Coronavirus? Please calm down.

March 5, 2020
Dear Humanities teachers,

I’m writing to you with a plea.

There are a lot of reasons to be worried about coronavirus, and reasons we want to take response upon ourselves: Government didn’t equip itself to find out who has COVID 19, and now it’s here; and while big tech sends workers home and some districts and even some countries closed their schools, Seattle Public Schools seems to be saying, Assemble in your closed rooms and tell kids to wash their hands. Maybe it’s right for us to close schools.

But there are also public health consequences for closure and quarantine. Kids-at-home is a real economic strain—adults-not-working, because of shuttered schools or because of chain reaction job closures is, also, a strain, with its own cascade of social, psychological and somatic effects. This is to say nothing of the escalating fear, anger, isolation, and xenophobia that result in such an atmosphere.

We are capable of spreading a virus. But we are capable of spreading panic, too. Panic has real-world consequences, and not all these have to do with being more careful.

Amy wrote to me last night to suggest teachers prepare transportable lessons for students to have at the ready, and gather information about student home access to Internet. That seems like fine advice. I also advise wedging your school door open during the day, so we can minimize contact with door handles.

Right now, open doors are better for us all than closed ones.

David

March 11, 2020

Dear families and students (LA 9, Margins and Centers, Hands for a Bridge),

               A few days ago, as a warm-up, I asked a couple of classes what they’d do with their time if they unexpectedly had a couple weeks at home. One student said she’d catch up on television. One student said he’d write new music. Many said they’d do homework.

               Now those two weeks have arrived.

               Teachers have been asked to provide students with optional, supplemental materials outside of our scheduled curriculum. As an English teacher, that’s an easy one: Students should read books! They should write!

               When students have asked me in the past how to get higher grades or how to improve writing, the hard answer is what most improves writing, grammar, spelling, sophistication of thought is reading, reading, reading; reading improves all those things, and deepens empathy, and juices the imagination. I ardently believe in the imaginative, reflective powers of reading. The nearly thousand year old technology of bound books provides a sustained focus of thought and imagination that is a source of pleasure, empathy and critical thought available even in today’s crowded life. This is a hard answer because students are so busy with school work; but now there’s time!

               It can take a bit to get into a book when you haven’t been reading. But then the brain starts to relax into it. Curl up with a book!

               Here are things, in addition to reading books, I recommend:

·        Write in journals every day.

·        Meditate.

·        Build a new exercise routine.

·        Learn to cook new things.

·        Alter your diet in some way you’ve been thinking about.

               In addition to trying out new routines and reading, consider ways you can contribute to the household more—cooking, organizing, cleaning, child care. Clean your room!

               You can also think about your neighbors: Does anyone on your block have both jobs and young kids whose school has been cancelled? Parents with younger kids might be desperate for your help.

               Finally, I want to say this: Students welcomed the school closures with jubilation. This made teachers nervous. We want students to know this closure is about a real attempt to control the spread of COVID 19, and we hope that you respect the demands of social distancing. The time our schools are closed is not an opportunity for lots of hanging out and adventuring, acts which may negate the very extreme step taken in shutting it all down.

               Thank you. Read a book.

               I’ll be available through email if you have old work or desire to check in.

David Grosskopf

 

Dear Ninth Graders: Jokes Are Not Just Jokes

February 12, 2020

Dear 9^th grade block, students and families,

            In late October, an equity leader and a vice principal came to our block after a couple students answered one of Ms. Barnes’ questions-of-the-day by making light of owning other human beings. It wasn’t the first time we’d heard something obnoxious and oblivious from some of our boys.

            My own conversation with students at the time was about humor, privilege, and pain.

            Humor has the power to bring people together in laughter, to lessen pain, to put one at odds with the ordinary so that people might see the absurdity and wrongness of a situation. Humor also has the power to degrade, to bully, and especially to silence, because once people are laughing at something that’s vulgar or mean, it’s the choice of others to come across as edgy and cool or, instead, as oversensitive and scolding, and who wants to be the scold?

            Meanwhile, degrading humor is one of the weapons of privilege. By privilege, I refer to that which belongs to what Audre Lorde called the “mythical norm”: “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure” (Sister Outsider). The closer one is to the mythical norm, the less likely one is to be afflicted by or to understand historical and social tensions and pain. Those in the mythical norm who make degrading jokes about others, at worst, deliberately want to smash others down, and, at best, innocently enjoy what they think is a joke; but either way, a hierarchy of power and shame is reinforced. Let’s be clear that “innocence” is also what we call privilege: Saying, “I was just making a joke!” or “Why are you so sensitive?” or “I wasn’t talking to you” or “I don’t see why it’s a big deal” is acting out of either or both ignorance and selfishness.

