The chapter

I got an email from an editor, wanting my latest draft of a chapter I wrote a lifetime ago.  After slogging through two computers and various files, a few old pictures, some transcripts and various other memory-revealing odds and ends, I found the draft of the chapter.  It began with the following personal vignette:

When I was in sixth grade I “studied” Belgium. It was a long project, one filled with days and weeks of “research” which culminated into a presentation where I wore my hair in braids.  I no longer know the gross national product of Belgium, nor do I remember the main export or import.  What I do remember is that Linda cornered me in the girl’s bathroom and ridiculed my braids.  I also remember that it took me a long time to learn how to deal with Linda in the bathroom, a lot longer than it took me to learn how to look up a fact in an encyclopedia and transfer it into my own words.

I reread the rest of the chapter and thought of peace and power, of perpetrators, bystanders, allies, and targets.  I thought of how that framework seeped through my classroom and into the lives of all of us.  I thought of when I sat in a circle and cried with my class and told them that teaching them to act for social justice had made me ready to do so.  I thought about how each one of them could own their acts as perpetrators even as they strived to be allies.  I thought of disrupting the commonplace.  I thought of acting for social justice.  I thought of interrogating multiple viewpoints. I thought of focusing on socio political viewpoints.  I thought of writing again.