In The Community
As a kid, one of my favorite films involved Mexicans who counted. That movie, Stand and Deliver, was inspired by the real-life story of Jaime Escalante, a Bolivian immigrant who became a celebrated calculus teacher in East Los Angeles. The film rightly brought out the fangirl in me.
Many of Escalante’s students were stubborn Chicanos and I related; I was a Chicana and I hated algebra; history was my jam. The movie also featured Latine nerds, an archetype that was familiar but that I hadn’t seen on the big screen. Lastly, Escalante reminded me of my mom, Beatriz, a Mexican immigrant who taught public school in California.
As an adult, I now recognize the movie’s pernicious flaws.
Stereotypes are central to the plot of Stand and Deliver and while its ethnic caricatures are hard to miss – the cholo who feels pressured to hide his book smarts versus the cholo who refuses to learn – I didn’t understand how one of the movie’s primary stereotypes distorted my understanding of the teaching profession until I set foot in a classroom to instruct. Films like Stand and Deliver hurt educators by representing us as engaged in a morbidly transactional profession. In exchange for sacrificing our mental and physical health, we achieve hero status.
Martyrdom underwrites our goodness.
As the coronavirus continues to take lives, the lives of teachers and school staff included, the good-educator-as-unflinching-martyr trope is being used to shame those of us who express concerns about IRL instruction. Last month, New York Times’ columnist David Brooks penned a screed that all but accused educators critical of their working conditions of laziness, stupidity, and cowardice.
Brooks seems to prefer stoic teachers ready to become ill and die and I imagine the columnist watching Stand and Deliver, nodding in approval at a scene set during a night school session. Escalante, who has taken on a second job as an English instructor, shuffles about a classroom, clutching at his chest while he leads adult students through a set of language drills. The students seem unaware of their teacher’s distress and Escalante excuses himself. Once he’s out of their sight, he loses his composure. He sweats and pants, wheezing as he struggles to make his way down a desolate flight of stairs. Crumpling to the floor, Escalante presses his face against the seemingly cold cement as he experiences a heart attack.
(I imagine Brooks leaping to his feet to give a standing ovation! “That’s the spirit!” he screams.)
Several scenes later, Escalante convalesce in a hospital bed. His teenage son tells him, “Dad, the doctor says no stress. No job-related activity for at least a month.”
Escalante quips, “I want another doctor.”
The teacher urges his family to go home, and after they leave, he produces a pamphlet and a pen. He scribbles calculus notes and gives them to a nurse who smuggles the mathematical contraband to his students.
This plot point begs a question: If a heart attack is an unacceptable reason for a teacher to rest, what constitutes a justifiable reason?
Decapitation?
Not if the instructor who’s lost her head teaches home economics: Let her thread a needle!
Too many Americans hold teachers to the grotesque standards set by films that portray us as modern saints. I once evaluated myself according to such moral benchmarks and the first week that I taught ninth grade, I held myself to them. I developed a sore throat that I hoped could be cured by ignoring it. The pain overwhelmed me and speaking became torture. A student stared at me as I struggled to remain upright.
“Ms. Gurba,” she said, “you don’t look…good.”
“I’m fine,” I coughed. I taught the rest of the day while seated.
After school, I went to a clinic where I discovered I had strep throat and while I understood that I was infectious, I also understood that if I used sick days to recuperate, it was likely that parents, fellow faculty, administrators and even students might think me selfish. It’s not only the perfect attendance of students that’s celebrated. Teachers who come to work in spite of illness are often celebrated as well. They’re lauded for their selflessness. That’s what people have been conditioned to expect of teachers. No selfhood. Just selfless vibes.
I permitted myself one day off and agonized about it the entire time that I watched Jerry Springer.
In November of last year, CNN reported on a teacher who conducted elementary school lessons from her hospital bed following surgery. I found CNN’s fetishization of her convalescence cringeworthy but the news outlet, desperate to canonize her, placed her story in a section of its website titled “the Good Stuff.” The Good Stuff offers “headlines that make you smile” and its report on Stephany Hume characterized her as “inspiring,” “the type of teacher we all wished we’d had in elementary school.” Apparently, an ideal teacher is one whose identity is defined by unrelenting sacrifice: “…when the English language arts teacher of 20 years went to the hospital for an unexpected hernia surgery, she still made sure to read to her students at Sewell Elementary from her hospital bed — gown and all.”
Teachers are never not supposed to be giving.
We are supposed to give ourselves away until nothing remains.