            And such humor is selfish because it causes pain—hurting people who include themselves at the butt of a joke, and hurting a community because it basks in meanness and crowds out others.

            Mostly, what I remember wanting to communicate—and this was asking for just the smallest piece of what I should have been asking—is for students to actively be aware of others in the world: be aware of experiences not your own, and be aware of other people in the room, and be aware of what they hear or feel because of what you say and how you behave.

            Yesterday, a group of boys were laughing at a rape joke. I don’t mean to pick on them here, because this letter is not about them, though their laughter was the impetus for my writing. I know they have good hearts; I like them all personally. But what allowed them to laugh at the joke is the same thing that allowed other jokes to blithely occur elsewhere and previously, and I want all of you, all of you, to know that jokes are not just jokes; that any humor playing off stereotypes or race or gender violence or sexual orientation actively, actively, fuels systemic racism, misogyny, and homophobia. I also feel I need to push you further than I tried to do last time: It’s not enough to refrain from such humor: It’s your responsibility to learn what it’s like for other people; it’s on you to push and remind others to be better; and, if you have it in you, do these things because all people need our good care, and our love.

            There is so much warm, embracing energy in our classroom. Feed that with kindness, consideration, humility, restraint, and your good hearts.

David Grosskopf

Delta Blues

          We were taught a lot more about the blues at Delta State University than I learned, that I can say for sure.

          I started with a text by white folklorist, William Ferris, in a book I later saw all over the gift shops in Mississippi and Tennessee--Give My Heart Ease. I appreciated what he gathered there, and I tried to listen to the accompanying CD of voices he recorded on people's porches or living rooms or churches and prison yards. I had forgotten the folklorists' method: they try to preserve the rhythm, the context of the conversation, the vitality and dirt. In this case, from the mouths of many people, the well-deserved distrust of white people and the disposable nature of Black work and bodies became very vivid. And the absolute theft in sharecropping became very clear in one description of sitting across from a white man at a table piled with money the man knew would stay there, even after harvesting 45 acres of cotton, all the while the white man was apologizing and saying if he had only picked one more acre, he could have had some of that money. Many people spoke to how singing the blues was the only thing that raised their spirits in an unjust world. Ferris also drew the several connections between gospel and blues, and some of his speakers made that connection even more unifying: One said there was no difference at all, and you just had to change the "Oh, baby" to "Oh, God!" and there it is. 

          Blues and gospel both give voice to unrelenting hardship, and both gather the strength of community in harmony with each other; but blues express the sorrow and sometimes humor, and gospel provides that sorrow but also witness and hope. 

          In Mississippi itself, we heard a lot about the dolor and the dollar. Sharecroppers lived on and worked miles of cotton, with no outlet for their fatigue and loneliness, their pain and isolation, save blues on Saturday nights and church on Sundays, though it also sounds like both of these sites were gendered--not strictly, but in the locus and tone of authority. We learned about juke joints in improvised structures that dotted the plantations, and on the bus, every once in a while we were told that if we followed that bend in the river and turned left at that stand of trees and went on a ways, you'd get to a place with open doors on Saturday nights. At Dockery Plantation, we learned how one of the first bluesmen, Charley Patton, made a fortune playing at the Dockery store for free and then on Saturdays setting up at the "frolic" house on the other side of a narrow bridge over what was essentially a moat, guaranteeing money was collected from everyone.

          We went to what our program insisted was the real crossroads where Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil.
          We heard Muddy Water's nephew, Keith, play on the first night.

          We learned how the Great Migration affected the sound of the blues, getting just as industrial and electrified as Muddy Waters and BB King did themselves, ascending Highway 61 to Chicago.

          We crawled to a slow and got in trouble outside of Parchman Farms, the notorious prison where so many of the heroes we'd read about ended up, and where a haunting rhythmic music of work gangs were several times recorded.

          We had a visit from Bill Able, who said several times that he was not a blues scholar, though he spoke with more knowledge than anyone else I'd ever heard, and he demonstrated how little is needed for the many forms of blues, twanging out on electric guitars he'd made from driftwood and cigar boxes and sliding on single-string broom handles, because blues themselves are improvised from porches and wire and dirt.

