thesis

It’s a dark-chocolate-peanut-butter-cups-and-the-end-of-the-bag-of-wine-inside-the-box kind of night. I miss Erica.

Last night I had the good fortune to be listening in on a call with legends. Intergenerational feminist legends. I already don’t have words big enough for the way their conversation, led by incredible folks from UC Davis, blew open the door and sent all the dry leaves swirling around in spirals in my heart. Leaves unfurling in fast-motion. The unfamiliar feeling of radical love as dialogue. How lucky we are to have them.

Adrienne Maree Brown and Angela Davis.

I still have my spiral bound notebooks that hold my feminist theory and gender studies coursework. I still long to study, restudy, unlearn all that I absorbed in those classes I minored in. I love to learn and I love school. I’m going to grad school now, though it’s not for the social work degree I could be paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for, or the early childhood program I wish I had the money and time to put into.

My grad school is this round kitchen table.
My grad school is new books, devoured cover to cover.
My grad school is academic papers shared with me.
My grad school is Instagram.
My grad school is the life experiment that is being a parent of twins.
My grad school is whatever scrapped together time I have to sit with myself and try to imagine a way forward.
My grad school is to have planning meetings with my fellow Teaching Artists and make space for others to share and think and feel.
My grad school is in any Zoom room like the one I was in last night.

They’re not all as revolutionary as this one.

Angela says, “We do the work because we believe that a different world is possible…History does not by itself conform to our dreams and our ideas, but at the same time, there emerge these moments, these conjunctures, such as the one we’re experiencing now, no one could’ve ever predicted that we would have a pandemic, a global pandemic, that is also a product of global capitalism, and that it would be the pandemic that would give people the opportunity to reflect on the structural character of racism because people could see what’s happening to the Navaho nation, that they could see that in Latinx communities people are suffering, that in Black communities are suffering so much more. All this would begin to make sense when we collectively witness the lynching, the police lynching, of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. No one could’ve predicted that.

But, on the other hand, had we not done all the work all along, had we not done the organizing, had we not engaged in the kind of the intellectual labor that created new ideas and new possibilities — this moment might have happened and we would not have been able to take advantage of it, we would not have been able to seize the time. I hope we will work hard to create new institutions and that’s work that is not so dramatic….it’s not like the mass mobilizations, it’s not the work that gets us so collectively excited, it’s, sometimes it’s tedious work, but we have to do that if we are going to make this moment matter. I guess what I’m saying is, I hope people put in the time, the physical, the intellectual, the spiritual labor that is going to be required in order to make this moment matter.”

Adrienne says, “Right now, we are stuck in our homes and we are teaching and teaching and learning and learning and teaching and learning. I think this a time when we are gaining a ton of ancestors, and we are gaining a ton of ideas. And I think all of that is going to come to bear on helping us to survive what is coming, which is coming, which is inevitable, the inevitable consequences of our human behavior and I think it’s our job to make it compelling to be a species on this planet, to not surrender to extinction.”

There’s too much more.
This paper is unfinished.