“Resist Anticipatory Obedience: A Love Letter to Educators and Youth Workers”

written by Elizabeth Bishop and Michelle Fine over 146 hours between February 11-17, 2025

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Elizabeth Bishop: Thank you for agreeing to this quick dialogue for rapid response publishing. This piece began as five short questions (demarcated in the text below) and ended as 10 page single-spaced essay and a call to action to join our public archive. Initially, I asked you if you would co-publish with me after we were in a shared community space where you said the phrase that became the title of this piece: “do not engage in anticipatory obedience.”

Q1 – Can you say a few more words about this idea: what is anticipatory obedience and why is it something to counteract?

Michelle Fine: In this love letter to educators and youth workers, I begin with the obvious: liberatory projects for collective freedom and self-determination are under siege. Ask any librarian who has been sued by Moms for Liberty.

EB: My mom was a librarian. Libraries are one of the last strongholds of democracy. The attack on school libraries is exactly about censorship and control and the work of the thought police.

MF: Witness the scholasticide – destruction of libraries, schools, archives, and universities in Gaza. Ask a teacher in Florida what “words” they can not speak to children – race, equity, gay, gender, Black…. Speak with Black Mothers for Education in Texas who are hosting freedom schools so their children are not “(mis)educated” to use the language of Carter Woodson. Sit with a trans youth, or their parent/guardian(s), searching for a safe state to move to.  Watch families who escaped state/intimate violence, sought asylum at the US border and are now scared to open their doors in Newark, take their babies to school in Brooklyn, allow their trans child out of the house in Texas, tortured with threats and shackles of deportation or Guantanamo.

EB: Asylum has been ransacked. The inscription on the Statue of Liberty is fading away…

MF: Funny – you and I are from quite different generations but that green lady holds a space in my heart. My parents both arrived on Ellis Island, poor Jewish children from Poland; it was 1921, sailing in under the Statue’s green skirts, at a time in history when the promise was made possible for white immigrants – as Karen Brodkin Saks tells us in the book When the Jews became White.  One hundred and three years later, I stood with 500 Jewish Voice for Peace members, under those same skirts, demanding freedom for Palestinians.  Before the action, we huddled in a circle each speaking “what are you bringing with you to the top of the Statue.” Someone shared her immigrant grandmother’s sweater; another a grandfather’s hat; a brooch; stories of the fight for freedom dreams our ancestors carried across the Atlantic. The ironies stung us all. And so today, in the midst of continued state violence, and amplified assaults on communities of color/immigration/working class/queer/without documents, it is gorgeous to realize that so many stand ready to resist and protect, scared/eager to organize, worried about losing our jobs/funding/reputation/status and dreaming about throwing our bodies under the ICE vans parked outside our schools. We know well that the assault on Palestine, on trans youth, undocumented and DACA students and families, DEI, families of color, workers, intellectuals, organizers, educators, youth workers… stems from the white supremacist elite source; we are learning the strategy must be rooted in solidarities and we can not let them split us.

EB: I strongly agree with this sentiment – that in the midst of the chaos, it is essential we find joy in each other and uplift each other while we defend each other’s right to exist, to autonomy, to survive and to thrive. As a professor and a loud advocate for front-line workers in education and youth development, I want to seriously support us in thinking about how to not engage in anticipatory obedience: not speaking words; not teaching topics; not reading “banned” books.  This line of thinking can be very detrimental to us and make us think that we have to give up our power in advance.

I recently had a group of white educators get trapped in the “pace of progress” (Gorski 2019) argument while talking with me about the word “equity” – that maybe if we didn’t use the term, then maybe we could get more traction with white folks who are resistant… these are hard moments for me to swallow but this is exactly the work of education to unpack. This is when I ask questions. Inquiry. This is when we bring in history and follow the morphing (anti)trends of language. This work isn’t linear, so some of our thinking and writing and teaching and organizing necessarily reflects that lack of linearity. Our beautiful struggle is built on more than logic alone.