          A bunch of us went to a couple of the urban juke joints in Clarksdale--Ground Zero, owned by Morgan Freeman, and the much more dilapidated and intimate one owned by Red Paden. Dancing at Red's was so close, in fact, that I spent a bunch of the time dancing with my eyes on the ground, because I was dancing over the lead guitarist's mic stand. I also had a nice dance with his wife or girlfriend.

          Probably the experience that kept coming back to us was Po' Monkey's joint. Po' Monkey died in 2016, but his "lounge" is still there, ugly and picturesque poverty porn for northerners, showing up on the cover of Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta and on a feature video of Good Morning America. Several of us went to Merigold to the third annual juke joint festival held in his honor. There we met his son, who would surely like to open the lounge again, but it's boarded up and belongs to someone else, and we met Larry Grimes, a character we heard about on the bus. He told me but mostly the three women I was with a lot of uncomfortable jokes, showed us some very rare coins he keeps on his person at all times, like a Booker T Washington silver dollar, did some magic, and spoke very fondly of his best friend, Po' Monkey, told us about his Vietnam war gut wound and military pension and his art--some of which is outside the juke joint but he fenced it in after someone drove over it. He told Caroline, I'm going to whisper something in your ear. Don't worry. It's nothing dirty. Here it is. I've got two baby dolls in my truck. They got penises. They're worth $300 each. And he told both Caroline and Lizandaa that he was kin to their husbands because now he was their husband-in-law. But he also spoke about Red with so much tenderness, how the first day he showed up, Red didn't let him pay, and he came every opening ever after, every single one, and Red never let him pay. He was always there.

Rebecca, Po' Monkey's son, John, Sophia

Caroline and Larry

Mississippi Delta--the most Southern place on Earth--visits hitting me hardest

          Last week, I traveled to Cleveland, Mississippi for a teacher development program called The Most Southern Place on Earth at Delta State University. The purpose of the program is to explore the history, landscape and music of the Delta, a place where the rich alluvial soil resulting from a constantly flooding river led to a wealth in cotton, and in the frantic grasping that followed, a
barbarism that would define race relations ever after.
          We learned a lot about the origins and generative power of the blues, and were immersed in the music and place of it; I'll devote another blog post to that.
          For me, the most powerful aspect of the program had to do with ways it touched events sparking and pursuing civil rights work. I was most moved by the heroism and stark contrast between a pursuit of basics--like clean water, education, a voice, recognition that one is a human being--and the violent, screaming outrage at the effrontery of such pursuits.
          Three events in particular hit me hardest:

1. Charles McLaurin's visit to our classroom,
2. The Founders' Day celebration at Delta Health Center, and
3. The journey to the store and courthouse that betrayed Emmett Till's life and then his death.

1.

          Charles McLaurin affected me a great deal. He is a gifted speaker with a treasure of experiences both with the Civil Rights era and its heroes, including Medgar Evers, Stokely Charmichael, and most especially, Fannie Lou Hamer. He speaks with passion and love, confidence and wisdom and practical understanding, and the moments with him were worth as much to me as everything else together.

          For one thing, McLaurin helped me fall in love with Fannie Lou Hamer. I knew her--knew that she was a mover in the Freedom Summers and voter registration drives, knew the Sweet Honey and the Rock song devoted to her; but McLaurin's story, which my notes capture in the last blog post, is so full of admiration and surprise and adoring feeling that I was transported, by her courage, her heart, and her clarity.

          This was reinforced when we were on the bus with Dr. Edgar Smith and Ms. Inez Smith. They

were Mississippi transplants who'd followed an academic career of Biochemistry and administration (provost, president) to Massachusetts for forty years; at some point, Mrs. Smith was fundraising to send books and supplies to Fannie Lou Hamer, who wrote them a thank you that they read and showed to us on the bus, both of them tearful for what it meant.

          McLaurin twice said that Hamer made people feel good. I'll say it twice, too. She was an indefatigable fighter, but what McLaurin also said was that she made people feel good. She had a beautiful voice. She had strength and hope. This seems like such an important aspect of activism in our current climate of outrage activism that is more likely to judge than organize and hearten. And everyone should see the clip and hear the entirety of her speaking to the Democratic Party Convention in Atlantic City in 1964, where she sought to replace the official Mississippi delegation with the necessarily unofficial Freedom Democratic Party delegates.

