on the virtue of pride

“I’m proud of you, Elijah.”

I was young, maybe 8 or 9. My mom and I were in her van in the parking lot of the Evangelical Free church that had a large part in forming me from elementary school until I moved to college. I don’t remember why she said this—I’m fairly certain it wasn’t anything major—but my response sticks out:

“Isn’t it sinful to be proud?”

Maybe those words were shuffled around, but I clearly remember that I almost immediately connected pride to sin.

At the time this didn’t weigh on me heavily, I don’t think. I was a good church boy and I knew conservative Christian theology better than most my age, and I was simply making an observation. Ironically, I think I felt a small bump of pride in my own ability to make such an observation.

“You’re right, it is,” was the reply. “But I still am.”

I’m far from that 8-or-9-year-old boy, but I still hear his voice. I’ve heard his voice more and more over the past year since I came out as queer on Facebook last summer. I’ve heard it in gay bars, in queer burlesque shows, in loving moments with my partner, in response to laughter and love house beats and rainbows:

“Isn’t it sinful to be proud?”

June is Pride Month, and this year’s Pride follows a year where I’ve been pulled in opposite directions: yes, towards feeling proud of how fair I’ve come in loving who I am, but also towards shame.

This tug of war is how I ended up crying by Lake Michigan in a blue wig yesterday afternoon. I was at the Milwaukee Pridefest, having done my best to stand out to fit into this colorful crowd I wanted to desperately to belong to.

Despite my efforts at fitting in, I didn’t feel like I belonged. Instead of belonging, I felt shame. Shame that said that the blue wig and eyeliner couldn’t cover up that the person underneath of them wasn’t worthy of being there.

This has become all too common. I feel like I came out too late and am now an unwelcome, uninvited guest to the big queer party. Everyone else seems to know what they’re doing, like they’re all in on something I’ve missed out on something.

And I know that just as my blue wig was in part a superficial effort to mimic deeply felt belonging, this logic of lateness is a superficial manifestation of deeply felt shame and otherness.

Sometimes it’s felt like it would be easier to retreat back to Evangelicalism, faking an “ex-gay” conversion to straightness or celibacy, because I know that world. And sometimes I feel the god of my past murmuring in my soul that this life I’ve chosen really is a life of sin like I had been taught.

And shame sticks. Shame can’t be absolved by a change in behavior, like guilt. Shame is about more than action. It’s about identity.

I wasn’t taught shame by the “clobber passages,” the few verses in the Bible that specifically mention and condemn some type of same-sex sexual behavior. I was taught shame by a theology that told me that these sins were a direct outpouring of my natural state of worthlessness. I was taught shame when I was told that the root of all sins is pride. On the other end of pride is shame, I was told, and this is where I was told holiness begins.

But sinful pride isn’t the opposite of shame. It’s the opposite of humility. A better word for this now is arrogance.

Pride, as we use it now, is feeling secure in the fact that we are loved. Secure in the fact that we were created with beauty. Secure in the fact that we are a part of a community that has existed in every culture in every nation in every time period, a community that refuses to disappear in a world that tries to make it so.

Rather than arrogance, this makes me feel humility. I’m humbled knowing of the fighters who have gone before me, of the lovers who are around me, of this massive legacy I’m blessed to be a small part of.

My coming out last August was preceded a couple of months before by the Pulse nightclub shooting. I saw the death of people in this community I was secretly a part of, and I knew I needed to claim my belonging.

The past year I've learned at claiming my belonging is not a one-time action but a long-time process. And now I’m at a place where I'm finally working on breaking apart the god of shame that haunts my happiness and letting myself be loved by the God of Pride. Not a pride that tells me I’m more important than anyone else, but the Pride that tells me I’m just as important as everyone else. I’m letting myself be loved by the God who said through Jesus: “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”

I’m looking for a Pride that acts as a precursor to external presentations like blue wigs instead of a mimicry of pride that’s expected to follow these presentations. Instead of a pride that comes from fitting in, I am looking for a Pride that comes from a feeling of belonging.

“Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted,” writes Brené Brown in her 2010 book The Gifts of Imperfection. “Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.”

The Pride I’m celebrating this month is clumsy and not yet fully formed. It’s still bound up in shame. In our celebrations of Pride, do we have room for this shame we still carry? Do we have space to shine a light on it and counter it with love? Do we have space to speak belonging to people who may not fit in?