MF: Educators and youth workers are first responders with bellies and hearts stuffed with wisdom, passion, irrepressible commitments to liberation, self determination – and, at the same time, a bone-deep instinct to protect young people.  You have never heard of a teacher running from a school shooting, even as we have heard of school police fleeing.  Instead we are squeezing through porous holes in the fascist membrane to resist. We labor in schools or youth organizations where resistance and fear steam off of young people and where complicity from our administrators surrounds.  Most of us are unsure if our supervisors/directors/principals will support us if you speak/teach/act with compassion. It is to this project I would love us to think together about the phases of anticipatory obedience and the varied registers of resistance and re-imagination and to build an archive together, with educators and youth workers around the country, to open an archive – Public Offering: Archive of anticipatory obedience, Resistance and Subversion (POARS).

EB: Yes! POARS capturing our powers to disrupt and document that resistance. This project is hydra-headed in a beautiful way – the way that root systems take innumerable rhizomatic routes as they extend to find nutrients and sustenance to fortify themselves for shifting seasons. That is true about the deep history of social movement work internationally and it feels particularly like an opening in this moment in the U.S. for those of us with some power/access/privilege from inside universities. For so much of my career, I have been involved in work that is about “collective impact” or “wrap-around services” for families in “opportunity zones” and other frameworks which both hold potential for aligned efforts and get lost in the bureaucracy of short-term funding cycles and power grabs internal to the projects that interrupt the real work we must do: to feed people, to house them and educate them on their rights – and create conditions for joy beyond survival.

Throughout that history working inside/adjacent to/at the whim of higher education, I have seen the power grabs all too clearly when “research-backed” work is proposed in partnership with members of high poverty communities (that are disproportionately Black and brown and immigrant) but key decisions are being made in university board rooms with excess food to throw out in the end. No cycles are broken. Power doesn’t shift. “Social change” gets published in “top-tier” journals behind paywalls. Of course it doesn’t have to be like this, you yourself have led a charge with partners and co-conspirators to do deep critical participatory action research for decades. You literally wrote the book on it with María Elena Torre in 2021. So it is not the case that we cannot do this from within institutions – we just shouldn’t expect much from them and should be prepared for them to not defend us in the end while we resist overtures toward anticipatory obedience. This is straight from bell hooks: “the classroom is the most radical space of possibility inside the academy.”

MF: Agree with you; like hooks and so many others, I am stubbornly unwilling to surrender public higher education as only oppressive. In the archives Lost & Found, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambera and Adrienne Rich, all of whom were teaching in SEEK at CUNY, wrote letters/memos/notes to themselves and each other about CUNY as both a prison and a liberatory space. I want to honor that braid, and help to sustain the liberatory mo(ve)ments, possibilities, fragments that swell within the often oppressive, always under funded, sometimes hilarious and vibrant space we call CUNY.

EB: I don’t think it’s only oppressive – I just find myself fighting hard from the inside while knowing that my perch is only important because of my teaching and mentorship. That is enough for me and at the same time the university does not have to work hard on my behalf. This is not new. That braid you want to weave and honor reminds me of so many outsider academics. Again, bell hooks comes to mind. Gloria Anzaldúa often comes to mind/heart.

MF: At this moment in the new U.S. administration, many are working in institutions – public/private/not for profit/transnational – that are shivering – for good reason; engaged in what Tim Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience” or Hannah Arendt recognized as the “banality of evil.” We watch our universities/schools/orgs pull back; engage in a soft (or hard) surveillance; shrink to the technical and melt away from their moral missions. In the beginning they were silent, then they engaged in what Diana Taylor calls percepticide (the killing off of what I saw/know). In the context of institutional cultures that are both embodying and trying to hide these structural anxieties and paranoia, some dare to speak aloud, pose critique, ask the painful questions of “where is your heart?” “where are our investments” “can you say genocide/apartheid/we are all immigrants/trans.” Our words/acts/banners/refusals come to mark the mythical line between civil and  “going too far.”

