"Sometimes I Sound Like Gravel, and Sometimes I Sound Like Coffee and Cream."

"What Happened, Miss Simone?" is a portrayal of the thin line between musical genius and mental illness.  Told using excerpts from Nina Simone's journals, and interviews with her daughter, it is a riveting documentary.  Watch it now on Netflix.

I'm All For Free Speech But . . . Be Quiet

I don't care to hear your thoughts on gay marriage if you fall into one of the following categories:

• You are married to a white person but have never heard of Loving v. The State of Virginia.
• You failed American History in high-school and don't recognize that the 'states-rights' argument was used to justify slavery.
• You complain about government interference in the everyday lives of citizens, but expect good public schools, pothole free streets, and bridges that don't fall down when you drive over them.
• You use the Bible as justification for believing that homosexuality is a sin but haven't picked one up in over a year and don't have the foggiest idea what is actually in it.
• Are heterosexual but abusive, neglectful, or unfaithful to your spouse.  Why deny someone the right to do something that you have a) never tried or b)messed up your damn self.
• Mad that no one ever wanted to marry you.

The New Whitney

It didn't make sense to walk The High Line without visiting the new location of The Whitney Museum, so James and I bit the bullet and paid the $22.00 dollar admissions fee (unfortunately The Whitney does not have a teacher's discount or a IDNYC membership). We decided to take the stairs and were greeted with Felix Gonzalez-Torres's "Untitled (America)."

On the 5th floor, we encountered Fred Wilson's "Guarded View," which features mannequins dressed in the uniforms of museum guards from four New York City institutions.  The description of the exhibit mentions the fact that sometimes the guards are the only black people in the museum.  Seeing this definitely made me more conscious of the delicate balance these guards have to maintain; they must be authoritative yet non-confrontational.  They have to interact with people who may not be used to being told where they cannot be and what they cannot do by a black person.

Looking down the corridor of the museum it looked as if the real guards were an extension of the exhibit. 

The Whitney is home to work by other African-American artists such as William H. Johnson, Jean Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Glenn Ligon, and Kara Walker. The space is bright and airy, and there is plenty of outdoor space which prevented it from feeling too crowded. 

Untitled (Negro Sunshine) by Glenn Ligon

One of the best parts of the day was having drinks in the sun at The Studio Cafe on the 8th floor. The view was amazing and it was a great spot for people watching.  On top of that the cocktails were pretty tasty!  We are so lucky to live in New York!

On Vacation

Today was like a workout, history lesson, and photo shoot all in one!  I had never been to the High Line before, but it is now one of my favorite New York City spots.  James is one fabulous tour guide!

So Long Second Grade!

Chloe has always been a precocious child.  She was born holding her head up with her eyes wide open.  She walked at 10 months and used her words to communicate with strangers as soon as she could speak.   When it was time for me to send her to pre-school I decided to send her to Riverside Church Weekday School, where my brother and I went.  I filled out the application and the financial aid forms.  Chloe went on her “interview” (a play-date observed by members of the admissions team) and was accepted.

Looking back on it, part of the decision to send her to private school was my effort to ‘keep up with the Joneses.” I went to private school and I assumed that that is just what bougie people did. The first year was great; the school was racially diverse (although not as diverse in terms of economics status or family structure), and Chloe seemed to thrive in the social environment.  I was paying 10,000 a year for a half-day program (a HUGE sum on a Storefront teacher’s salary) but the sacrifice was worth it.

The next year it was a whole different story.  I noticed that Chloe’s picture often did not appear in the weekly newsletters sent home to parents.  Her teachers did not seem to understand that I was a teacher too. I worked the same hours that they did, and therefore could not come to every performance, lunch potluck, or morning PTA meeting.  When they did see me they treated me with this false- “Oh! It’s so good to see you!”- enthusiasm that made me feel like I had just gotten out of jail.

The breaking point was when Chloe’s teachers told me she had “low self-esteem” during an early Parent-Teacher Conference.  When I asked them to justify their conclusion they pointed out that she didn’t like to clean up after herself.  Huh?  Since I make it a point not to argue with fools, I just smiled and nodded and committed to getting Chloe out of there the next year.  There was no way that I was going to pay someone who thought that it was their job to cure my child of a problem that she did not have. These teachers did not like my child.

As a teacher, up until then, I didn’t think that I had to like my students.  I thought that my responsibility was to respect them and challenge them academically- but I wasn’t trying to be friends with them so why did I have to like them?  It wasn’t until Chloe had teachers who didn’t like her that I realized that I needed to change. For the sake of my students (and their parents) I had to find something to like about each child that I interacted with. No matter how much adults smile with their mouths but not their eyes, or speak in sugary high-pitched voices, children can sense when an adult doesn’t care for them.

For the past three years at The Hamilton Heights School, Chloe has been able to take Mandarin and Spanish classes.  She has learned to swim and travelled to Carnegie Hall on field trips.  She has developed a love of mathematics, and now reads at a 4^th or 5^th grade level.  But more important than any of those things, she has been taught by educators that not only like her, but love her.  Thank you Ms. Tasha and Ms. Lisa!

Storefront Step-Up Day 2015

That moment when you realize that the children who you taught in middle school are now young adults, but you don't feel any older!

