Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Service Op: Special Olympics Bocce Ball
At Stevenson High School on the Port Clinton field.
On Sunday April 17, 2016 from 8am to 3:30pm. There will also be a training session on thursday April 14th, the week before during 8th and 9th periods (choose one period to attend a training session).
Here is a google form if you are interested, or fill out the form embedded below:
Friday, March 11, 2016
Don't just do something, stand there! Nothing and Thriving
Our culture constructs a reality where we are not allowed to just be. We must be doing at all times; it is valuing personal achievement, time, work, competition, materialism and success. Note that happiness is never a apart of the equation. The hegemonic assumption is that happiness simply comes with those values. See this post about happiness and it's relationship to money. Contrast these values with the values that Michael Buettner writes about in his book Thrive. What are the lessons you learned from Thrive? How would you like to live your life differently after reading this? What would be a message you would like to share with the rest of your classmates who don't have the privilege of being in our class?
Bernard McGrane's experiment explores the idea of doing nothing in American culture. In his book, The Un-Tv and the 10mph Car he explores doing nothing as a way of being able to detach and see all that is actually going on - both in others and in ourselves. By detaching from the social world, can you see the ways the world controls who you are? We go about our daily lives without question drifting along doing the things that we do. We never have to stop and think about why we are doing what we do and whether we want to do that. Some of the questions McGrane addresses are: How did you react and what occurred to you in being unoccupied? How did the world around you react to doing nothing? How does this relate our work to our identity? See this link for a discussion guide to the nothing experiment. This is from McGrane's book. If you don't know why we did that experiment please read it!
The last point about work and identity reminds me of how Americans get acquainted with one another. The first question is usually "What is your name?" (usually answered very individualistically with the first name.) And the next question is usually "What do you do?" This highlights the importance of job and work identity. What does this mean for teens who might not have a job or parents who spend their days taking care of children and making a home. It is a sad message. An example of a different way that some cultures do these introductions is something someone from Australia told me. He said they get acquainted by asking "Where have you been?" So the focus is more on one's previous life experiences and travels. Another example is described in Richard Strozzi Heckler's book Holding the Center. In it, he describes a group of presenters at a health conference who were introducing themselves,
The distinguished men and women described their degrees, awards, publications, university positions, and their current research. The sixth person was an Ojibway Native American who introduced himself first by naming his tribe and family lineage and then describing in specific detail the land in which he and his tribe lived. He spoke of his relatives, many generations back on both sides of his family, who his sisters, brothers, and children married, his relationship with his aunts and uncles, and then the birds, fish and animals, the trees, rivers, lakes. He finished by saying, "this is who I am." He then politely requested that others provide the same information.
This is a marvelous example of other ways of defining their identity. Whereas Americans would define their identity based on their individuality and that would have a strong focus on their job, others (like the example above) would define their identity by their community and where they came from. It is much more communal than individual and less focused on your individual role. Finally,Here is a funny video of a group that appears to do nothing, but they are actually doing "freezing". For the purposes of McGrane's experiment, they are not detached, but it is funny nonetheless to watch.
Our culture constructs a reality where we are not allowed to just be. We must be doing at all times; it is valuing personal achievement, time, work, competition, materialism and success. Note that happiness is never a apart of the equation. The hegemonic assumption is that happiness simply comes with those values. See this post about happiness and it's relationship to money. Contrast these values with the values that Michael Buettner writes about in his book Thrive. What are the lessons you learned from Thrive? How would you like to live your life differently after reading this? What would be a message you would like to share with the rest of your classmates who don't have the privilege of being in our class?
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Black Lives Matter
The movement began with Alicia Garza using the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African-American teen Trayvon Martin in February 2012. From The Guardian, Garza logged on to Facebook. She wrote an impassioned online message, “essentially a love note to black people”, and posted it on her page. It ended with: “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” Garza’s close friend, Patrisse Cullors, read the post in a motel room 300 miles away from Oakland that same night. Cullors, also a community organiser working in prison reform, started sharing Garza’s words with her friends online. She used a hashtag each time she reposted: #blacklivesmatter. The following day, Garza and Cullors spoke about how they could organise a campaign around these sentiments. More on the history here from the Smithsonian. Also detailed on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter
John Crawford, 22, was shot and killed by a police officer at a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio. There did not appear to be a confrontation with the police, and Crawford was unarmed — he had been holding a toy BB gun. The officers involved in the shooting, Sean Williams and David Darkow, were not charged.
