YOU ARE IN IT

Hi friends,

Today I'm thinking about my own specific harms from toxic bias in my education experience, the ways that white supremacy culture becomes part of the creative cannon by educators of theatre practice, healing, and accountability.

1. In the Middle of it...

2. What's your shoe size, Boogey?

3. Cry It Out

4. Fear as Cannon

5. Literal and Metaphorical CLOWN TRAINING

6. Identities

7. Culture

8. Punishments

9. The footprints of WS in education

10. Physical Theatre School Death Star

11. The enduring legacy of fear-based education practices: it aint about you

12. "True Artistry"

13.  Making the Invisible, Visible

14. It was never about me

15. On freeing voices at the expense of other voices

16. Beyond their interests

17. You are in it (or, wrestling with White Supremacy Culture)

Thanks for sharing the tea, and feel free to write to me with your thoughts at Tara@waxingmoonmasks.com.

-Tara

*****

I n   t h e   m i d d l e   o f   i t . . .

I want to share some details with you.  I write today because I am, very much, in the middle of it. 

I'm on a journey of processing harms that were done years and years ago, and I'm seeing with each memory, the consistency and texture of ever-present white supremacy culture.  

If I hadn't put myself in the middle of it, if I just let that trauma and hurt sit inside me ignored, I'd have never made this post, a kind of bridge, for you and I to both walk across and look at the pervasiveness of bias and harm in classrooms.  

But also, I want to suggest that even though these details are 15 years old, their presence in me is as new as if it happened yesterday.  Something similar DID happen to me yesterday, in fact.  

And by acknowledging that I am IN IT, that the harm has not left me for good but is in fact in the air I breathe, SPECIFICALLY, I come back into myself.  I come back into my body.  I come back to my dignity.  I heal the thing that happened yesterday much more easily.  I navigate my ship in waters that are less murky with white supremacy culture. The memory of that time was creating an awareness in me, a muscular awareness, of what injustice looks and feels like.  

Slowly, gradually, I have collected enough bits and pieces of the puzzle to play detective, and create some understanding and context where there had been only hurt.

This body of mine, it is a time machine.  I can travel through decades of experiences just by feeling through those moments, remembering them, asking them questions.  

And I can heal them too.  That's what this post is all about.  I'm gonna 'Peggy Sue Got Marrried' my grad experience because HEALING THAT is going to make me a better citizen/human/partner/maker/ collaborator today.   

I hope that by doing this work and sharing it with you, you will also see that to some degree, we are all in the middle of it, that our harms and traumas are not waiting quietly in the closet waiting to be counted on judgement day. 

They are present.  So you need to be present to heal them.  

All of this is 100% real. No Bullshit. It is my account of being a student at Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theater.  I know I usually take the names out, but this time, I'm naming names for the good of everyone. This time, I'm gonna say it and not cover up for the sake of the other party involved. It's too much to ask. 

You ready?

W h a t ' s   y o u r   s h o e   s i z e ,   

B o o g e y ? 

In one month from tomorrow, I will sit down on a zoom call and discuss the harms that came to me during that time at school, I'll be with the new school board of directors, new leadership and all new oncoming staff, and we will talk together about how the school culture used to exist, during my time at my alma mater. 

I'm preparing for that conversation. And to do that, I am letting those harms pass through my nervous system again, though digesting them differently this time. 

When I was there, as a younger person, I had no means of speaking up to my teachers and admin about the bias-entrenched experiences I was enduring. This time, however, I am calling that boogey-person out from under the bed and asking to get their shoe size and profile pic. 

And as much emotional and cognitive labor as it is taking from me, this uphill climb through the past toward a keystone moment of sharing and hopefully healing, (I'll have more than a moment of sharing my testimony and the facilitator's are making lots of space for me,) the whole experience is giving me back some of my confidence. 

It feels like the halfway mark in a meal, when you're finally eating after you have been so hungry for a very long time.  My lungs are finally releasing tension. My breath is dropping down into my guts. 

