I am sitting in my empty classroom reflecting on conversations and reactions from this past week. In this empty classroom, I think about the students who sit before me hoping to glean some type of knowledge, not just about English, but maybe about life in general. Conversations this week have included why I don’t like rap music, why country and blues are so popular, and why slow songs sometimes make us sad. These are the lighter conversations with young minds who want to know who I am. Within these same walls with colleagues, I have conversations about disrupting inequities, white fragility, and caste systems throughout the world. Each subject brings a different perspective and different reactions from colleagues. What I am experiencing right now is the lack of an adjective to describe how I feel when these topics come up in conversations and the reactions of fear, guilt, quietness, defensiveness, and discomfort that are emitted. If a book, a conversation, or a situation can evoke this type of response, how will we ever communicate, learn, grow, and move forward?
Watching how the talk of disrupting inequities has affected people close to me has caused me to pause and look through different lenses. Honestly, I don’t always like what I see, and I don’t always like the way that I feel because I see scales of the status quo clinging tightly to what has always been the norm. To disrupt the norm even unnerves those closest to me, and the revelations of their character and perceptions have been frightening. In the past four years, I have come to the realization that levels of progression are almost non-existent, and people are not who they believe they are. As a country, we have not made great strides; we have survived by attaching a band-aid to cover runny, never healing sores, and to hide the gashing wounds that leave ugly scars. That vision may seem grotesque, but doesn’t it describe the state of our world right now that oozes with fear, division, and hatred while some people consider this the New World? If our world ever calms down, we are left with the scars of fear, brokenness, injustice, racism, denial, and inhuman behavior.
In the quietness, I give thought to the parts of the conversation that make friends and colleagues uncomfortable. Some became defensive as though being accused, or suddenly become silent, or some would say “I am not a racist. I have a number of ethnic friends,” or some remain in denial about the struggle, or justify senseless brutality; and some were just uncomfortable. In my feeling “some kind of way” because I don’t have an adjective, and perhaps there is no one adjective that encompasses all of my feelings. I recognize that I can’t dwell in the denial and refusal of conversation. I can’t even dwell in the anger, the ignorance, and the silence because none of this makes the reality of injustices and inequities disappear. The lack and discomfort of conversations only deepens the divide and fear that has been tightly woven into the American fabric.
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Coffee Reflections 