The Pride I’m celebrating this month is being born out of a current struggle.

Maybe that’s what makes it worthy of a parade.

letter to my 8th grade writing class

Writers of 410,

I want you to know that I’m thinking about what you were saying in class today and am taking it to heart. Your thoughts and your words are powerful. Remember that. They are even more powerful when you send them out for others to read or gaze at or listen to or dance to. The world needs the messages you have to send.

Many of you expressed feelings of rejection, betrayal, and anger towards the school and many of the adults in the building. When you expressed those feelings I felt heartbroken, and I wonder if in any way I have let you down and how I can do better by you.

I think I said last week that my favorite book series is A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. These books echo the ways that children are let down and put into danger by the greed, selfishness, and neglect of adults in their lives. In the second book, Snicket writes of a man named Mr. Poe: 

He was kindhearted, but it is not enough in this world to be kindhearted, especially if you are responsible for keeping children out of danger.

I’d like to think of myself as kindhearted and well intentioned, but those traits can’t keep you from the violence in our world. I can’t stop the violence of these systems that are so much bigger than me and I can’t stop the violence that people inflict on each other.

My hope for this class is that by talking and writing and learning together, we can make a space for each other where, maybe just for one hour a day, we are safe from violence.

I asked to teach this writing class. Even though I am a first year teacher, even though I’ve never been taught how to teach a writing class, I wanted to, because I see this incredible, giant potential in all of you. I see your potential to make a safe space in this classroom that can spread to other classrooms and even to other buildings when you move onto high school next year. I am so, so sorry that you feel like the adults in this building don’t want to be here for you. I am here for you, and I chose to be.

When we were discussing and writing together last week, I felt so hopeful and excited. I’ve been happily spending my free time dreaming what we could do: a field trip to the Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen to view an exhibit put together by youth; surveying the students and teachers at Otis to come up with ways to improve our school; a publication of written works to share with friends, family, and other writers in the building. 

But this week has been different. This week been frustrating for me. When you talk over each other and over me, when you insult each other and me, when you throw the clipboards and notebooks I spent my own money on at each other, I feel disrespected and hurt. I don’t feel disrespected as an authority figure as much as I feel disrespected as a fellow learner and thinker and writer and individual in this classroom with you. 

The fact that I have good intentions, on its own, is not enough to stop you from feeling angry. And that isn’t my goal. I see your anger, I hear that you feel rejected, and I understand that I can’t or shouldn’t make that go away. 

But if we come together, if we learn to respect each other when we speak and listen, we can use our feelings of anger and rejection and turn them into something powerful. If we honor the shared agreements we came up with and signed, we can stop the emotional and physical violence of the world from coming into this classroom and create a positive space that will spread outward.

But we need to work together. It shouldn’t just be my ideas running the class. Please take time to write ideas or suggestions of things that we can do, things that I can do, to make school a safer place for you. I really, truly want to take your thoughts and feelings into consideration, and I hope that by doing so I can help you feel respected and valued. 

Thank you,

Mr. E

notes on the down days

Last night there was a moment that was essentially the sad scene in a rom com (minus the relationship issues, which of course is the important part of sad scenes in rom coms). Both of my roommates were out, one at a birthday dinner and one on a date. My partner is in LA for a few days, so I was waiting to hear back from a couple of different friends with potential plans. I had the lights dim and candles lit, a baggy sweatshirt with the hood up, eating pizza rolls for dinner, playing the Bon Iver Pandora station over my roommate's giant Bluetooth speaker.

Without something planned and something productive to do (although I'm sure I could have found something), I felt unsure of what to do and my feelings added up to a sum total of something like bogged down. I tried reading, and I did read, but was more unfocused than usual, not so much attending to other distractions but being unable to attend at all. I sent a snapchat of the scene, maybe as a subtle call for help but also not wanting anyone to respond because that would mean I'd have to communicate.

And it felt strange, and I thought about how long it's been since I haven't had some kind of plans on a weekend night, or on a night in general. No schoolwork, no work work, no money to go anywhere because I'm still not getting my first paycheck for 3 weeks and am stretched thin.