          As Charles McLaurin was talking, I felt a swelling of energy and duty and possibility. We need heroes like McLaurin and Fannie Lou Hamer to guide our values and our actions, and to fill our hearts with love and possibility. And McLaurin's approach was also so clearly not one of passion alone. He spoke on a very practical level, too. He said that people like Amzie Moore and Medgar Evers felt the sting of returning from WWII to a brutal negation of citizenship, yes, but they also returned with operational organizational abilities. McLaurin said he felt he could work a crowd into a lather at any time, yes, but he also spoke of the small pieces, gathering around a single thing, educating, discussing, motivating, getting out of the way.

          I have felt my students vibrating with goodness and hope, ready to act. In the thrum of all that, I have pressed them only to listen, think and be kind. But I have not stepped to the singular object goal that would make something move. I haven't decided if that's enough.

2.

          The Founders' Day event in Mound Bayou the night before coincided with the unveiling of an exhibit about its Delta Health Center. It wasn't originally on the agenda, but the exhibit was spearheaded by the director of our program, Rolando Herts, who also secured them funding through his role with Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area management. It was an exceptionally meaningful event for me. 

          Founders' Day is special in Mound Bayou because, 132 years ago, it was established by former slaves, and that remains a mark of great pride for its citizens. And Delta Health Center is special to them because of all the struggles and victories it represents in their community: they claim it, along with Boston, as one of the first two community health care ventures in the country, and its existence was fought by the governor and Mississippi's senators, and, when in their beginnings they sought to provide care to the violently beaten Freedom Riders, fought by the newspapers and neighboring whites. At the time, whites were saying Bolivar County already had two hospitals, but one would not serve Blacks and the other was prohibitively expensive. The community health model was especially useful in the little town of Mound Bayou, helping its citizens fight for clean water and sanitation and educating them against some of the toxic home remedies, going after environmental hazards and government neglect the way no hospital would have done.

          I was honored to be there, an event that had nothing to do with my program or the teachers it serves, but a community wine-and-dine for the local dignitaries and involved citizens that recognized their history steeped in trials and triumph and the heroes that reflected their ongoing struggles and values of dignity and wellness and Blacks and whites coming together to make that happen.

          I was talking to the CEO, John Fairman, about why it was meaningful for me to be there, and

what it was as a white northerner and the way I view racism to be framed in progressive Seattle (with our segregationist history and restrictive covenants and less visible but systemically demonstrable racism) to encounter the naked racism of the South. My father described the contrast this way: "For me, the South was a dark, hateful, frightening place; but it was clean in the naked honesty of its racism. No precious discussions of micro-aggressions there, but many courageous souls who put themselves on the line fighting cruel injustices." There is systemic racism both North and South; but the battle for something like hooking up a school to water and a sewer system is the tourniquet that makes the vein stand out.

          One 95 year old man at the event in the clinic was describing his work with the brick factory. The African Americans had to make their own, and then none of the major contractors would buy their bricks. I later heard from his son, a former mayor of Mound Bayou we ran into again last night; he said his father was the guy who took over Medgar Evers' job at the life insurance company when Evers went to fight segregation full time as NAACP's field secretary.

          The welcome we felt in Mound Bayou's triumph and honest eye toward the past was entire.

3.

          We took a bus to Money, Mississippi, where Emmett Till whistled to Carolyn Bryant. The store is almost impossible to see through all the vines and no trespassing signs left by the those ready for history to swallow the story gone.

          We heard from Reverend Wheeler Parker, Emmett Till's cousin, who, as in that summer of '55, traveled down to Mississippi from Chicago, and who was at the store that day with the whistling, and in the house that night when Roy Bryant and JW Milam abducted Till from their grandfather's house at gunpoint.

          We heard from Devery Anderson, who wrote a book with exhaustive knowledge about the events following from Emmett Till's death, and he said the Bryants embraced a denial as encompassing as those kudzu vines, and they were isolated and broken by their own cage of silence. 

          We sat in the Tallahatchie County courthouse, where Bryant and Milam were exonerated of murder, and where an Emmett Till memorial now stands opposite a monument to the Confederacy.

          We saw the footage of Till's crushed and mangled face and body, which Mamie Till demanded the world see.

          And we heard this is the spark to light the march towards human rights.

          See the three minute clip the media team prepared about this experience.

          I am grateful for the reminder in these events and heroes of our shared humanity and for the clarity of our struggle.

          Yesterday, Sophie, Amelia and Maisie joined Dad and Wendy in a Lights for Liberty vigil standing against the merciless and actively dehumanizing treatment of asylum seekers and immigrants in the detention camps at our borders.

          I'm going to let it shine.

Here, too, is a video reflection to which I contributed prepared by the media team.