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

Goodbye, Cape Town

               We’re sitting in the airport and the plane is already boarding for Dubai, but Natalia thinks I can write the blogpost before anything happens. She is wrong, because we just flew from Cape Town to Dubai, then hiked through a mile of airport and security and security again, and now we’re on our final flight. We’ll be seeing you all in 14 short hours.

               We’ve been saying our goodbyes for the last two days and the students have found every opportunity to hug and cry. We had a final picnic in the Company Gardens last night, the mama’s braai the night before that, and then all of HFB showed up at the airport to wish us goodbye, and cry cry cry. Mimi would say, I’ll get a bucket for your tears and then we can compare them.

               Today we went to the Kirstenbosch Gardens for an exquisite wander at the base of Table Mountain, every path and hill cut and shaped and planted for botanical representation and beauty, and there, in our final moments amidst the careful growth, students gathered concluding thoughts.

               Perhaps the widest insight from the other side of the world and township experience is an appreciation for historical understanding and learning. Very deeply, our Roosevelt students stated in various ways the importance of history and the political power of honest witness. Steep yourself in the literature and vestiges of Apartheid and then go to a place where its effects are starkly written into a segregation of geography, language and culture, and then ferry back and forth between all-black, all-improvised township and all-white/colored, all-cultivated suburb, and talk across different generations and hear Afrikaners say, over and over in different ways, the past is the past while teenage Xhosa-speakers aren’t sure what you mean by Apartheid; and it becomes very evident that a lack of historical perspective contributes to the legacies of Apartheid, physically and spiritually remaining deeply, invisibly entrenched. But in culture and in circumstance, its easy to see and react to only symptoms, for which the sufferer is likely to receive most blame.

               Roosevelt students in their final reflections observed over and over the disconnect between the history of Apartheid and current tensions and patterns. “It’s so boring!” Dani paraphrased from some conversation with Bellville students. “Why do we have to keep talking about things that happened in the past? It’s time to live in the present.” Zanzi captured a similar attitude: “The only reason segregation is still an issue is because blacks don’t have money. Racism just isn’t an issue anymore.” Alea added that Apartheid is so recent that it’s barely history, so it’s shocking that anyone in South Africa think it such a removed, far in the past issue. But it’s so important not to forget, Zanzi said. It’s easier for me not think about what happened to my ancestors; but I’m going to work on being more comfortable talking about it.

               Our students had many thoughts and observations along the same lines. Dani heard so much “they” talk, especially in Bellville; and it is her goal to get away from us and them talk in her own conversation. Ray talked about how important it is to educate youth because that’s where transformation is grown. He said that speaking with Bellville parents and getting a sense of that generational perspective allowed him to gain a lot of respect for the HFB program and a far deeper understanding of what we’re doing here. Mel discussed the redlining and segregation of Seattle, and how important it is to understand what happened and how it relates to what exists now. Stella reminded students that Bellville students stop taking history classes in eighth grade, which shocked several of our own students as she said it.

               Elias heard a lot of blame in Bellville, and not a lot of blame, alternatively, in Langa, to which Sarah responded strongly, saying that she wants to go home and help, and make a change, but somehow do it without pointing fingers: she wants to acknowledge history without being accusatory, and while trying to work together. Zanzi said that doing so with careful vocabulary will help, and she called back what Dani said about avoiding us and them framing. Acknowledge that we all went through this history together, Zanzi said.

               There is a deep desire on the part of students to understand and acknowledge the infrastructure of race that shapes our history, an aspiration to be changemakers operating from a place of ubuntu, or humanity, unity, compassion: I am because we are; we do because we share history, and we do, in love and in hope, together.

               Our students have been thoughtful and hearts-out, tender, solicitous and open. I didn’t know most of their names two weeks ago. But it’s deep affection I feel now, and I’m moved by them, knowing they have been moved, their goodness conjoining the knowledge of injustice and poverty and shared joy into a wisdom and spirit of activism and giving.

               Maybe they’ll give me a hug in the halls.

 

Put your arms around a buddy / Sway so it feels right.

The morning, we'll be together / Til then, I say, Goodnight.

HFB, goodnight (x2) / Goodnight, HFB (x2) / I'll see you in my dreams.