Of course at one time this was normal. This felt very much like most of the weekend nights of my first three years of college, before I knew myself enough to really do anything and when I was too scared of finding out who I was to try. College presented hundreds of  opportunities (that most people don't have the chance to participate in) to engage in all sorts of things I had been taught to fear. I think frequently about how I wish I would have been involved with Pride, or service trips, or theater groups on campus, but those things to varying degrees carried too much danger because they weren't housed under a Christian organization. I had been told and really believed that anything beyond that was the beginning of a dangerous path. As I sat eating my pizza rolls and thinking about how familiar nights like these once were, it made perfect sense to me why I went to a counselor for depression off and on in school.

The past 2 years have been a different world of being off campus, adventuring in a different location every 4-6 months due to my university's elongated period of pre-student teaching placements, a period that was elongated even further by an additional year because I had to retake a semester that is only offered in the fall. In these nomadic years I found myself through blog posts and alone time and by being away from all of the different voices telling me who I was without my permission.

And so I'm still very slowly learning who I am and how to be in the world as that person, how to make a Saturday night productive and meaningful, how to engage with people and not feel painfully awkward the entire time, how to read books, play piano, write, do these things that were slowly shut down in those years that I slowly shut everything down because everything held a potential for damnation.

Last night was too cliche in its dolefulness, but I've been feeling that feeling come back slowly the past few days. And it comes and goes, and some days I take care of myself by going to the gym or calling old friends and some days I eat pizza rolls by myself to candlelight. Some days I spend time with people because I want to and enjoy the conversation and other days I spend time with people because I know I need to even if I can't seem to remember how to talk to them.

The important thing in these down days is to remember that there are up days too, and that one is coming, and that until then we do the little things we can to bring ourselves around. I changed the music from Bon Iver to Janelle Monae, finalized plans with a friend, put on something nicer, painted my nails and scrubbed them off immediately because they were a mess, poured myself orange juice instead of beer, attempted to make my brain work enough to read a few pages, and accepted that at that moment that was the best I could do, and reminded myself that most of the time I'm doing much better these days than I was a few years ago and that I'll be doing better again soon.

queer

A little over a week ago I got off the phone with my somewhat-long-distance partner after we decided to "make it official." At one point in time you'd give a partner your letterman jacket or your class ring. Not being sporty enough or blingy enough in high school to have either, and not being from the right era for that to effectively communicate a romantic relationship, I knew I'd have to settle for the 21st-century option.

I texted him about an hour later: "You know this is going on facebook, right?"

"I was about to say I expected you to do it while we were still on the phone."

At least he knew he was dating a social media addict.

Although I've been out to my friends and to any acquaintances I happened to mention it to for a couple of years, many people who I hadn't spoken to in a while, or with whom I had networked with professionally, and certainly the majority of the people I grew up around didn't know I was queer (suspicions aside).

My only direct mention of queerness on facebook prior to this point (that I can remember) was in response to the Pulse massacre in Orlando. I was living at my parents' house at the time in short period between graduation and moving into my next apartment. The morning after the shooting, I was sitting in my parents' small rural church and my dad got up to prayers and announcements.

"And finally, please keep the families of the victims of the shooting in Orlando last night in your prayers."

I hadn't heard about this yet so I took out my phone. Googled "Orlando." Saw the pictures, images, headlines, tweets.

23 dead. Gay club. SWAT team. Dancing. Gunshots. Terrorist. Not a terrorist. LGBT community. Latinx. Thoughts and prayers. Bodies being carried out. Update: 50 dead. Families. Tears. Blood. Can't donate. Please donate. Fuck your thoughts and prayers. Queer.

This moment was strange but not new: sitting in a white evangelical church--a familiar, well-intentioned environment I had been accustomed to growing up--while learning about another world I knew I was also a part of through the electric glow of a screen. I held back tears as we sang a song I had never heard before:

Bind us together, Lord
Bind us together, Lord
Bind us together with love 

There wasn't anything I wanted more than to be bound up as one with the beautiful people softly singing around me, but I knew that this wasn't possible as things were. I knew I couldn't be united with anyone from whom I actively hid my membership in this other world where the price of love was blood. And even then, if they knew, would they have loved on and healed these queer wounds, or would they have left me on the side of the road?