Celebrating cases like Hume’s sets an absurd standard for teacher behavior, one that requires saintliness. This standard exists because, like nursing, teaching is a feminized profession with moral expectations dictated by fucked up gender norms. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the education of children has been treated as an “inherently ‘feminine’ pursuit” and data shows that the profession has grown increasingly gender segregated. 77 percent of public school teachers in the United States are women, with the “the average teacher [being] a 43-year-old white woman.”
The logic of misogyny drives the urgency with which assholes like Brooks call for teachers to return to IRL instruction. Because teachers are feminized, we’re expected to be unconcerned with our own well-being and wholly consumed with the well-being of strangers’ kids. This conceptualization falls within a framework theorized by philosopher Kate Manne, one that she terms the “human being/giver distinction.” According to this distinction, women function as givers and must conform to a set of obligations that are fundamentally economic. We must offer love, attention, affection and admiration as well as caregiving labor without the expectation of any of these moral goods or services in return. Here I will stress that the allocation of these moral goods and services is synonymous with the teaching profession.
I enjoy teaching but it’s not a religious vocation.
It’s a job, one that has become increasingly difficult to perform during the pandemic, with 77 percent of teachers reporting an increased work load compared with last year. Thanking us for our labor isn’t just unnecessary: it’s condescending. We work because we must, because under racial capitalism, we have been disciplined to the wage and racial capitalism that will punish us if we dare to critique the prevailing set of economic relations. The highest expression of gratitude to educators isn’t a litany of platitudes. Most of us would prefer to work in safe environments where our health is prioritized. In order to give that to teachers, Americans will have to relinquish their fetishization of us as selfless givers.
I’m glad English speakers took the word schadenfreude from the Germans. Adopting it was an emotionally intelligent move. The affective vocabulary English speakers rely on is slim and I look forward to the day that we develop a language abundant enough to articulate our internal hellscapes with precision.
Until then, we’re left fumbling, unable to name so many crappy states, including one that’s been on my mind since watching a TikTok video by anti-rape activist Wagatwe Wanjuki.
As Wanjuki lip syncs, “Actual goals, AF!” her TikTok performance unfolds to the tune and lyrics of Eva Gutowski’sLiterally My Life. Clad in athleisure, Wanjuki flashes a grin and a thumb’s up sign. Glitter splashes across the screen and she imitates a victory dance while this message hovers overhead: “Me finding out my rapist graduated law school and became a lawyer.”
Wanjuki’s video spoofs the inverted schadenfreude to which rape culture subjects sexual assault victims. I’ve experienced variations of this state. It’s an absurd horror, well-suited for satirical or parodic interpretations given that rape victims living in the United States navigate a two-faced society. This duality comes into focus when the supposed illegality of sexual assault is juxtaposed against criminal justice data.
According to the nation’s penal code, rape ranks among the worst of crimes, a felony whose perpetrators deserve to be locked in cages. Criminal justice statistics, however, tell a much different story. According to RAINN, “perpetrators of sexual violence are less likely to go to jail or prison than other criminals.” In fact, “out of 1000 sexual assaults, 995 perpetrators will walk free.” These numbers underscore that rape is more accurately described as a theoretical crime. The volume of perpetrators walking among us shows that the ability to commit sexual assault free of repercussions is anything but rare. Instead, rape is a commonly exercised privilege.
Those of us who are the victims of rapists experience the ramifications of sexual assault across our lifespans. One of the ugliest and most painful dimensions of rape’s aftermath is exactly what Wanjuki so brilliantly communicated through TikTok. Rape culture requires the majority of sexual assault victims to co-exist in a society where our rapists do more than move freely. In a rape culture, our attackers thrive.
Some of these perpetrators become physicians, like the doctor who assaulted Connie Chung. Others, like the former attorney general of New York, become lawyers. I know one who is employed as a teacher and yet another who draws a teacher’s pension.
An elite few, including the author of the Declaration of Independence, have sworn the oath of office and assumed the US presidency.
All of this is to say that with the election of Joe Biden, life probably sucks for former Senate staffer Tara Reade right now.
In March, Reade told journalist Katie Harper that Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993. Instead of being met with the groundswell of feminist support given to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the professor who reported Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh for attempted gang rape, an array of influential feminists strategically abandoned their commitment to the principle “believe survivors.”
Biden supporters, like Alyssa Milano, worked to create a state of exception around Reade’s account. This artificial distinction allowed them to dismiss Reade’s statements under the guise of “pragmatic” decision-making, thus obscuring the implications that Reade’s revelations could have had on Biden’s candidacy. Consequently, Biden’s defenders also communicated to rape victims that we live in a rape-tolerant society.