At the same time, once those lines are drawn and the “bad” protesters are tarred, those who are truly vulnerable – workers/students/those who speak out and protest – are set out to dry, some criminalized. Many remain silent. Audre Lorde reminds us “our silence won’t protect us” – but we know that some who dare to contest the moral contradictions of the organization, may be fired, put on leave, isolated from colleagues, reprimanded, doxxed, videotaped, blasted on X or worse.

Ten years ago, when neoliberal education privatizers from DFER (Democrats for Educational Reform) were trying to take over school districts of Newark NJ, Highland Park, Montclair NJ, and other communities, we founded a multi-racial activist group called MCAS (Montclair Cares About Schools), comprised of educators/activists/parents and students.  Eager to dismantle public education, assault the unions, institute high stakes testing, proliferate charters, tie teacher evaluations to student test scores, DFER sent a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request to CUNY demanding all of my emails with 28 named racial and educational activists from Montclair, NJ. I tried to convince CUNY not to surrender the private emails, but they did. CUNY relinquished more than 1,000 of my emails with named educators/activists feeding the witchhunt, the attempt to censor and silence us.  Of course it stung; it was hilarious and humiliating (There was one email where I wrote to others at a rare moment when the opposition seemed to be acquiescing, “Why are they sucking our dicks?” – don’t ask what I was thinking. But this particularly elegant quote was circulated in our local media.)  Then a massive counter response, a global petition of educators resisting privatization swelled. All to say, we have been here before, and many have sacrificed much more. But it still aches. I was not surprised at the privatizers, I was naively shocked that CUNY submitted to such a clear and aggressive violation of my academic freedom.  So we can’t be shocked again…

We must be vigilant, because we are surrounded by “good enough” institutions engaging in anticipatory obedience.

EB: I think about the way that “good enough” institutions have been engaging in neoliberal practices for decades (probably as long as I’ve been alive) that have laid the groundwork for them to abdicate responsibility in this crucial moment. The university is an engine of profit which incidentally can be a space for knowledge to grow. We often blossom as scholars – students and faculty alike – despite the university. When you look at the trend statistics on the adjunctification of higher education, it becomes clear that so many of us who teach in universities will never experience those institutions as sustainable spaces for our careers to develop. It is as if each time a tenured faculty member retires from a long career, the stockholders agree that the endowment will be better off if adjuncts or doctoral students teach their classes at a fraction of the cost with few benefits. We do good work despite this because we love our students and care about the communities we serve. Most of my students propose research on topics that are actively under threat in the U.S. right now from an authoritarian, fascistic executive order regime.

You couple this with the asteroid of the predatory student debt crisis and you have current and rising generations of the professoriate who are moving mountains with tools that we brought to the university ourselves. When I step back to track the skyrocketing cost of education in this moment of AI-fetishization exploited by the tech-oligarghy, I see data-brokers and edtech profiteers littering the playing field with no interest in our data privacy or security… so we find ourselves operating across a landscape where we are always in the state of defending “our data bodies” (https://www.odbproject.org/) while speaking out against censorship of our speech or self-censorship of our ideas.

I think one of the most pressing topics to teach youth and educators alike is how to defend our data. The #1 thing anyone says to me about defending data is “they already have it” which is exactly the moves of anticipatory obedience. It is always about consent. Just because you gave your data away yesterday doesn’t mean you can’t make a different decision today. Data is getting scraped on children every day. They do not consent to schools forcing the newest shiniest Silicon Valley platform on them. A different example: I have never had my photo taken by TSA at the airport and I fly at least once a month, sometimes much more. There are signs that say the photo is optional but I have never observed anyone besides myself request: “no photo please.” This is the Edward Snowden argument – if you don’t defend your rights, don’t be surprised when you lose them. I say that as a faculty member who probably won’t get busted for talking about Snowden because I’m not that significant on the organizational chart of a university. From this position as a lowly adjunct, I find opportunities to crack open conversations that need to be had.