At some point in the last week I was accused by a family member of slowly driving a wedge between myself and my family. And true, in high school and college I became more and more withdrawn, struggling to converse or share anything of importance with my family. What I wish they knew was that this was never intentional, that I fought against it, but any conversation too real or disclosure to deep may have contained enough truth to reveal that I was something I had been taught to fear. This may have placed a barrier between myself and my family, but it was a result of the barriers I had carefully placed within myself. Jagged pieces of whatever I could find to make sure that no one, even myself, knew that I was queer. I couldn't just block of dating men, as if that one desire could have been put in a separate box and forgotten about in a corner. With straight people we take it for granted that the desire for romantic love and intimacy infuses itself into every part of life beginning in puberty. For queer folks, this desire is boiled down to sex.

As I've come out to more and more people over the years, I've found myself doing things like reading and writing more, things I once loved but had stopped almost completely, and I never understood why. Leave it to American Horror Story to tell me something about myself. Liz Taylor, the show's first transgender character, was asked why she read after she publicly transitioned and not before.

"I don't think you can shut down one part of yourself without shutting down everything else."

My queer wounds didn't draw blood, but they were (and are) definitely real.

This is why I am using the word queer. This word emerged out of a few different languages hundreds of years ago, with roots as benign as "off-center" and as stigmatized as "grotesque." It was only applied to LGBT communities relatively recently as a term of abuse, but was then reclaimed in the 80's and 90's because really, it fits. We are grotesque to the world. We are off center from the systems that regulate gender and sexuality at the expense of free souls. The symbol claimed during this era of queer activism was a pink triangle, the symbol placed on people identified as homosexuals by Nazis during the Holocaust. Queer claims this history of endured violence.

If you want to know very simply, I identify as gay (with a side of genderqueer, which I'm still figuring out). I usually use this gay my everyday life, because I don't have time to rattle off a blog post every time someone asks me to explain my word choice further. But I prefer queer. Gay is a sexual orientation. Queer is a political orientation.

An identification of queer, as I define it, says more about the world than it does about me. The fact that I am off center from these systems shows there's a problem with the systems. The fact that people find me grotesque shows there's a problem with the world that taught them.

The fact the world has and does abuse the beautiful souls that claim this word shows that it's better to be out of line from it, better to be detestable to it, because it has to be pretty fucked up to come after heavenly bodies like us.

Queer is about deconstructing this world to make way for new ones that still have yet to be imagined. It is imagining, rebuilding, protecting and cultivating the seeds within each of us and seeing what grows. As put by Rinaldo Walcott, it is "the unthought of what might be thinkable." It is a constant cycle of laying down what is old and decaying and resurrecting what is new, taking barriers and pain and blood and turning them into something that dazzles.

And that's what I knew had to happen when I saw that flurry of headlines following the Pulse massacre. I knew, somehow soon, I needed to take down any walls between my queerness and the world. Because the world needs it. It needs to see love--both love of self and of others--take forms it isn't expected to. I don't know what my seed of love can do, but who am I to stop it from growing?

gender without borders

This was originally posted on the Young Teachers Collective blog.

“Mr. E, when are you going to cut your hair?”

A student of mine in seventh grade looked at me, half laughing, half not, not meaning to make a joke but just asking an honest question.

“What?” I said, returning his half laugh and pushing my bangs back. “I like my hair.”

In an attempt to have long hair (because, well, why not?) I haven’t cut my hair since August. The light brown mop on my head has finally grown past what I’ve dubbed the Awkward Middle-Length Period to the Okay-Looking Middle-Length Period. But even though my hair isn’t yet long enough to be pulled back, it’s still too long to fit into my student’s image of what a male teacher should look like.

“When I first met you, I wasn’t sure if you were a girl or a boy because of your voice,” he said a different day during a reading lesson, maybe a bit too comfortable with me and a bit too unfamiliar with social boundaries. I was amused rather than offended—as if being perceived without gender is offensive—and understood why he might have been confused. I am a student teacher in a resource room for students with visual impairments, and my ambiguous-sounding voice coming from an ambiguous-looking blur from the other side of the room on my first day probably would have told him little to nothing about my gender.

I was reading The Bridge to Terabithia with that group of students, three boys in seventh and eighth grade. We had read about when the protagonist, Jesse, meets the other main character, Leslie. “He couldn’t honestly tell whether it was a girl or a boy,” the book says. We were making connections, and this student came up with my initially mysterious gender identity.