I have been working towards this moment for 14 years. If I hadn't stayed in the long game of  cultivating courage, and practiced separating my fear from my instincts, this moment of being a badass brown girl who knows her worth would never have come.  

I'm still here.  And believe me, it's taken a lot of work on my part for me to stay.

C r y  - i t - o u t  

If courage is rooted in knowledge of the self and in faith in one's own experiences, I think it's safe to say that the school I attended for my graduate degree did not offer me any part of courage.

Quite the opposite.  My school offered me what I now recognize as gaslighting. Words didn't mean what they meant.  Actions were law. The space where I tried to grow, as one does at a school, was filled with soil that fed a very few, but was largely toxic to others.  But the toxicity was never acknowledged, and so students particularly took their cues about what was good and bad from the much beloved staff.

In fact, the school's teaching methodology, entitled "via negativa," has at it's center the purpose of stripping encouragement from students so that they were even more moldable to the teachers, thus hearing their teachers' insistence about what was good, or moreover WHO was good.  Disagreements amongst teachers hardly EVER happened, and students existed in a space of intimidation when it came to contradicting or offering opposing points of view to the classroom. In via negativa, the teachers were meant to tell us what didn't work rather than encouraging what did work.  This strategy is supposed to focus the actor/creator on the work of accepting critical feedback without having the teacher influence the student's actor/CREATOR voice.  

As long as you got feedback, you were able to move forward in the work.  There was an exciting sort of cult-of-personality feel, and we all clamored to engage with our teachers.

But it's important to say that not everyone got that all important feedback, the result of which was that  a lot of students were really attention hungry, (I mean it is theatre school,) and sometimes even starving for feedback, on a regular basis. So much so that typically students welcomed and accepted all feedback all the time, and resistance to that right of the teacher to trump our thoughts was seldom if ever challenged. 

Kind of a strategic tactic for self-perpetuation of a method, if you ask me:  

If I give up my trust in myself, I'll be making space for the ideas of my teaching authorities! 

But also,

"...then I'll be the kind of teacher that insists my students ALSO give up trust in themselves... "

A nice safe spot for insecure folks who teach, I'd say. 

Not unlike the cry-it-out method use to train babies to get through the night in a room on their own, "via negativa" insisted that teachers let that student figure out that no one is coming, and then understand that the babe will need to beg for and cherish any crumb of attention the teacher gave, and ultimately accept that crumb as LAW.  

(Unless you were one of the few who received most of the resources.  Then you were swimming in options.)

...

(Give you one guess as to who got the most resources...)

F e a r   a s   C a n n o n 

SO Basically, built-in desperation WAS their teaching method.  

And from that state of desperation, the students of that school during this time, also sought immediate shelter from the radioactive disproval of the institution's authorities. I started to realize that via negativa became a litmus for student confidence, because if a student not confident, they were often and regularly looking for ways to distance themselves from those students who irritated, dared disagree with, or who never got feedback from the teacher.

Fellow students practiced distancing themselves from stigmatized people, people such as myself, like it was the tango and they were about to be on Dance with the Stars. 

I witnessed this fear as a pervasive monster that asked more and more from my classmates as the semesters went on, at greater and greater cost to themselves, sharpening themselves into their teachers' ideal actor/creator down to a razor's edge, full on congregants of the belief that whatever the teachers said was law.  When teachers ignored you in class that day, so did the student body- popularity went hand in hand with success in the most recent performance showing.

Everyone was sharpened. This is the way to create toxic culture.

L i t e r a l   a n d   M e t a p h o r i c a l  

 C L O W N   T R A I N I N G

One truth seems clear about the field of physical theatre educational practices after my time at DAI:

A lack of courage to address classroom abuses purposely breeds it's own brand of fear, and then that fear becomes considered part of the educational CANNON.

We watched my teacher throw tennis balls at students and ferociously yell, "FAKE! GET OFF STAGE!  I DON'T BELIEVE IN YOU!" and to this abuse we were inclined to applaud the attacker.  