Self-Love, Self Preservation

Every day we wake up in the mornings and look at our phones, turn on the news, or open the newspaper and are confronted with images of black men, women, and children being shot, beaten, objectified, and dispossessed.  We relentlessly reblog and share stories of our own degradation thinking that we are communicating necessary information, not realizing that it is the same story over and over again.  These images are not motivating us to action as they did during The Civil Rights Movement because today we believe that sharing something on social media is the action.  In the face of such physical and psychological violence, it is a wonder that any of us can move through the world with any semblance of self-esteem.  It is good to be a critical thinker, but we must also be aware of the impact that these images are having on our emotional well-being.  This is not to say that we should stick our heads in the sand and pretend racism does not exist.  It means that taking care of ourselves and others must be our first priority.  As Audre Lorde said, "Caring for myself is not an act of indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."

William H. Johnson

Charleston

One Way Ticket

One Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series is a collection of all 60 of the panels in Lawrence’s project about The Great Migration.  Each panel is accompanied by a brief description which, when read chronologically, tells the story of the largest migration in American history.  It is amazing to realize that many of these panels were created when Lawrence was just 23 years old.

However, One Way Ticket is about so much more than Jacob Lawrence.  The theme of the exhibit is ‘artist as historian and activist’.  It features photographs by Gordon Parks, paintings by Romare Bearden and William H. Johnson, and first editions of novels by Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen. Throughout the exhibit, there are stations where one can sit and swipe through digital versions of the texts.  One of the most moving parts of The Price of the Ticket was the film of Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” and Marion Anderson singing “My Country Tis of Thee.” 

My only complaints are that it costs $25.00 to get into MOMA (not a "suggested donation") and there is no photography allowed in the exhibit (probably so that you will buy the reproductions of Lawrence’s work on sale). Nevertheless, this was definitely one of the most thorough and engaging exhibits of African-American art that I have seen in a while.  It is suitable for everyone from school children to American history buffs. Go see it before it closes in early September.

#youcantsitwithus

Looking for her book deal!

I will admit that I was entertained by Miz Rachel and her various hairdos the first few days of this story. Maybe I related to the tan skin, braids/curly weave aesthetic.  Perhaps, I even admired how, according to her parents, she used "her artistic skills to transform herself."  However, today when she stepped down from her position at the NAACP, and instead of apologizing for her dishonesty, tried to quote critical race theory it stopped being funny.  

According to Miz Rachel, "challenging the construct of race is at the core of evolving racial consciousness."  Huh? Since when is white people making money explaining black people to white people something new?  Using her logic, because blackness is a social construct I should be able to choose to be white from this day forward. But it doesn't work that way does it?   Yes, race is a construct but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.  If Tamir Rice didn't have the power to challenge how race is defined neither should Mz. Rachel.  The fact that she thinks that she can declare that she is black because she wishes to be so is an example of the white privilege that she claims to be against. 

I wonder . .  Did Mz. Rachel decide to "challenge the construct of race" before or after suing Howard for discriminating against her because she was white? (She lost, by the way, and was ordered to pay Howard $3000.00 for wasting everyone's time).

Clearly, this woman does know when to admit that the jig is up. My prediction is that after weighing her options, Miz Rachel will do an interview in which she depicts herself as a victim of her parents, Howard University, and several abusive men. Then she will describe how she "saved" her brothers by raising at least one of them as as her son. She will talk about the ways in which she sacrificed for the black community and how betrayed she felt by some of us (of course she will give a shout out to the good Negroes who supported her). She will answer questions about how she began 'passing':  she braided her hair once because she liked the style and people began assuming that she was mixed. She liked the feeling of acceptance after the rejection she felt at Howard-so she went with it. In other words, this whole fiasco is actually our fault.  We have heard this story before.

Clearly, Mz. Rachel watched about half of Stephen Colbert's interview with Toni Morrison.  The function of the construct of race is racism, because who would some people be without it?  Why be a mediocre white woman struggling for approval when you can be Maureen Peal?

One Drop

This February I was teaching my 6^th graders about African-American artist Romare Bearden.  After projecting his image onto the Smartboard I turned around and confronted fifteen very confused faces. "He's white, Ms. Cardwell, why are we learning about him during Black History Month?" they asked. Despite, seeing the black subjects in his work, I had a hard time convincing them that Bearden was, in fact, black.  I started explaining the One Drop Rule and one of the boys looked at me and said, in all seriousness, “yeah, but Ms. Cardwell, where’s his drop?”

Romare Bearden

This week those of us with Facebook pages and Twitter accounts discovered that, despite her cornrows and tanned skin, the chair of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP had no drops.  If there is one thing that the controversy surrounding  Rachel Dolezal has reminded me, is that blackness is a social construction based on the One Drop Rule.  Part of what makes Rachel Dolezal white and Angela Davis black is that drop.

Rachel Dolezal and Angela Davis

Despite the fact that the One Drop Rule originated in slavery, black people cling to it as a means of  defining and unifying our community.  Ironically, the only way that Rachel Dolezal was able to get away with claiming blackness as long as she did was because of the One Drop Rule. 

But why do we care?  Being inundated with images of black people being treated worse than animals has a negative psychic impact on all of us, whether we are aware of it or not. In a year that we have had to endure images of black men being choked on city sidewalks and black girls tackled on the grass at pool parties- Rachel Dolezal is a flattering and curious distraction.  If Rachel Dolezal and her frizzy perm (weave?) can remind us that our culture is enviable - so be it.  It's been a long year; we are entitled to a little comic relief.

If you are as fascinated as I am with Rachel Dolezal and the idea of racial passing, check out these books.

1. Passing, by Nella Larsen

2. Caucasia by Danzy Senna

3.  Boy, Snow, Bird, by Helen Oyeyemi

4.  The Sweeter the Juice: A Memoir in Black and White, by Shirley Taylor Haizlip

5. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, by Henry Louis Gates

5. Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin

6. Passing Strange: A Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, by Martha A. Sandweiss