MF: From the perch of my relatively safe and very senior faculty position, and surrounded by friends and comrades and students – the publicly bold and the quietly resisting, and those of us who are hybrid – it seems important to name, beware and disrupt the evolving phases of anticipatory obedience.  We know it begins with silence, deeply suspicious, but then the slope of anticipatory obedience is steep, slippery and oiled with an eerie quiet in drag as neutrality.

First you hear the loud silence and the whispers (“Why aren’t they saying Gaza? Where are the gender neutral bathrooms? Why aren’t we being informed about how to respond if ICE shows up on our campus?) The demands begin to be articulated quietly and then most boldly.  As the demands grow louder, officials argue we “can’t be political” or they offer the “two-sides” framework. Institutions scramble to be “fair” and “not offend” (who?) – even as the bodies and evidence pile up. As demands grow more acute, Institutional refusals to engage crescendo with the policing and criminalization of dissent. New groups claim victimization or fear (white plaintiffs in Affirmative Action cases), new words are censored, some student and faculty faces are paraded on the sides of doxxing trucks or tapes of classrooms are submitted to City Council or the Daily News… Chill has a more powerful velocity than courage does. Eventually, in the name of “protecting” the institution, facilities people are asked to tear down the initials DEI, administrators to shift admissions policies, deans insist that we whiten the curriculum, remove books, rename the Gulf of Mexico and there is a subtle affirmative action call for white Afrikans from South Africa.

Obedience is not a bright line, it’s a well oiled seductive choreography, invitation and surrender, that leaves a stench, scars, a chill and parades publicly those who dare.

EB: I am compelled to mirror this question back to you:

Q2 – So what is our work right now?

MF: It is important to remember – and refuse to forget – that policing/punishing/criminalizing dissent is an old tactic of authoritarian regimes. Ironically, joyously and painfully, repression only serves to mobilize more and more resistance. Our work is to pierce the silence, mobilize, accompany movements for justice, host bold events and quiet gatherings, invite people to come together to “speak the questions etched on your heart.” Indeed with this informal blog-alogue, and our invitation for you (the reader) to submit to the POARS archive, we will catalogue incidents of anticipatory obedience, and document strategically bold and subversive forms of resistance, rendering visible the toxicity floating softly into our organizational lives, and our souls, and the resistance that burns bright.

EB: This is the invitation: speak the questions etched on your heart, pierce the silence that our fear of a fascist regime makes us quiet in moments when our survival depends on speaking out. “Speaking out” differs depending on privilege, status, safety. The point: we do not shrink away. We cannot be erased.

MF: When the sound barrier is broken – that is when someone(s) dare to name the injustice/contest the violence/expose the flow of monies/gently or more passionately challenge the institution, it melts the glacier of fear; seems not so frightening for others.   This is where privilege matters – those of us with some have an obligation to rupture the silence, name the issues, point to the structural forces behind the downstream symptoms, that is, take the risk. At that point we may begin to see the soft fragments of solidarity leak into our segmented struggles for trans justice, immigration justice, movement for Black lives, prison and policing abolition, and those who demand justice for Palestine… But of course solidarities are fragile. For those with some privilege – by race/gender/sexuality/documentation/role – we have an obligation to stand alongside, step back, and move forward when the assault is mid-air.  Don’t try this alone – always be in community as you wander into treacherous waters.

EB: That is partially why I turned to you. I heard you speak truth to power clearly in our meeting a week ago and knew we needed to explore/explode a dialogue such as this from that moment. This is the togetherness of building solidarities, opening new routes to disrupt/subvert/reclaim.

MF: CUNY is a complex and shifting space of ongoing, loving struggle – in the most delicious and most exhausting ways.  We are a community of faculty/staff/students/communitymembers/administrators/workers who labor to educate, mobilize, build solidarities and dare to speak with/about/toward the unsayable.