"He's doing it for your own good," we would think.

"He'll be crying in 5 minutes time because someone is going to show up and be authentic, and then we'll all have gone on a rollercoaster ride for the class." 

This was clown training.  And the level of verbal and physical abuse that we accepted, nay, eventually EXPECTED WITH ANTICIPATION, is horrifying to me in retrospect.

Because we didn't know that real trauma WASN'T THEATRE.  We didn't know in our young bodies that theatre SHOULDN'T MAKE MORE TRAUMA.

We were there to make ART. And the cannon of artists who normalized abuse for the sake of the craft is as long as the MFA curriculum. 

Even longer.

Questions that occur to me now, deep in retrospect, as a professional educator in theatre:

Should traumatic acts, like physical abuse and aggressive yelling, be used in educational practice?

Should trauma processing be a part of theatre educational practices since we regularly re-enact or call on traumatic events for our work? 

I d e n t i t i e s

I live in the world as a brown skinned Asian, cis female-presenting person, which was unique in my DAI classroom. As such, I am used to navigating very carefully, clearly, and specifically in collaboration with white folks.  Part of that is my use of "professionalism" which I have historically used to compensate for cultural preconceptions folks may have about me.  

I've learned to pay attention to context clues.  I only ask strategic questions for my own safety and success.  I genuinely care and appreciate answers that are offered to me.  I'm polite. This way of being in the world is my STRATEGY for being an Asian woman in a world that could care less if I fail or succeed.  If I do not employ these strategies, am less relatable and thus less interesting.  I do not revel in competitive culture, nor the qualities that define it.

White pursuing my MFA, I was surrounded by mostly white folks in school, and in the Blue Lake community.  My class consisted of 2 other folks of color, though one presented with a superior English accent, and the other was male.  One of my teachers was Black (though we had her with us for maybe 2 short weeks a semester), and only one other mentor was a person of color, (he wasn't actually a teacher, he was student from the year before mine who stuck around as an assistant teacher in one of our classes in one semester.) 

So, though I was never ALONE as a person of color, I was often LEFT ALONE to inhabit that space, so much so that I would say I had the lowest rank among our class. It never seemed that I was actually lowest rank because of some reason like intelligence or professionalism or my ideas or my performance, but instead, it was like I earned lowest rank because of low relatability and thus likeability.  Of course the staff's attitude towards me was also very defining.

The other two students of color had ways that they manifested their value in the DAI community, or perhaps, they just played well in the competitive game of the community in ways that I was not successful.  We never discussed these things.  Back then, we didn't have the words or self awareness to question the competitive shark tank that we had chosen for grad school.  But I know I FELT it, and as the lowest ranking classmate, I accumulated a lot of negative attention simply because that's how hierarchy works: the ones who benefit from the system the most are the ones who need the help the least.  The ones who need the most are the ones who get the least... 

And just like with poverty and wealth in a capitalistic system, at DAI, it's assumed that if that's what you got, it's what you deserved.  

The rules of that community were so hierarchical, it never mattered how talented I was or wasn't, I didn't stand a chance. 

The bottom line was that as a result of my own necessary navigation of the world, I needed to lean towards collaboration and away from competitiveness.  As someone whom the world deems invisible, I find my strength in communication and cooperation.  

But because the school leaned towards competition and white-defined individualism, and as the teachers already shamed me regularly for asking for something different, my classmates ultimately had little choice if they wanted to survive that place...  they had to play the game as it was set, and that meant letting me go it alone. 

Every. Person. To. Themselves.

Ironically, our degree was in Ensemble generated original play making.  

In my journals, I sorrowfully referred to our class as the Non-semble.  The fact that our MFA class could NOT bond and build each other up was ultimately my biggest disappointment from that time.  

But the culture made it impossible.

