Jurassic 5, “Concrete Schoolyard”

(one of my favorite flows evarrrrrr)

Dylan Rodriguez on Teaching Against the PIC

“Perhaps, then, there is no viable or defensible pedagogical position other than the abolitionist one. To live and work, learn and teach, and survive and thrive in a time defined by the capacity and political willingness to eliminate and neutralize populations [talking about the end result of the PIC] through a culturally valorized, state sanctioned nexus of institutional violence, is to better understand why abolitionist praxis in this historical moment is primarily pedagogical, within and against the ‘system’ in which it occurs. While it is conceivable that in future moments, abolitionist praxis can focus more centrally on matters of creating and not simply opposing public policy, infrastructure building, and economic reorganization, the present moment clearly demands a convening of radical pedagogical energies that can build the collective human power, epistemic and knowledge apparatuses, the material sites of learning that are the precondition of authentic and liberatory social transformations.

The prison regime is the institutionalization and systemic expansion of massive human misery. It is the production of bodily and psychic disarticulation on multiple scales, across different physiological capacities. The [PIC] is, in its logic of organization and its production of common sense, at least proto-genocidal. Finally, the prison regime is inseparable from—that is, present in— the schooling regime in which teachers are entangled. Prison is not simply a place to which one is displaced and where one’s physiological being is disarticulated, at the rule and whim of the state and its designated representatives (police, parole officers, school teachers). The prison regime is the assumptive premise of classroom teaching generally. While many of us must live in labored denial of this fact in order to teach as we must about “American democracy,” “freedom,” and “(civil) rights,” there are opportune moments in which it is useful to come clean: the vast majority of what occurs in U.S. classrooms—from preschool to graduate school—cannot accommodate the bare truth of the proto-genocidal prison regime as a violent ordering of the world, a primary component of civil society/school, and a material presence in our everyday teaching acts.

As teachers, we are institutionally hailed to the service of genocide management, in which our pedagogical labor is variously engaged in mitigating, valorizing, critiquing, redeeming, justifying, lamenting, and otherwise reproducing or tolerating the profound and systemic violence of the global-historical U.S. Nation building project. As “radical” teachers, we are politically hailed to betray genocide management in order to embrace the urgent challenge of genocide abolition. The short-term survival of those populations rendered most vulnerable to the mundane and spectacular violence of this system, and the long-term survival of most of the planet’s human population (particularly those descended from survivors of enslavement, colonization, conquest, and economic exploitation), is the significantly dependent on our willingness to embrace this form of pedagogical audacity.”

Rodriguez, Dylan. “The Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Abolition as Pedagogical Position.” Radical Teacher. 88 (2010): 7-19. Print.

“the fire of the alphabet”

I’m very much in a romance with the writing process and language generally right now. Making words work, altering who they work for. Being in the conversation. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” blew my mind last night and Virginia Woolf is reaching out from her sea grave, moving stones from her pockets into my hands, altering my perception of time, guiding my fingers.

Both make clear to me the complex fact that it is altogether possible to both hate a text or disdain an author, but also to harbor deep, stubborn admiration simultaneously. I don’t have to love them, they move me insistently regardless. They reach out across time and space, their voices still reverberate across the Atlantic, after all these years.