Last Spring 2024 semester, a stunning, vibrant, scholarly, ethical, loving, aesthetic and multi-generational gathering emerged at the CCNY encampment.  Muslim students, Jewish students, queer students, students with disabilities, and those in the movement for Black lives and immigration justice and prison abolition held study and struggle groups on racial capitalism, on labor solidarities, and I facilitated a quiet corner of folks where we simply spoke, “what’s on your heart?” In circle, we stitched our concerns, without seeking consensus.  Many of us brought our grandchildren. There were joyful spaces for art and story telling, book reading, discussions across labor unions; time to pray, to eat, to host a multi-ethnic/religious Shabbat dinner, to bring our classes in the spirit of the Open University, to share stories of rent/struggle/joy with our neighbors in Harlem.

And yet during this turbulent and enriching time, most faculty feared “raising the issue” in their classes and so remained silent – which of course doubled as complicity – as administrative memos recognized October 7, the pain in Israel, the plight of the hostages and remained  silent about the massive violent assault in Gaza, the emergent genocide and ethnic cleansing, the scholasticide of Palestinian knowledge/archives/libraries/schools/universities, strategies for BDS as a non-violent move of solidarity.

EB: I found myself on a “Scholars Under Fire” database the day after the 2025 inauguration – undoubtedly for “raising issues.”

MF: You are in very good company. Witches burned at the stake; under fire.

EB: My ancestor Bridget Bishop was the first witch burned in Salem in 1692.

MF: Our institutions – universities, youth organizations, not for profits – by refusing to engage, cede space, and betray our mission to dialogue, to engage across, to disagree, to educate all of the children of the city.  By criminalizing the encampment students/staff/faculty, our universities violently severed trust with students. And yet the desire for freedom, justice and solidarity was insatiable; legal defense funds swelled, Columbia students refused to have their records cleaned unless the CUNY students were treated equally; conversations across universities and transnational borders persisted, some underground, in coffee shops, on Signal, in courthouses, in our classrooms… these struggles nourished both knowledge production and political power.

EB: I think about the universities as distinct from the community-based organizations since so many of those local organizations are doing excellent front line work – direct service, mutual aid, triage. Depending how they move, their doors will be shuttered. Universities are less at risk. So how do we create communities strong enough to not cede our ground for justice? And to save space for joy?

MF: Like obedience, resistance must come in distinct registers. For some this is a moment to be strategic and bold.  Some of us can speak with powerful rhetoric about justice, silencing, erasures; some of us will huddle to protect those most vulnerable; some of the most “vulnerable” have long body memories of trauma past and ongoing, knowledge of how to breathe and make music/laugh/organize even as the police are lining up.  Some of us may choose to be quiet.  But together we need a political choreography of bold and quiet; above and underground; separated spaces for those directly impacted, and solidarity spaces as we are all responsible to build another tomorrow. We must hold space, invite those who are already engaged with both feet and those who might want to listen even with a dark screen, on a zoom call to decide if it is “safe enough” to engage and breathe.

Simply, I believe that the desire for freedom is irrepressible, and for most the desire for justice and solidarities is strong.  I have worked in prisons where women gathered to build AIDS care, intimate violence collectives, build college and art and a child care center; I spent time with activists from universities in South Africa where students protested “Rhodes Statues (and then later fees) must fall,” boycotted formal education, shut down administration buildings, curated small reading/study groups across campus, building and making knowledge – until the administration called in the military police, and then the study groups were shuttered and the law school burned. (footnote – when administrations rely upon violent policing, mobilizations tend toward the violent – we must remember the encampments in South Africa and at CUNY, the knowledge critiqued/created/shared, the yearnings for justice, the sweet taste of solidarities before the state violence landed). We – at The Public Science Project – have collaborated with a small collective of Black mothers in Texas resurrecting freedom schools to teach Black history, and teachers in Arizona holding after school “banned book” clubs with middle schools.  The desire to read/engage/resist/be free/imagine what else is possible is deliciously mischievous but impossible to smother.  Recall the will for Black literacy; for queer love; for girls’ schools across the globe. When universities shut down critical analyses/demands/radical imaginations, the yearnings spill out the doors, into the halls, onto the greens, through the encampments, in zines, in protests.  We should be proud, but we are criminalized. And then fifty years later – as in The Five Demands film of City College protests – the struggles will be celebrated.