C u l t u r e 

In the Dell'Arte school community, the unspoken rule was that folks didn't challenge the professors... on anything.  When I spoke up, (for different reasons throughout my time there,) I cast myself as 'the one who doesn't cooperate' for both the staff and the student body. It wasn't a lack of my cooperation:  usually speaking up for me was something mundane, like, could we have our journals back, it's been a few weeks and I need to work with mine? Or, could we not say just "Christmas show," because there are other people who also celebrate at that time of year? 

Had these mundane "challenges" ever come from the white men or women in the group, these comments would have been passed without a blip. But for some reason, ME asking these sorts of things always seemed to resonate quite differently, and everyone in the room noticed.  

That's why they always got silent.  They were listening for the presence of anger. Punishment for my unavoidable subversion of the dominant cultural norms at DAI was a very common occurrence, mostly because, I simply didn't know I was being subversive when spoke up!

  

I grew up with a white family till age 16, so it's not like I was somehow unaccustomed to white people or white culture, lol.  But I experienced more than a few interactions with fellow students who said the equivalent of, "I have never met a person from Baltimore...".  

I realized then that there was a feeling of "unknowing-ness" around the culture of someone who lived in an historically Black city like Baltimore, and that it was different than the cultural heritage of the other folks of color in my group.  

I'm very Asian-presenting, particularly my skin and hair. However, I am not very like the "model minority" stereotype of Asians in the US, either.  I'm just me, an amalgam of all my influential components, nature and nurture.  I don't bring Philippine culture with me because I'm a second generation filipina-american who was raised by white folks.  

So, being raised in the US by white people, I didn't go in to DAI thinking I was very different culturally... But the message I RECEIVED, again and again, was that I was very different from most of the folks that surrounded me at DAI. There was a big gap, and that gap was somehow defined by my cultural identity, combined with my willingness to ask questions or make space for things when I needed it.  And as a result I found that I was status-checked, again and again, like someone that just didn't know "her place."  

P u n i s h m e n t s

Again and again, the message that came back to me was the same.  

No. 

Time. 

For. 

You.  

Little.  

Uppity. 

Brown. 

Girl.

In the classroom, my teachers' actions called me out for my differences more regularly than other students. I felt more "differentiated" there than I had ever experienced elsewhere in my creative life, and those call outs were always either disorienting or flat out hurtful.  

I remember one teacher framing the exercise we were doing in Alexander Technique as, "Who here thinks they can do that exercise better than Tara?" and I thought to myself, huh?  I thought this work was to give ME insight on myself, not a competition...  

On two occasions, I asked for the teachers and the school to reconsider something that was being asked of me and others that felt unsafe or unhealthy, and was denied both times for no reason but that they didn't choose to believe me.  

The first time that happened, I had to spend the night in a hospital because I was coughing up blood and moldy fibers from having to lie for hours on an uncleaned, moldy carpet as part of a production.  

The second time, the vehicle (that I had inspected by my then boyfriend who did auto inspections,) that our class was asked to travel in blew exhaust INTO the cabin for 4 hours as we drove into rural Oregon, and then that vehicle promptly broke down, requiring us to be rescued in the middle of the night. They later told me that they had never read the inspection, just didn't have time.

My teachers at DAI were fine with normalizing play or joking at my expense about how I was annoying or humorless... so of course the student body quickly followed.  "Get a sense of humor, Tara," one said to me in front of my peers.  Amongst those at the school at the time, the harms inflicted on me were regularly referred to as "just joking around."  And normal joking you would expect in a school of clowns! But in reality, the teasing and tone of these "jokes" was alarmingly personal and aggressive, and much more resembled bullying than collegial teasing.

Here are some of my most common transgressions during that time, and how I was regularly punished for them:

I was Punished for my Poor Judgement:  I was clearly communicated that I was not worthy of a moment of complication for my teachers because I did not fit into dominant culture (DC) nor have something useful to offer DC.  It was like they thought my lack of replication of DC was judgmental error, rather than point of view.  For my poor taste in choosing (any) moment to slow down the fast pace of meetings or decision deliveries, I was largely ignored in performance labs, (where we got most of our feedback.)