I explained my silence on the allegations against Joe Biden in this clip.\n\nI am still endorsing @JoeBiden. Listen to this clip to find out why. \n\n#MeToo #TimesUphttps://youtu.be/tcNx_nD6Bi4— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa Milano) 1586194756
Rape culture serves as a constant reminder of our disposability. So does witnessing a rapist luxuriate in his freedom. It stings when you happen upon your perpetrator giddily pedaling down a city street on his bicycle, soaking up the sunshine. I’ve experienced this coincidence and I admit that the fantasy of aiming my car in his direction held significant appeal. Though it may have been gratifying to introduce his face to my windshield, I decided to remain a free bitch instead of indulging in old-fashioned vigilantism.
For Reade, constant reminders of Biden “winning” are unavoidable. He’s the president-elect for fuck’s sake. I have a difficult enough time psyching myself up to go to the grocery store, a place where I might run into my rapist whistling to himself as he thumps melons, so it’s excruciating to imagine Reade’s reality, one where Biden will saturate the news for the next four years.
Much is made of the flashbacks that sexual assault victims experience in the aftermath of rape. Worse yet is that many of us continue to encounter our rapists as we move through the world. Acknowledging that reality would push society to reckon with just how many perpetrators circulate among us. It would require us to affirm that we eat lunch with rapists, work beside rapists, share our homes with rapists, split child custody with rapists, attend class with rapists and listen to rapists read the State of the Union Address from teleprompters.
Seldom do I find elements of mainstream culture that acknowledge the lifelong impact of rape. When I do, I relish them. One artifact that validates this impact is taught as part of the high school English curriculum. It is the rape of Persephone.
According to this ancient Greek tale, Hades, Lord of the Underworld, observes Persephone picking flowers in a meadow. Ever the entitled asshole, he kidnaps her, holding her captive in hell. Like many rape victims seeking to reestablish bodily autonomy, Persephone starves herself. Eventually, she accepts several pomegranate seeds that her rapist tricks her into eating. In her anguish, Persephone’s bereft mother, the Goddess Demeter, threatens to destroy the earth by subjecting it to permanent winter. With the future of the planet hanging in the balance, Zeus, God of gods, finally intervenes. As if brokering the return of a stolen toy, Zeus orders Hades to deliver Persephone back to her mom. Divine law, however, makes a return to normal impossible. After tasting the fruit of the Underworld, Persephone is required to be a part-time resident of hell. Supernatural rules mandate that she cyclically spend time with her rapist. Life for rape victims continues in the same infernal vein.
I encountered my first pretendian on a public school playground. She was a blonde and blue-eyed ten-year-old who spent the greater part of recess dangling from the jungle gym while bragging that she was Cherokee. Her news took me by surprise, my family had known her family for years, and the more she talked, the more eager I grew to this new information about her with my parents.
That evening, as we sat at our dinner table, I repeated to Mom and Dad what the girl had announced. I hadn’t anticipated Dad bursting into laughter.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Your classmate,” said Dad, “is making things up.”
I fumed with anger. I had trusted this Campbell’s soup looking kid! Why would she lie about being Native American?
“Why would she lie about being Cherokee?” I demanded.
After taking a sip of wine, Dad explained that certain Americans like inventing stories, especially tales that turn them into native people. Dad’s thesis illuminated nothing. The girl’s behavior still made no sense.
“But why?” I demanded.
“They think it’s exotic,” Dad over-asserted the word exotic to heighten its vulgarity, “and, it eases their conscience. It makes them feel better.”
“Better about what?”
“About taking things.”
“Ooooooh,” I uttered as the puzzle pieces slid together. By things, Dad meant the lands called the United States of America. Still, I didn’t want to believe that my friend, or her family, were liars, and so, I did the work of whiteness: I continued to defend her innocence.
“But she really could be part Cherokee!” I insisted.
Dad replied, “Yes. Or she might be a typical Anglo American who insists that she’s 1/16 Cherokee and descended from a princess whose name nobody seems to know.”
“HOW DID YOU KNOW THE PRINCESS PART?!” I yelled. “AND THE 1/16 PART?!!”
Dad sighed, exasperated. “Because it’s always the same damn story. Now eat your ejotes!”
Dad was on to something. The lies my classmate told me closely resemble the fabrications for which various racial and ethnic fakes have recently been held to account. Last year, Jeanine Cummins, a writer who had publicly identified as an unelaborated white lady, began announcing herself as both a “Latinx woman” and “boricua.” It was noted by many who followed her story that her attempt at claiming a spicy identity coincided with the publication of her highly anticipated novel, American Dirt. That book, a narco-thriller set in México, fetishizes immigration to the point of unintended satire. It’s a fun book to hate-read.