Even as we critique schools, education as reproduction and the oppressive dynamics of schooling, it is stunning to realize that education must be a radical and therefore dangerous project. Authoritarian regimes everywhere work so hard to defund/deny/starve schooling = for all, for some, for girls, for children of color… We witness a “cutting out of tongues” (thank you Gloria Anzaldúa) in the US in the proliferation of lists of  “don’t say these words”; book bans; the obsessive drive to slaughter DEI initiatives; the wholesale destruction of schools, universities, archives, libraries in Gaza (read Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom); the refusal to educate fully in some religious schools that are being challenged in New York State; the commitment to deny girls education in many countries around the world…

Education is/can be a radical project.  Once they start clipping our tongues, or we begin to gently clip our own, anticipatory obedience settles into a fascistic project. And yet desire is insatiable, with a coyote-like transfiguration, always emergent.

EB: Something that stood out to me in thinking about writing this piece with you is that we have different relative privileges and oppressions. When I proposed this, I was hoping we could produce something short and fast for teachers and youth workers to fortify themselves in this socio-political moment. I am compelled to do this because of my own racio-economic privilege. As a queer anti-racist white educator with a Ph.D., I feel very free to “go for broke” as James Baldwin (1963) told teachers we must do. I speak through an inquiry-oriented human rights lens from within whatever university or community space I am in, backed by citations as receipts. It strikes me that you’re well positioned to speak out too – and clearly you have and you do and you will. You’ve come so far in your career that you are able to speak truth to power unabashedly which is a model scholars like myself continue to need. Yet I’ve been such an outsider academic in higher education most of my career that I mostly write and speak on whatever I want.

Q3 – How do we mobilize our relative privileges for justice? What is required of us right now?

MF: Those of us who work in/through/despite universities, i would say have an obligation to leverage our resources, our skills, our humble capacities to be in solidarity with those most impacted; to track the money; to out the abuse of power; to speak the unspeakable; to ask hard questions; to insist, for instance that universities not weaponize anti-Semitism as a way to smother critique of Israel or contaminate dissenters; to hold space for teachers being charged with “hate crimes” for teaching progressive curriculum or supporting mixed status families.  Universities are sites where we can hold testimonials, where we can connect the dots of criminalizing trans youth and mixed status families and youth of color and those who support Palestine. We can demand divestment, as we have during the times of South African apartheid or when universities decided to stop funded environmental threats. At the same time we have an obligation to name the monied and power interests that render all of these struggles controversial. Whiteness, academic position, age – I can speak/be bold/be fierce and work alongside those who prefer an underground railroad to freedom, to gather for care/protection/joy.  Together we can break structured silences, gather data on dark money and undue influence, and call out the varied violations of academic, and human, freedoms.  And we must hold our institutions publicly accountable – which is the humble hope of our invited archive.

EB: Many people are saying we need to pace ourselves in our news consumption since the “shock doctrine” of “disaster capitalism” (Klein 2007) playbook is designed to cause chaos to our lives and attack our nervous systems while simultaneously clamping down on our rights. There is some truth to that wisdom to limit our consumption, to moderate what we can tolerate psychologically and emotionally. And yet, those of us who work with vulnerable populations (such as immigrants, trans folks, women, incarcerated youth) do not have the luxury to look away. Many of us ourselves are part of these groups, they are members of our families and communities. It is not an abstraction. We can still take care of ourselves while being informed. I watch Democracy Now almost everyday. People ask me how I can do that but I find hope and strategy in the analysis of the DN guests – different than watching corporate media say nothing. I really believe that those of us with privilege need to be in the know in order to fight alongside and on behalf of individuals and groups who are being targeted right now.

Q4 – How does that fight to love our communities connect to our work counteracting anticipatory obedience?