“There’s a student at this school who looks like a girl,” another student said, “but it has short hair and uses the boy’s bathroom. Is it a boy or a girl?” I knew of the student in question because all of the staff had been required to attend a professional development session put on by the Illinois Safe School Alliance to ensure that we would be able to support this student, who had recently come out as transgender.

After a conversation on pronouns and clarifying that we never call a person “it” and that “they” is an appropriate pronoun when we are unsure of someone’s gender, I said, “Well, if a person uses a boy’s bathroom, they probably want to be called ‘he.’ He would know what his gender is better than anyone else, right?”

This was the first of many conversations in which we used The Bridge to Terabithia to problematize gender. Jesse’s father is distant because of Jesse’s love for drawing, which he claims will turn his son into a “faggot” (the word isn’t directly stated, but strongly implied). Leslie is the first and only girl to run in the races at school and wins every time. Jesse feels unfit to be the “king of Terabithia” because he fears the rising creek and Leslie doesn’t. Leslie is forced to wear a dress for the only time in the book when she goes to church with Jesse’s family. The two are best friends and more, but their partnership isn’t romantic or sexual. For 1977, this widely-read novel queers gender more than it’s given credit for.

When Leslie joins Jesse’s family for church on Easter Sunday, she gets into an argument with Jesse and his sister about the story of Jesus’ crucifixion. Leslie, who had never been to church or read the Bible, thinks it’s beautiful. Jesse and his sister, who are required to go and believe what they are told, think it’s disgusting. Leslie sums up the situation this way: “It’s crazy, isn’t it? You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don’t have to believe it, and I think it’s beautiful.”

“When you have to do something, like Jesse and his sister had to believe the Bible, does that make it better or worse?” I posed this question to my students, who all agreed that doing something because you have to makes that thing worse. We went on to discuss Leslie and Jesse’s differing experiences with their families’ relationships to their gender: Leslie felt free to wear pants and run with her family while Jesse felt suffocated by his because his passions were too girly. While my students didn’t come to understand or even explicitly learn about transgender and non-conforming gender identities, they engaged with this idea that they are told what that they can and cannot do certain things because they are boys, which means they are not totally free.

This imposition of gender norms is called gender policing, a societal practice that has been fought by feminist movements, queer movements, and countless other movements and groups that have gone by other names throughout history. And it is having an effect on our students. Research by Maria do Mar Pereira, among others (discussed here by Tara Culp-Ressler) shows that gender policing among students in a school setting causes them to restrict and modify their behaviors in harmful ways. This study also found that a slow breakdown of this process leads to more positive behaviors in the school and in the home. Further research shows that heightened gender policing in childhood increases the risk of mental health concerns in adulthood. This is true for straight and cisgender students—those whose gender identity consistently aligns with the gender they were assigned at birth—but even more so for LGBT students and particularly transgender students. The 2013 National School Climate Survey conducted by the Gay, Straight, and Lesbian Education Network (GLSEN) reported that transgender students:

• Were more than three times as likely to have missed school in the past month (58.6% vs. 18.2%)
• Had lower GPAs than students who were less often harassed (2.9 vs. 3.3)
• Were twice as likely to report that they did not plan to pursue any post-secondary education (e.g., college or trade school; 8.2% vs. 4.2%)
• Had higher levels of depression and lower levels of self-esteem.

The most horrifying statistic comes from the Youth Suicide Prevention Program, which has found that more than 50% of transgender individuals will attempt suicide before they turn 20 years old.

The students I predominantly work with—students of color with disabilities—are subjected to stricter gender policing than white and/or able-bodied students. Whiteness places tighter gender roles on people of color than are imposed on whites while ableist paternalism robs people with disabilities of their self-determination, including (but not limited to) their self-determination in regards to gender. These students are constantly used by those in power as tools for political gain. Because they are already politicized against their will, they must be enabled to take control of their own politics. But how can they control their politics if they are not able to control their gender, or even their hair?

My goal in these conversations is not to “make transgender students” as a friend of mine joked when we discussed them. My goal is to create a space for my students where they feel safe to question what they have been told about their genders and to express their genders as authentically as possible, whether or not their gender identities and expressions align with societal expectations. In other conversations they question what they have been told about their abilities, about their bodies, about their skin, their hair, all of these characteristics that society uses to label them as less.