I was Punished for my Body:  Me and my big, brown, filipina-american womyn body did not fit into the collective cultural narrative of what superior artistry/ superior actor-ness looks like.  I heard it in my teachers' appraisals of me when I did take the stage to do an exercise- it was not enough of anything to get feedback much more than frustration. I rarely was accepted as a "character" unless I wore a character mask.   

I was never cast in ways that celebrated my differentness, but rather encouraged heavily just to try harder to be like the others.  My physical acumen was not the worst in my class, but for some reason, I still accumulated the most negative attention from both students and teachers: for not setting a better example, for not being stronger, for not being physically skilled enough, for looking like things were harder for me, encouraging me to try harder...  

My "big" body was often commented on by teachers and students; I was maybe 150 pounds and 5' 5" at that time.  Fellow classmates refused to base for me to be the flyer, citing that I was too heavy.  My butt was commented on by my teacher when he told the class that my sculpture, which he loved, looked like my own ass. He then went on to tell another student how to use my sculpture in performance, and I couldn't help but be hurt and offended by the association, and that the sculpture was somehow deemed "better" when it was in the other actor's hands.

I was Punished for my Curiousity, Engagement and Intelligence:  In my attempt to learn and communicate in class, my questions and thoughts slowed down my teachers' ability to get to the end a lesson, or a meeting.  Usually it was urgency to move on that was used against me as an excuse: urgency was a reason to avoid giving me or other students more information, urgency of time and schedules was why asking when we'd get our papers back was frowned upon, everything was urgent urgent urgent. I kept them 'held up' if I asked that they explain ideas that felt obvious to them.  

I was Punished for My Dignity:  My dignity was assumed as unimportant.  My ideas were often ignored by the group and subsequently coopted by the closest sitting white man, who would offer the same (my) idea (after hearing it and no one else did) to great applause of the group. 

I had neither representation nor voice in a community of mostly white liberal folks who wielded skills in competition better than skills in collaboration, who talked over one another, who never yielded space for conversation but instead were always trying to win one another over with a "better idea"... they didn't seem to know the difference between hearing everyone out and just conceding to the person with the loudest voice. Urgency was very present in our student project meetings as well. 

If I complained that I wasn't heard, or disagree so that more than just the dominant voice ideas were considered, I was scoffed at and told to stop being so uptight, "it's a group effort" and I needed to be a better team player, and was then promptly forgotten again.

T h e   f o o t p r i n t s   o f   W S   i n  

 e d u c a t i o n 

These are some ways that WS culture denies and punishes difference.  This is what it looked like in my classroom:  

• Talking down to a student in class, 
• Making fun of a student in class, 
• Bringing attention to a student's body in class in ways that are shaming or embarrassing, 
• Ignoring student's raised hand
• Ignoring a student's submission of an idea
• Neglecting to make space for all students to have a voice, and then decision making from that knowledge
• Refusing to explain an activity and the intended/hoped for outcome, 
• Denying student experiences of inequity in their collaborations and turning a blind eye to existing problems
• Ignoring reports from regarding safety to the point of endangering student health and safety
• Allowing class mates to also justify teasing, 
• Denying access to further training opportunities because the student would, "... ask too many questions."
• Neglecting to provide training in collaboration structures that provides equal footing for participants via groundrules or unanimous vote, and letting the loudest/most aggressive voices coopt control
• Neglecting to provide boundary control to all participants of a collaboration, or making safety a value with accountability

P h y s i c a l   T h e a t r e   S c h o o l   

D e a t h   S t a r  

Congrats, DAI! With a cunning use of "Via Negativa" combined with racist and white-male-gaze expectations, you were Completely Effective in destroying this confused, brown and queer woman's faith in herself back then.  

5 stars for the physical theatre equivalent of a Death Star!  

Imperial Dell'Arte international school of theatre destroyed my Alderon like *that*.

("Pro Voce", my fucking fat, brown ass.)