Cummins is perhaps the most prominent among this new crop of Dolezalitas. Others include BethAnn McLaughlin, a white woman and former assistant professor of neurology at Vanderbilt University. McLaughlin crafted a pretendianTwitter persona, @sciencing_bi. The persona remained unnamed but, over time, @sciencing_bi developed an elaborate identity, that of a Hopi anthropology professor working at Arizona State University. On July 31, McLaughlin killed her nameless invention, announcing on Twitter that @sciencing_bi had died of COVID-19. Shortly thereafter, an ASU spokesperson exposed McLaughlin’s hoax. The outing prompted McLaughlin to pander for pity. She blamed her bad behavior on an unnamed mental illness
Otra mentirosa es la Jessica Krug, a white woman and former associate professor of history at George Washington University. For years, Krug impersonated “North African Blackness,…US rooted Blackness, [and finally] Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness” to enhance her academic career. Duke University Press unwittingly published her book, Fugitive Modernities, which Krug had the fucked up balls to dedicate to her “ancestors, unknown, unnamed, who bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist.” Krug’s hyper-stereotyped Black personae most recently manifested in the form of Jess La Bombera, a salsa-dancing alter ego who spoke in a weird, guanabe, pastiche accent shared by nobody else on the planet. In anticipation of being unmasked, Krug confessed to her charade while shirking accountability, framing her shitty behavior as a trauma response.
Jess La Bombalera (Jessica Krug) - NYC City Council Testimony 6/9/20youtu.be
Kelly Kean Sharp, a white woman and former assistant professor of African American history at Furman University, is the latest ethnic fake to be exposed by doubters. Like Krug, Sharp also rooted her fictional identity in Latin-American ancestry, claiming to be a Chicana. An anonymous medium essay includes a picture of Sharp clumsily dining while wearing a huipil, a traditional Indigenous garment. The essay also features Sharp’s tweets about the commitment of her “abuela” to Goya foods. To me, this detail seemed to betray Sharp’s secret. Do you know many die-hard Chicanx Goya loyalists? I don’t. If there is a canned food brand that inspires cult-like behavior among Chicanx, it’s El Pato Salsa.
Reasons for the racial and ethnic fakery deployed by opportunists like Cummins, McLaughlin, Krug, and Sharp are varied. I’m interested in closely examining a reason inextricably tied to property: settler-colonialism. For guidance, I turn to the work of Cheryl Harris, author of the seminal article, “Whiteness as Property.” In a retrospective response to that article, Harris asserts that the “racial foundations of property remain persistently…obscure.” Harris also invokes political philosopher Jeremy Bentham to remind us that “expectations affirmed as property are not physical but metaphysical.” Harris then argues that “this subjectivity takes the concept of property deep into the heart of race and race deep into the heart of property.”
What racial and ethnic fakes do when they impersonate racially and ethnically minoritized people is engage in a pairing: They plunge the concept of property deep into the heart of race and race deep into the heart of property. The harms strewn in their wake leave us to consider three questions:
1) To whom do race and ethnicity belong?
2) Who belongs to race and ethnicity?
3) Who belongs to a race or ethnicity?
If we consider whiteness a tool through which one seizes, settles, and accumulates more properties, then we can also use it as an intellectual key. In the case of white women who impersonate those who racially or ethnically differ from themselves, we see the following: Non-white properties become targeted for settlement. According to this dynamic, the white settler relates to non-white identities, for example, that of a Hopi anthropologist or a Black Caribbean historian, as frontiers to be studied and then occupied. Non-white identities become terra nullius, “nobody’s land.” The settler-colonial visionary sees these identities as empty vessels fit for habitation.
In the twenty-first century, white settlers seek to colonize quotidian ways of being that hold exoticized appeal, or, as Edward Said put it, “They weren’t like us and for that reason [they] deserved to be ruled.” These recent crops of race and ethnic fakes share certain traits. Many have described them as sanctimonious and at some point in their impersonation or appropriation, they claimed to either be a superior iteration of whom they were impersonating or they claimed to know what was best for the group they auto-elected to represent. Both of these gestures enshrine white innocence while asserting white supremacy, and such actions are also expressions of capitalism. The white settler not only accumulates and hoards land and other material resources; the settler also accumulates and hoards the property we call experience. Krug, for example, didn’t limit herself to impersonating one type of Blackness. Instead, she worked to colonize a spectrum of the Black experience.
Consider who else she, and the others, could have colonized had they been afforded the time and the freedom. Las Dolezalitas are truly disgusting.