This is much of the power we have as teachers: we can continue to label and box our students in or we can let them choose their own labels and draw their own borders. The outlines they draw for themselves may be as boxy or boyish or girly as they had been told before, or they may take a different shape, changing shapes, blurry shapes with ambiguous voices and flippy hair that they didn’t know could fit together before. We can aid our students in this process by explicitly teaching about transgender identities, gently queering classic pieces of literature, or taking gendered practices out of our classroom. But maybe the first step for us as teachers is to let ourselves draw our own boundaries, have our own voices, our own hair. When we embrace these aspects of ourselves as equal, our students will feel more and more comfortable doing the same. And as more and more youth embrace all aspects of themselves as equal, the world will be more and more free.

little epiphanies

I have recently been learning more about the church calendar, which my life has seemed to be naturally following as of late. I wrote in December about my longing for individual and global justice in Advent and my experience of the hope of Christmas with my students. Advent was also marked with anticipation of my long-awaited move to Chicago which came to be at the end of the Christmas season.

And now we are a week into Epiphany, the season inspired by events in Jesus's life such as the arrival of the magi (the "wise men from the East"), the turning of water into wine, and the Transfiguration. These are moments of realization and celebration of the identity of Jesus breaking into the everyday.

In the Gospels these realizations are often made by outsiders and celebrated in ways that are no more conventional. The magi celebrate it wastefully by bringing gifts too extravagant for a child. Jesus himself celebrates it scandalously with too much wine for a party. And Peter celebrates it awkwardly with a proposal to live in tents on the mountaintop so he never has to go back down.

Of course we do have to come back down from moments where the reality of Jesus is unavoidably clear to the lows of everyday humanity where he is harder to find. But whether we are in places high or low, Jesus is here. He's here in our heartbreak, our doubts, our insecurities, our limits, our fears, our blood, our awkward moments, our strained relationships, our regrets, our longing, our anxiety. He's here in our poverty, our oppression, our marginalization, when we're forsaken, rejected, alone.

I don't know what that always looks like or even why that's always a good thing. Sometimes I wonder, "Jesus, why would you come here? Why would you come here as a baby? I thought you were coming as king!" But at the very heart of Epiphany is the truth that in his infancy Jesus was the king, a truth declared by the magi in the courts of King Herod himself. "They delegitimize the very power structure of Roman-occupied Judea," writes Ben Irwin. "The magi arrive at Herod’s palace and ask for his help locating 'the king of the Jews.' No wonder he was mad."

It is nothing short of divine to realize that God is found with a child and not with Herod, with the poor and not with the rich, with students in under resourced schools and not politicians. And though the latter violate the former by killing them, by demonizing them, and by depriving them of resources, God is found not in the security of the oppressors that is sustained by such violations but rather in the joy of those who are joyful in spite of them.

In Epiphany we focus on the truth that Jesus grew up with us, cried with us, laughed with us, died with us. He lives with us, so we can live with him. The oppressive systems of this world can't claim that, only those of us with bodies and souls can. Out of this victory Paul taunts death itself: "Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?"

As in the Gospels, these realizations and celebrations involve unexpected people and happen at unexpected times in unexpected places. They are genuine laughter in periods of mourning, or the presence of someone to mourn with. They are the church I went to on Sunday erupting in cheers at the announcement that a woman is finally done with chemo. They are small gifts that sustain more than the giver could have imagined. They are people tearing holes in buildings so we can all have equal access. Who knows?

Jesus comes like a thief in the night, like a swiftly changing wind, like a baby after birth pangs. He comes when you least expect it, in spite of your preparations, because of your preparations. Always be on the lookout, because you never know when or how or to whom Jesus will appear.

As I settle into this city I've waited so long to be in, I'm going to be looking for Jesus. I hope to write a few more posts during this season of realization, but I hope even more to actually realize when I am in the presence of Jesus, to actually celebrate it, and to actually live out his story. In his book Living the Christian Year, Bobby Gross writes that "Epiphany...is a time to both inhabit the Story and tell the Story, for the in the telling itself we are further enlightened."

Let's go into this cold world where finding evil and injustice can be so easy and focus on finding holiness and righteousness, on finding Jesus, and celebrating all of our little epiphanies.

why I must vote: reflections on Montgomery, Selma, and the winding path to justice

I’ve had the opportunity to go to Alabama with a group of other students from my university. We got to a town outside of Birmingham last night, where we are staying in a church. This morning we drove to Montgomery to see the Southern Poverty Law Center and their Civil Rights Memorial.

