Advice to the Senior Class

Dear Seniors,

            At Roosevelt High School, we attend to racism and mental health issues, but mostly we don’t know how to talk to each other around such things. But if we can’t address the trauma and shame at the fault lines of such issues, we will nourish, in our silence or helpless outrage, continued harm. We have to be able to witness, to listen, to share our most vulnerable stories, to operate from our deepest humanity, and to do that, we have to approach each other with humility and love, treating each other’s stories as tenderly as our proffered hearts.

            Dear seniors, my advice to you is therefore about not-silence. It’s about love. If we are silent about wounds we bear from an unjust and ignorant world, abuse continues; if we are silent for fear of offending or appearing unjust or ignorant, we haven’t helped. Privilege, allow people their anger. Just listen. Pain, give room for allies to respond in ignorance. Make room for each other’s stories and pain, and, most of all, love, which, when it’s offered across trauma and difference, is a shy and fragile thing.

            When you are ready to tell your story, when you are ready to listen, do so with deepest generosity and humility. I do think we can heal.

David Grosskopf

Letter to students after many stories of personal trauma

May 3, 2019

Dear 6^th period,

            Truly, you are dear to me. Yesterday was so tender and raw. Mostly I just want to acknowledge this. What was intended as a 10 minute journal meditation on power and empowerment became a full sharing of wounds, trauma and deep wondering about how to go forth; harassment, fear, imprinted trauma and anger, and what happens to our pain and what happens when someone else’s pain is directed at us.

            You have such beautiful good hearts. When I see how the poisonous world has taken its shots at your trusting hearts, I ache—as a father and as a teacher. And when I see how you open yourselves up and genuinely try to hear each other and help make sense of the disorder and pain and loneliness that’s laid bare, I am grateful to you as a human being and inspired as a citizen of the world.

            We’ve talked about the importance of witness and what it means to witness well. It takes empathy, understanding, compassion—and space. And giving space when you are witnessing means letting go of judgment and control, and the advice and solutions that aggressively impose them.

            We have also talked about silence and shame as a mechanism of power and marginalization. Witness is the answer. Testimony is the answer. They are themselves not just an act of healing, but of healing the world.

            Our books are these acts of self-revealing shattering silence. They fight: they’re fighting not just the forces of silencing but the unchecked abuses of power and powers of abuse.

            And when you as an individual feel safe enough and ready enough to share, when you as an extraordinary class feel safe enough to share in this semi-public forum, it is brave, and it is also a gift, and not one you ever need to do before you’re ready; and you are fighting, even if you feel broken and small when you do it.

            When you as a class are listening hard and giving people room to feel their feelings and share their stories, you are not only tending to the pain, you are not only learning and growing wiser from it, you are fighting, even if you feel hurt and helpless as you do it.

            You are breaking through shame and breaking the silence, giving shape to the hurt, and you are fighting the toxic complacencies that otherwise allow smaller and larger acts of violation to keep wounding us and to keep shaping our culture with impunity.

            Testimony and witness are the first step. But it’s the step that gives heart to all the others.

            I know I dealt with the sharing awkwardly yesterday. I know it felt messy and unresolved. I sensed hurt feelings I didn’t have the wisdom to answer. And then, trying to leave you with a communal sense of something other than the raw pain we had all just shared, I inflicted a one-minute dance party on you that ended up just feeling misplaced and desperate. I still don’t have the wisdom to know how to respond to the hurts that were stirred up. So this letter is just to do two things:

            To acknowledge the tenderness of yesterday’s discussion.

            And to let you know you are important to me.

David Grosskopf