Bending The Arc May 2024

A Social Justice Newsletter for Educators

When state actors refer to “peace,” they are really talking about order. And when they refer to “peaceful protest,” they are talking about cooperative protest that obediently stays within the lines drawn by the state. The more uncooperative you are, the more you will be accused of aggression and violence. It is therefore imperative that the state not be the arbiter of what violence means among people seeking justice.

- Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba in Let This Radicalize You (2023), p. 111

Accelerated Movements

In the Northern Hemisphere, school years are wrapping up. It’s IB exam season. National qualifying exams are also underway. My niece is working her way through the Austrian Central Matura, a set of academic exams which qualifies students for university studies. May is the month in which my usual elementary PE teaching station becomes a big exam hall for several days. Yes, the end of the school year is in sight and the sense of pressure and acceleration can be difficult to escape.

Photo by Herbert Goetsch on Unsplash

Making Sense of Current Student Protests

Meanwhile on collage campuses across the US and in other parts of the world, many students protesting the war in Gaza are experiencing political pressure and violent escalations. In some cases, protest encampments have been resolved peacefully with university administrators and without the intervention of local law enforcement. Numerous protests, however, have been violently disrupted when university administrations have relied on police to clear encampments. Hundreds of students and supporting faculty have been arrested, and in certain places, brutalized by intervening riot police. Students’ primary demands for divestment from Israel’s military supporting industries, amnesty for protesting students, and financial transparency about where and how schools invest their millions have demonstrated the widening divide between university leadership and the espoused center of their efforts: students.

Through this process, protesting students, supporting faculty and staff, bystanders, onlookers, and college administrations are all receiving and creating an education. In upstanding, in conflict resolution, in violent repression, in political opportunism, in generational divides and possible solidarities. It is painful to observe the degree to which so many of these institutions of higher education most widely cited as exemplary are beholden to interests far removed from the goals of multifaceted and critical student learning. Others writers have captured these nuances far more eloquently and clearly than I:

 College students demanding that universities divest from the war machine threatens to expose their whole scheme. It threatens to show the world that the greed of the ruling class has turned schools into hedge funds and society itself into a profit-extracting juggernaut that will participate in genocide rather than alter the flow of money and power. - Joshua P. Hill, New Means, April 29, 2024

Or:

What do you wish the administration pursued rather than going to Congress and deploying the police?

Klein: Fundamentally, it’s the way that every major private university in the country operates. It is beholden to donors and donor interests. Any kind of student protest movement is fundamentally incompatible with these financial and political bodies that are exerting an undue amount of influence on the university and its policy. What I think really needs to happen is the university needs to really reevaluate its relationship to donor bodies, and its relationship with its endowment.

Milène Klein, Editor at Columbia Spectator in interview with Aymann Ismail, “What Is Really Going On at Columbia?”, Slate, April 22, 2024

Or:

This is a toxic combination: universities reliant on investment portfolios in a system where mega-profits are made by companies that threaten and destroy human life, influenced by an increasingly radicalised class of billionaires, teaching students whose degrees won’t earn them enough to pay off their loans, managed by supine administrators threatened by (or willingly collaborating with) a reactionary right, who have decided that young people’s minds are being turned against capitalism not by their own lived experience of austerity and racialised police violence but by ‘woke Marxist professors’. This situation has now met with a live-streamed genocide which is supported, and brazenly lied about, by political leaders and commentators who claim to stand for truth and justice. Students, like much of the public, cannot square the reality of what they see with the world as constructed by politicians and the media. - Gareth Fearn, “Liberalism Without Accountability,” London Review of Books, May 2, 2024.

While following the headlines and commentary, I have been struck by the difference between student reporting and mainstream national and local media coverage. Campus reporting has often been nuanced, detailed and focused on accuracy whereas mainstream media have focused on administrator and police responses, rather than featuring student voices. Lydia Polgreen, opinion writer in the New York Times spent time speaking with protesters and other students on Columbia’s campus and offers a perspective that is usefully thoughtful and provides a welcome exception to my general observation.

Give It Back

Originally, I wanted to dedicate this month’s post to the Land Back movement. Before I say more, listen to the folks engaged in this movement first:

LANDBACK is a movement that has existed for generations with a long legacy of organizing and sacrifice to get Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands. Currently, there are LANDBACK battles being fought all across Turtle Island, to the north and the South. - from Landback.org

The video below captures moments of organizing and protest among members of the Oceti Sakowin of the Black Hills of South Dakota, who blocked the access road to Mt. Rushmore in advance of President Trump’s visit in July 2020. It’s just 5 minutes long and its impact runs deep.