MF: Right after the election, my partner who teaches at a Jesuit University where many working class youth of color live in mixed status families, where he is head of PRIDE and one of the founders of The Center for Undocumented Students, and we are both active in Jewish Voice for Peace, we simply opened our doors, with the smells of lasagna (veggie) and brisket, for students from CUNY and Saint Peters and Montclair State, and we ate, and cried, and laughed and promised to stand alongside each other as the winds chilled us, and our kin. I tried to withdraw from the news cycle but I am back in the gain. Tracking both what the media are telling us, and what we need to know by keeping ourselves grounded in community, in struggle, in public spaces. We raise money for lawyers, find beds for those who need, help families write children’s books in Spanish “in case one day you come home, and we are not here, go to the kitchen and in the top shelf, in a red envelope is a letter for your teacher.”

EB: The most important messages I’ve been giving to my students are: 1) citations are receipts; 2) don’t be metaphorically paralyzed by paradox; and 3) drink water, take computer breaks. Each of these messages hold distinct power in our fight against fascism and the devastating white supremacist moves to seize control by a racist-sexist-transphobic-xenophobic authoritarian regime. Psychologists have diagnosed these dangerous narcissistic delusional moves many times over. As I have written elsewhere, Trump may have been gone from office for a short while but his brand of fascism and white supremacy that is policing bodies (especially women and queer folks) and communities (Black, Brown, immigrant, trans) isn’t going anywhere and has been here all along. What is important is that we have been resisting all along. They try to shock our systems but as adrienne maree brown has taught us, we emerge strategy at sites of possibility; sites of resistance are spaces of opportunity and it is crucial that we do not cancel each other along the way. So who do you turn to for guidance – what models in history strengthen you?

Q5 – What does it look like to step up from a place of privilege while stepping back in deep reflective praxis from a place of “critical love” and “critical humility” (Sealey-Ruiz, 2020)?

MF: In my heart, in my belly, in my head… I am moved by those who came before… including a grandmother Rebecca, mother of 18, wearing a sheitel, no money, no English, who schlepped from Poland to Williamsburg, with the 4 youngest in tow, my mother Rose the baby, as the elder brothers awaited them in Brooklyn. Didn’t know her, but she was a badass I carry in my soul’s back pocket.

Over the years I have been engaged/witnessed/read on so many struggles of justice, inquiry, music, rough and luscious solidarities… they pave the road for me/my students/comrades…

I hold tight the organizing that took place since 1932 at Highlander Center in Tennessee, “a heartbeat for radical change,” where Myles Horton, Septima Clark, miners, unionists, public health epidemiologists, organizers and musicians gathered to trace the incidence of black lung, to mobilize policies and campaigns for racial justice and worker safety, to birth songs for justice, braiding music, folklore, science and labor organizing.  Burned down, surrounded by the Klan, Highlander just keeps rising to do the work that needs to be done in/by/for Appalachia. Dear to my own work is the four year stretch, thirty years ago, when Kathy Boudin, Judy Clark, Cheryl Wilkins, Aisha Bowen, Donna Hylton, Maria Elena Torre, Debora Upegui, Rosemarie Roberts, Pamela Smith, Migdalia Martinz and others worked together – as a wildly radical research team- to study the impact of college on the women, their children, the prison environment and post-release freedom dreams.  A gorgeous, brilliant collective of women from CUNY and women imprisoned at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, we huddled every other Thursday, in the basement of the prison, sharing stories, gathering evidence, organizing, strategizing to secure college in prison and producing a volume Changing Minds: The Impact of College in Prison (www.prisonpolicy.org).

Years later, with most of our sister-researchers now out of prison, together we are still documenting and making movies about the radical possibilities of formerly incarcerated women led movements in the U.S. and transnationally; excavating the entangled relationship of domestic violence and the criminalization of women – particularly women of color; documenting the power of research movements led by and for those most impacted.  From each scene of critical community-led inquiry, we cross dangerous lines of power and privilege and we birth hope/obligation from the cooperative struggles taken up by collectives of very differently positioned people. With passion, joy and curiosities, we come together to inquire and demand justice, to collect stories and statistics, to insist on what could be, in academic writing, amicus briefs, community organizing brochures, pamphlets, sidewalk side, performances and pop up exhibits.  My old lady/now gone, friend/colleague/momtor Maxine Greene asked us to stretch toward “aesthetic awakenings” with our schools/research/art, and refuse to engage in “anaesthetic numbing.” This must be a commitment of teaching and youth organizing – to provoke and not numb.