T h e  e n d u r i n g   l e g a c y   o f   

f e a r - b a s e d   e d u c a t i o n  

 p r a c t i c e s :   

i t   a i n t   a b o u t   y o u 

 I left that place in May of 2007, terrified that I wasn't as valuable in the world, or more importantly, to myself, as I had come in thinking I was.  I left that place feeling like I had nothing to offer the world, and with no words that felt convincing enough about how I had been harmed.  

And I felt those things, in part, because I literally was told they were so.

In my exit interview, my pedagogical director said to me that I,"... would probably only ever teach because {I} don't have {my} own voice."

First off, the statement, "...you'll never make something because you don't have a voice," is one form of destructive fatalism that should never ever get confused with educational method, ever.

Secondly, the teacher telling the student that they will "only ever teach" is... 

... is an admission of one's own perceived failings... Don't you think?  

If you are a teacher to me,  then why is being a in the broader theatre field a failing?  

Basically, if you are a teacher who hates teaching, please GET THE FUCK OUT.

" T r u e   A r t i s t r y "

The journey I have gone on to even compile these lists has been epic.  Why?  Because the gaslighting that I experienced about my worth and my talent at DAI bled over into my professional life AFTER grad school, quite seamlessly.  

It has been easy to toil for a decade and not have a decent healthy voice in my head to tell me that my teacher should not throw baseballs at me for the sake of art. I was around people who also uplifted those trials.  I was around <white> people who also felt that good art was costly and that we should throw all our natural resources at it to cultivate "TRUE ARTISTRY". 

Surviving abuse does not create true artistry. Now that I have grabbed the dials out of the hands of my oppressors and told most of those white folks to fuck off, I'm starting to understand that health and safety do not need to be at odds with good art.  

M a k i n g   t h e   I n v i s i b l e ,   V i s i b l e 

I've started to more deeply understand how invisible my non-dominant identities make me in competitive white communities like that of DAI.  Even though they claim to want to support "your voice," the culture and the education practices at DAI were antithetical for achieving creative freedom UNLESS you were articulating a dominant White Cultural Experience.  

The school's activity was never centered on sourcing and bringing forward YOUR personal/ cultural experience or point of view: the pedagogical work was actually centered on pulling forward the point of view that uplifted the Most Competitive White Culture Experience. That was always the work that was celebrated, and which comprised what was articulated as the ideal work in that environment. 

The school's centering on whiteness and competitiveness is why the creative voices of the white men in my classes were the ones that got to grow, and they did grow!  The white men in my classes received the majority of the teaching resources:  more consideration, more time, more respect, more relationship, more feedback, and they even had the ability to offer pushback sometimes.  

For those of us for whom the white experience was out of reach, we had to work much harder to make work that didn't fit cultural stereotypes, because typically, it was those stereotypes that resonated better to our teachers than our personal complex truths.  My teachers would have been happy to watch me play out a story about being filipina and victimized; however, that wasn't the story I came to the school with.  It's ironic and sad that it IS the story I'm sharing IN REFLECTION of my experience at the school.

It's clear that my teaching team during that time at DAI were unaware of their white privileges, and their dominant cultural point of view.  

It's clear that they were ideological but not practical allies, and that they never considered that they had their own biases which were playing out among the students, affecting the culture of students.

Teachers protected their white-male-heteronormative bias by using bullying and punishments.

It's clear most of them didn't have a clue about the level of anti-blackness that their superiority rested on.

Teachers never considered the cultural consequences of being authoritarian and brandishing rank over students.

Teachers never considered the impact their own tendencies towards bullying and ignoring harm had on the the school culture.

Teachers never considered that a creative environment and all it's resources should not function on the same principles as capitalism, where accumulation of resource and power is the goal rather than distribution of power and resources.

It's clear that the white teachers had stereotypical expectations of Asians in their classes, and were very comfortable with the white demographic of those who was considered "good" at the craft.  They did not seem to ever question why those stories were more successful, to them, than others.  

It's clear that these practitioners were committed to share information narrowly, not widely.

