deepen my capacity for perseverance and resilience through remaining committed to being present (Friere, 1970; King, 1967; X, 1965).

Grass-roots organizing has always forged the way for the changes we need. I think of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, how Professor Jo Ann Robinson, Ms. Claudette Colvin, Ms. Rosa Parks, beginning from their upbringing in African-American religious and spiritual traditions, created a crisis to address the social disease of segregation (Garrow, 1987).

Integrating our consciousness must build on the work of the Montgomery Bus Boycott; in our internet-based classes, let’s try the following:

Begin and end each class with a moment of silence (Suzuki, 2011).

Begin with a poem or quote that is resonating with you.
Frame lessons with a color of the day to keep an eye out for in our surroundings.
Intersperse moments for new questions.
Contextualize the lesson historically, connecting the dots of the civil rights movement’s work and the work we need to do now.

Whereas crucible means struggle, we tend to employ fear as the resistance of our collectivity, rather than love (X, 1965; King, 1967). Whereas love is a sense that we are vulnerably buoyant, fear is our capacity to control vulnerability. Whereas we are powerfully capable of casting ourselves as players in the future of our species, we are even more capable of sensitizing ourselves to a crucible. This is an anti-racist habit of mind in that our struggle to compassionately conceive of a crisis reveals how humanity has been regarded as a quarry.

Compassionate collectivity can hold our green fear, our blue sadness. Not long ago, in an effort to find a way for colleagues and I within the New York City Department of Education to confront segregation within public education, I started crossing conversations with questions to, as Black Lives Matter puts it, “disrupt our deference to respectability”. I heard the work colleagues and I were doing as part of a society mired in racism, yet fundamentally inspired by the civil rights movement. I began asking questions such as: How do we frame our work here as anti-racist? How is our work excluding a multi-lingual society? How are we integrating the connection between grass-roots organizing and portfolio assessment?

Soon, the work of challenging the status quo not only presented a lesson for my colleagues and I on how society’s racism prevails in institutions, it brought me back to lessons learned in childhood, to how racism challenges me to admit how confounding is interrelatedness.

From my earliest memories, my mother and father taught me to embrace who I am, largely because of how my being black was always an identifier that they, a white woman and a black man, did not understand in the same way. On the one hand, for both my mother and father, who I am has always been about how graciously and educatively I respond to society’s hostility toward black identity. On the other hand, to imagine myself as of a society delusional about skin color has never been within the expectations my parents had for me. I find that segregation’s impact on my parents has meant that my identity is to be creative without being self-righteous.

Poetry, my parents taught me, is a medium for the kind of listening and living I need to do. When I was seven, my mother gave me a seedling phrase-‘And how’-to frame my vision of life. My first poem is as follows:

And how the trout wiggles when it moves.

An How it opens it’s mouth an bites the Bait.

And whenit dies it still lives

Because it’s a spirit.

so everything lives for

ever.

How are boxes sources of power? The distance we face in large part is a product of maintaining boxes that are premised upon racism. Allowing us to move about with a sense of relief, boxes center, protect, store what we remember. With distance learning as a consequence of COVID-19, there’s a sense that anyone of us is called upon to answer for this sudden shift in our lives, that a lid has been put on all our best practices. In this box, we nurture each other. We expand with compassion the kind of talk that includes anyone, and resist problematizing crisis as some natural disaster, occurring because we weren’t prepared.

References

“Black Lives Matter protesters confront Hillary Clinton”. https://www.cnn.com/2016/02/25/politics/hillary-clinton-black-lives-matter-whichhillary/index.html

Friere, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury.

Garrow, D.J. (1987). The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press.

Suzuki, S. (2011). Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Boulder: Shambala.

King, Jr., M.L. Where Do We Go From Here – August 16, 1967. youtube.com/watch?v=HagCA3FytMU

X, M. MALCOLM X THE POWER STRUCTURE. youtube.com/watch?v=olmLAiucLM4