So too, I take wisdom from the stunning educational projects/collectives that emerged at Standing Rock when  protestors gathered to resist the Dakota Access Pipeline, as grassroots Native American groups sat alongside educators and organizers and musicians and food deliverers drove in from around the country to take space, inquire, read, study, and snuggle for justice.  I dig deeply into the archives/stories from those active in ACT UP when people with AIDS and advocates demanded to take back and control the clinical trials from NIH and insisted “no research on us without us.”  I still love telling the stories of Eddie Ellis and the Green Haven Think Tank, incarcerated for decades in upstate New York, who launched a crucial study of mass incarceration from behind bars, called the Seven Neighborhood Study – tracking, as Eddie said, “Where did all these Black people come from in prison?” (1970-1990, you can still find it online).

And – interdisciplinary activist nerd that I am – I take strength from the work of neuroscientist Bruce McEwen, public health scholar Arlene Geronimus, and others who have demonstrated that “allostatic load” – the structural stressors that young people endure, compounded by poverty/racism, homo- and transphobia, Islamophobia and xenophobia – do indeed move under the skin, hiking blood pressure and cortisol levels, threatening physical and psychological well being and yet, Mc Ewen has documented how “good enough mothering” – and I convert that to sweet/loving spaces of recognition and support – can mediate the blow of social stressors, gently placing a small protective umbrella over the heads of young people vulnerable to structural violence. Buffering will not necessarily stop the acid rain, but will minimize the toxic impact.  I take this work (which can sound a little mother blaming) to mean that we can/must build schools, youth organizing groups, neighborhood centers, libraries, freedom schools, social movements that nourish agency, self determination, solidarities and yes even love.  Please believe me – we have so much evidence – that one teacher, youth worker, social worker… who believes in a young person who has been systematically denied respect… can break the spell and invite the magic.  We so often focus on the “ones who got away” but take a moment to remember all you have touched – you are an allostatic load buster, transforming lives, building movements, mobilizing youth power.

EB:  I think about my graduate students, the student-teachers preparing to step fulltime into classrooms and the youth workers who run out-of-school programs across the country. Many of them are burned-out, underpaid and fearful for their own lives while still working to show up for youth and families. In anticipation of “Valentine’s” celebrations, I had my students at an ivy league university write “letters of love” to their students/co-workers/selves/classmates. I participated too and wrote a letter to one of my MA students in the CUNY SPS Youth Studies program. And then I sent it as an email. He was so happy and surprised to receive it.  We need to share this love. Our students deserve it. At its best, despite all the dread, this work fills our cups. I am so energized when I end my classes most evenings. The vast majority of our students and colleagues inside of universities and/or community organizations are working overtime to bring love, joy, richness to the young people and families in their care. Education is care work. Youth development is care work. Writing and publishing like this is care work. Launching this archive is too. We love our people so we continue to show up. It is the antidote.

INVITATION TO THE READER

Join us. We need you. Testify. Bear witness. To educators and librarians and communities across the United States: have you been asked to “scrub” your website? Change your curriculum? Not teach certain topics? Not say Black or gay or undocumented in your classroom? Is ICE present outside your school? Are people gender-policing your bathrooms at school? We invite you to submit anonymous or named “witnessing stories” and “acts of resistance/subversion stories.”

Contribute stories, screenshots, letters, audio, video, collage, documents. We will keep the archive open. We will analyze and create themes every two months or so. We will build and grow together. We are stronger than the forces that are attempting to silence us. As Mariame Kaba reminds us: hope is a discipline. As Audre Lorde reminds us: “when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid so it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.”

Submit your stories/multimedia to the POARS archive: anti-obedient-archive @ proton.me and it will end up on the archive. We love us. We got us. We keep us safe. We dare to be powerful. We move with fearlessness beyond fear. We put fascism on blast.