And lastly, it's clear that ultimately the teachers at DAI lacked genuine respect for the most valuable resource students in actor/creator theatre might bring:  their own point of view. 

I t   w a s  n e v e r   a b o u t   m e 

Looking back at my interaction with the pedagogical director at my exit interview, I can't help but wonder, What value does telling an outgoing student that their presence in the field is worthless actually have? And also, why does that moment feel so integral to my overall story?

It took me some time to realize how NOT ABOUT ME his response really was. 

1. The benefit of telling me that I don't have a voice is that the teacher then gets to tell other students that they DO have a voice... 

In this zero sum approach to the herd, a teacher can save their energetic reserves for praise of the white men who have voices that he understands.  

The binary thinking of good vs bad was being reinforced up to my very last moments at DAI.  But also significant is this:

2. It was IMPORTANT for him to tell me that I was not who he wanted to make art because that reflected HIS values.

I now see that this event, the exit interview that left me with such hurt at the time, was really a moment that had very little to do with me, and everything to do with my white male teacher's angst about protecting and projecting his own artistry into the field.  I didn't win his approval, so he wasn't going to send me off with a vouch of his approval even though I had completed the program successfully because I could reflect badly on him.

To be sure: nothing good (for the teacher) comes from a final meeting with a graduate student where the teacher has to acknowledge that they didn't know how to work with that student.

My exit interview. 

All. About.  Him.

O n   f r e e i n g   v o i c e s   a t   t h e   

e x p e n s e   o f   o t h e r   v o i c e s

My MFA education was not a competition I signed up for,  and bringing my point of view was not optional, like an add-on to the MFA product for which I had forgotten to pay.

My creative work is not made as a reflection of how successful I will be as a capitalist, and I do not believe that my teachers' work is to pair down the folks who GET to tell their stories. 

The job of the school is NOT to make the best product for the entertainment market, so that the school can proudly say that so and so came from Dell'Arte.

The job of a theatre school is to LIBERATE BODIES AND VOICES.

B e y o n d   t h e i r   i n t e r e s t s

Gradually as I go through my memories, impressions and experiences, I have to realize a very important summarizing fact about my experience of "pro voce" training.  Like, I'm Indiana Jones, lol, spitting at a stone tablet with Sumerian characters trying to find the answer to an age old question:  "Why didn't my teachers engage with me as they did some other students?" 

The answer is becoming more and more clear:  

I was never the voice my teachers at my grad school had any interest in freeing.    

Being outside of the dominant culture, while at that school, socially defined me and my worth SO MUCH  that I was literally beyond anyone there's interests. 

Y o u   A r e   I n   I t  

(o r ,   W r e s t l i n g   w i t h   W h i t e   S u p r e m a c y   C u l t u r e )

So, as I said at the beginning, I'm on a journey of healing.  There's no end destination, but the purpose of healing is in every step.  

And in order for me to stay on this journey, I have to point out that even though this story centered my experiences, throughout there were other people also involved, all of whom experienced an abusive situation.  

We're all in it together, the harmed, the one who creates harm, and those who perceive harm. 

We go through NOTHING alone. When one person is harmed, ALL are affected.  

And we all deserve, and benefit from, healing from harm.

So I have a question for you, dear reader:

When you read this account of my experiences, where did you see yourself in it?

Because you are in it.

Were you the student being flailed by WSC and a student body deep in toxic groupthink? 

Or, were you the teacher, pushing your own agenda for self-fulfillment through a student's exit interview?

Were you a student who sat on the side lines and watched your classmates revel in the the abuse as tennis balls and insults were hurled by your teacher?

The reason I ask is that, if you are anything like me, YOU'VE PROBABLY BEEN ALL THREE.

You are in it.

And I'm here today to remind you that by listening to folks who were harmed, by believing them, and by acknowledging the harms of white supremacy culture, we can heal them and ourselves. 

We are all accountable. We can all offer healing. We can all receive healing.

You just have to recognize that you ARE. in. it.

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T a r a - i n - W h i t e r l a n d