Thoughts on Being Selective About the Company You Keep (Living an Activist Life…Part 5)

This is the last excerpt from the original speech for the 2011 UK Annual Black Women’s Conference where much of the Activism pieces were first read. I have some other parts that I may share, but the tone of this warranted mention of where it fell in the line of the work.

I am joined by one of my oldest and dearest friends, Salina Gray, who has traveled here from California to kiss and love on my son. Though she is one year older than me, she has the substance of a woman of my mother’s generation. Another little black girl for whom the world did not care to soften its blows in her tender years, she too understood the hard work of counter-education at a young age.

By the time we joined each other on the grounds of Prairie View A&M University, which is for us an educational phoenix like the Library of Alexandria reconstructed on a Texas hilltop by the hands and hopes of the formerly enslaved. My friend, Salina was ready. We met in an honors colloquium where we both learned and still live by a clear understanding of the difference between being an intellectual and an intellect worker and the responsibilities of black academics to the black community. She is still one of the few people I know who finds reading Paolo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed both fun and edifying. We have been friends through first loves and last call. Through the birth of our children, the death of my father, her grandfather and other people we held dear, Numerous cross-country moves, financial crises, graduations, and days when we were feeling fat and days when were feeling fine. My twin sister and I and a girl we had known since the 8^th grade sat next to Salina in the auditorium of Agricultural Sciences Building at Prairie View A &M University and she has now been my friend for almost more than half my life.

THOUGHTS NUMBER 5 ON LIVING AN ACTIVIST: BE SELECTIVE ABOUT THE COMPANY YOU KEEP. If you are in friendships, relationships, acquaintanceships, reading groups, prayer circles, coffee klatches, boo-ed up or it’s complicated situations that do not challenge you, support you, make you grow, learn or be better, move on to one that does. Be intentional in your choices. Sometimes be selfish when it comes to selecting people who think can teach you something. Relationships are work. Work hard at them. Nurture them. Always be open to new ones and with old ones, when they die bury them and move on.

While I spent my post-Prairie View time learning theories and quantitative methods, she was an elementary school teacher in the poor and gang riddled communities of Inglewood and Watts, trying to create educational spaces for empowerment through charter schools and training other teachers how to use their classrooms as sites for empowerment for black and brown children. She has attended more gang funerals than I probably know. Definitely more than I think is healthy because we have discussed the lingering impact of her work at length. She turned around the educational chances of nameless children while single-mothering a beautiful son who I once babysat in my college dorm and now stands over 6 feet tall. He is a kind, thoughtful young man.

I have watched with my own eyes as her 3^rd graders spoke to the city council to protest constricting library resources in their community. I have read the letters her students wrote in support of striking grocery store workers in the Los Angeles area where she taught for more than a decade. I have read their poetry, seen their art, and been subject to their intense questions—questions children in wealthier communities may live a lifetime and never ask— She was getting them ready. AND she was teaching them the complicated impositions of power that have lead to the state of affairs in the communities where they live, communities they love. All in ways digestible to their 3^rd grade minds. I have been mesmerized by the way she takes children in difficult circumstances and teaches them that they and their communities are something to be proud of and studied along side of all those who would deem them inferior.

She is a wonder in the classroom and she will tell you she is at her best when she is with children. Not just there, she has already begun teaching my son James the art of picking things up, a lesson she has been trying to teach his mother for decades. She could be wondrous in molding these young minds because she was ready. I now know that all that time she and I spent standing next to speakers in hip hop clubs, smoke filled dancehalls, at house parties with speakers in windows [If only my mother were here to see how I was not just being a smartass when I said that stuff was educational and would one day comeback to useful to me like in this talk for instance.] All of her experiences outside of her formal education were just as instructive to help her reach the children she works with as the theories of education learned in classroom’s of her student days. She takes the cultural milieu in which they exist and transforms it into tools for critique and empowerment so they too can be ready.

From the moment I entered graduate school, I began lobbying Salina to apply for the PhD. She read for sport and the desire to be better and make her students better, work I was assigned in my graduate program at the University of Michigan. But she is a woman who is not afraid to be on the front lines. So she remained in her classroom. She is a warrior for black and brown children and she has the tattoos to prove it. When she called to tell me that my years of lobbying—or she might say nagging—were making head way and she had applied to graduate school. I, of course, took a tremendous amount of credit, but the truth is she was doing it because she was ready. She applied to one school. She was accepted. In 2 years, she will have a PhD in Education with focus in Science Education and Curriculum and a certification in Environmental Resources from Stanford University and all those who peddle in the myth that black and brown and poor children are not interested in or are incapable of learning science just step aside now.

I could have talked about the “great” women of our community who are often trotted out at functions like these, like the activist and educator for whom this lecture is named, Ana Julia Cooper, like the operative for the NAACP and black woman who was tired of taking shit, Rosa Parks [you should be reading Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street], or the black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet Audre Lorde, challenge us to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. A challenge I take with me into every class I have taught since I read that work. I can go on and on like this but on my Mt. Rushmore of Black Women are the ordinary women who in my life have done extraordinary feats to make me and my world better. My Aunt Gladys Ruth Spates Spann who became a surrogate to my mother when they lost their own, my professor Dr. Jewel Limar Prestage, whose love and confidence took me from my own Texas fields of learning to the University of Michigan, my mother Sandra Faye Spates Price whose strength has stopped the world when I needed a breath and for whom my son James is a testimony to her love. My friend Salina when she does a couple 2, 3 more things will surely be there with them. But all of them, the famous women I began with or the one’s you may have just heard of from my own personal experiences were able to do the things they did because they were ready.

I guess I would leave you with the question of what are you doing to get ready, Are you ready for the small challenges and the big ones that will surely come. How are you educating yourself or un-educating or counter educating as the need maybe? What book do you have in your bag right now that you are reading for the pure pleasure of words on a page but that also because it might be just the thing you need to be useful when it is your turn to be ready. Are the songs that you listen to taking you to a place that is useful, safe, calm? Do their rhythms and resonance remind you of the good in your and the world or challenge you to think of the bad? I want to stop here and say that this last question is not a slam against hip hop or any other popular youth music. My lifetime is marked by the birth, adolescence and maturation of rap music. It features heavily in the soundtrack of my life in ways that empower and politicize me and at times conflicts with other values and identities I hold as core to my being. You have to tailor a soundtrack that does what you need it to do for you.

What are you doing? How do your politics, sense of values inform the way you do daily tasks? What actions are you taking to transform the world or just your dorm room?

Are the relationships you are in significant and transformative? Are those to whom you are connected ready to travel with you when you make a decision to take a stand? Do you check your intimate and casual associates when they engage in racist, sexist or homophobic actions or talk? Do you salute and celebrate them when they don’t? When they deserve it?

All these thoughts on living an activist life are really just a call to be thoughtful about how you go about the very short time we are given on this earth. On what markers of progress of are you gaining ground? What injustices are you shouting down? You better be ready for the journey because this it.

Are you ready?