The memorial, designed by Maya Lin, consists of a curved wall with a quote from a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., a paraphrase from Amos 5:24:"...until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." In front of the wall is a large inverted cone, the surface flat but off-center, as if it's leaning under the weight of the circular timeline on its surface. The timeline begins with the death of Emmett Till in 1955 and circles around to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, listing a number of others who died in the movement. There is a 2-foot gap between King and Till's names, a space for everyone not mentioned, a space for us who look on, inviting us to choose: "how will you be remembered?"

The Civil Rights Memorial

That afternoon we drove on to Selma, the historic site of what is now known as "Bloody Sunday." In 1965, a large group marched through Selma to fight for the Black vote. When they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were met with a militarized police force, which brutally attacked the protesters.

A picture of a group of protesters in front of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, lead by Martin Luther King, Jr.

On the bus ride back to the church, we were given time to reflect in response to a few prompts preparing for our evening discussion. The following two prompts stuck out to me:

Take a moment to “check your privilege.” Think about how not in 2015 most people can vote but many don’t. Why is that? With presidential elections coming up soon do you think you will vote? Has learning about Bloody Sunday altered your decision on voting in any way? 

What is #BlackLivesMatter to you?

Maybe this is bad, but I don’t care that much about voting. Like, I know in many ways, cognitively, that I should. But the prospect itself doesn’t land on me with any weight or leave me with any sense of urgency, but rather just brushes by me, leaving me not with the impression of a great right or responsibility but rather with a soft “meh.”

Right now, my slowly-emerging politics are mainly concerned with challenging the way people think, challenging what is accepted, pushing up lesser-heard narratives and pointing out their nuances when people oversimplify them. I know how to complicate things, to ask questions, not to provide answers. Not to provide solutions. Not to change policy. Not to vote. I often just figure that if people’s hearts and minds are changed, policy eventually will too, a kind of “trickle up” theory of politics.

And I do, in so many ways, believe in that. But I also know that my privilege has left me without the need to worry about policy or political representation. My privilege has left without the need to vote, because change doesn’t need to happen for me. If the world remained exactly how it is, I could go on to lead a successful and fulfilled life, mostly unaware and unconcerned about the fact that my success would come at the expense of others, would be built on the backs of others who have been tracked into the massive system of labor designed to make it look like I worked my way to where I am.

But I’ve already learned too much. Maybe it’d be possible for me to forget or to unlearn, maybe if stopped following half of the people that pop up on my Twitter and Facebook feeds, maybe if I moved to an all-white area and taught all-white students and used a curriculum written by all-white people that sends the message that racism is in the past and everything is, finally, as it should be. Maybe then I could forget that it’s not. And sometimes, I think it’d make things a whole lot easier.

But I don’t want to forget, and at this point, I don’t know if forgetting is possible. Maybe living in denial would be possible, but not outright erasure. Today I stood on the bridge in Selma where people gave their bodies for the right to vote, stood in front of the Civil Rights Memorial, in front of the gap in the lopsided, circular timeline that wobbles and rolls and circles round and round “until justice rolls down like waters,” and it left me with the choice of stepping into that gap in the timeline that bends towards justice or of opting for one more steady, one where change is an annoying occasional jolt to what I’ve accepted as normal rather than a leap towards an elusive future I am working towards because I refuse to accept the world we’ve been given. I stand there, a body marked with a free pass out of this uncertain loop barreling forward, and I feel—even though the choice is my own—I feel no choice in stepping in and rolling onward, hoping that the 120 pounds that my slight frame adds to this motion can help to build some momentum, help to continue the movement towards a world that embodies mysterious words like glory, love, and justice.

The group from my university in front of the Civil Rights Memorial

So, as I go forward, I know I must vote. Because as much as this act may hit me with no more force than a puff of smoke and as much as my participation may hit others even less, I know it’s not just for me. If voting doesn’t increase my own security or representation—as if I need more of either—if voting isn’t for me, then it must be for people like Laquan McDonald, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boya, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Emmett Till, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., all those who have been killed by injustice and resurrected through retellings of history, through marches, through hashtags, through this movement that demands that I act like their lives and their deaths matter, that their destroyed bodies matter, and that—even though they carry little weight—my vote and my body and the things I do with them do, in fact, matter.