“Land Back” because a recurring theme as I read almost anything is how ownership of property, of land, of cultural artifacts, of the means of production (oh, here comes Marx) - all of that shapes our whole understanding of how the world works. Private ownership as a fundamental idea is so deeply ingrained that it’s hard for me to imagine otherwise. That said, no one has shaken my assumptions around property, ownership and the social implications of these frameworks more than Antonia Malchik.

Antonia is the author of A Walking Life (2019) and a friend. She has written extensively on the vestiges of settler-colonial mindsets on our every day existence. Her ongoing thought process is documented in her newsletter, "On the Commons” where I have found a great deal of wisdom in her writing and the community of co-thinkers who populate the comment sections. Antonia offers her research path as one for readers to travel alongside; an invitation to share in the sense-making process. While introducing the concept of her work in progress, No Tresspassing, Antonia explains a key finding:

Ownership is about far more than land, but the further I read and think about this idea, the more it seems to me that the legal concepts buttressing ownership’s legitimacy grew from two things: how humans own land (and justify that), and how humans treat water (and justify it). And in some places those two things were intertwined millennia ago to justify control of women, reproduction (including seeds), and bodily autonomy for almost everyone. Huge concepts and debatable ideas, all of these, but I think this is where things start from.

It’s a start, not the end.

To trouble the very idea of private ownership is to shake the foundations of how most of our societies are organized. It’s no surprise then that the notion of #LandBack provokes all sorts of fears and concerns. This is where listening and learning are most crucial. Who is proposing Land Back and what does it mean?

This video provides a useful introduction to the Land Back movement and its aims. The accompanying article offers a slew of resources which bolster the claims made in the video. Go deeper by considering these resources:

• In compact essay form, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, outlines the contours of Indigenous history in North America noting what sets native folks apart from other marginalized groups. The essay lends itself well for analysis in high school social and environmental studies, in particular. Again, it was Antonia who put this reading in my path:

Land return does not mean that everyone who is not Indigenous to what is today called the United States is expected to pack up and go back to their ancestral places on other continents. It does mean that American Indian people regain control and jurisdiction over lands they have successfully stewarded for millennia. -Dina Gilio-Whitaker, “Environmental Justice is Only the Beginning,” High Country News, July 1, 2022.

• A common thread among arguments in favor of Indigenous control of ancestral lands and natural habitats revolve around environmental conservation. The unfortunate reality is that as climate crisis has become undeniable on every corner of the globe, national and international entities are now turning to Indigenous populations , whose existences also hang in the balance, for possible solutions.

Despite their role in protecting Earth’s biodiversity, Indigenous peoples have historically not been invited to participate, considered or consulted in matters of conservation—globally or locally.

… A growing awareness of the climate crisis we all find ourselves in finally prompted organizations like the United Nations to turn to Indigenous peoples for help. But critical to the future success of environmental protections were protections for Indigenous peoples themselves. - Amelia Mavis Christnot, The Big Picture, Apr. 25, 2024

• Finally, if you and your students are looking for examples of successful land back initiatives in North America, please consult this growing database.

It is vital that we highlight, emphasize and foreground Indigenous peoples’ struggles for sovereignity in the present. Colonialism is both historical and ongoing. Seven years ago this was news to me! Think about your own secondary and university education. To what degree were you introduced to Indigenous perspectives and ways of knowing? The idea is not to point fingers but to open our minds and hearts to ideas and knowledge systems that have been silenced and suppressed throughout our learning institutions.

Let’s be the listeners and learners we encourage our students to be. Let’s be the upstanders and supporters of just causes. Let us remain eager students even as we teach. That is the cornerstone of this whole project - of Bending The Arc, of being educators at all - to continue learning with others.

Before I close, two announcements:

• Students at Berlin Brandenburg International School who petitioned the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) to take action to “actively support LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion at IB schools” one year ago will be hosting an open meeting on May 8th, 3pm (CEST) to offer an update and engage the wider international school community on this initiative. You can register HERE.

• I’m thinking about hosting an online Bending The Arc forum a few times a year. This would be an open meeting space to talk about some of the resources shared and get to know each other a bit. Please just drop a note in the comments if this sounds appealing.

Whew! That was a lot, a lot!

Thanks for showering this space with your attention. As always, I know that there’s more here than you likely have time or energy to engage with right now. It’s part of the reason this is a monthly affair - to have breathing space between loads of new connections.

Wishing you all the bounty and beauty of May wherever you are,

Sherri