Police were on the scene for just seconds when they shoot Mr Powell is shot dead a second after this photo.
Sept. 4, 2014 Dashcam Video Shows State Trooper Shooting Black Man Reaching for His Driver’s License
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/09/south-carolina-dashcam-shooting-sean-groubert-levar-jones-incident-on-video.html
https://youtu.be/XhAklMWqLnI
Tamir Rice (12 yrs old) is shot within seconds of police arriving on scene. He was holding a toy gun.
Jan 2015 American Dialectic Society declares “#blacklivesmatter” as the “word of the year” for 2014.
Eric Harris a second before being shot from behind by police.
July 2015, Sandra Bland (Texas)
Sandra Bland, a black woman from Chicago is driving to Texas for a new job. She is pulled over for a specious traffic violation, failing to signal a lane change. The officer that pulls her over asks her if she is annoyed and she responds affirmatively to him. This leads to an argument that results in the officer drawing his gun and pointing it at her, forcibly removing her from her car, calling for back up and arresting her. She is found dead in her jail cell less than 72 hours later. Guardian story and dash cam video here. The Nation details the incident and her history here.
Oct 2015 Black Lives Matter PAC is formed in St Louis, but unaffiliated with the original movement.
Up to this point, Alicia Garza, who started the hashtag more than two years earlier, encouraged the use of the slogan BLM as a decentralized social movement, especially on social media, that promoted the idea that black lives matter. It was not until Oct 2015 that a distinct political organization developed.As detailed in Colorlines, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza told ThinkProgress that the PAC is not officially connected to the movement. “[What] our folks have said to us is we don’t want to endorse candidates, but to push [the] system of democracy to another level. … That’s where we’re headed,” she said. “I have a lot of respect for people who want to do different things. But I have questions: Who are they connected to, what are they gonna do with that?” Garza also said that she sees the value in their proposed work: “Everybody has something to contribute. The idea is not that we should all be doing the same thing. In [the] history of social movements, they were many different planks and impact from all of them.”
The above divergence is IMPORTANT to note. Many people oppose particular political positions espoused by particular groups that have emerged under the verbage of black lives matter. But dismissing the the phrase black lives matter and every sign/symbol/group that uses it because of opposition to specific political positions taken by particular political groups is reductionist. It lacks an understanding or acknowledgment of the origins of the phrase black lives matter and a blanket dismissal of blm is at best ignoring racism but perhaps allowing it to continue. It is naive to ignore the ongoing racism that is so well documented. And, I would argue that reducing blm to a particular group that you disagree with politically is akin to reducing the definition of conservative to white supremacy because of groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens or to indict Christianity because of this Christian mass murderer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpijYTMpz3k
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/02/28/blacklivesmatter_protests_trump_in_alabama_trump_responds_all_lives_matter.html
A 32-year-old African-American, was pulled over while driving in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and killed by Jeronimo Yanez, a St. Anthony, Minnesota Latino police officer. Castile had been driving a car at 9:00 pm with his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and her four-year-old daughter when he was pulled over by Yanez and another officer in a suburb of Saint Paul, MN.[3][4] After being asked for his license and registration, Castile had told Officer Yanez that he had a firearm, to which Yanez replied, "Don't reach for it then", and Castile said "I'm, I, I was reaching for..." Yanez said "Don't pull it out", Castile replied "I'm not pulling it out", and Reynolds said "He's not..." Yanez repeated "Don't pull it out"[5] and then shot Castile seven times.[6]
November 2, 2016, Des Moines Police Department officer Anthony Beminio and Urbandale Police Department officer Justin Martin were killed in separate "ambush-style" shootings in and near Des Moines, Iowa. The perpetrator in both shootings, identified as 46-year-old Scott Michael Greene of Urbandale, Iowa, was apprehended by police hours later. Greene was taken into custody unharmed! President Obama publicly praised the police officers and decried the violence against them as heinous.
On Aug 23, 2020 Jacob Blake is shot in the back seven times and paralyzed from the waist down while his children watched from the back seat of their car.
After Ferguson, black men still face the highest risk of being killed by police https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/after-ferguson-black-men-and-boys-still-face-the-highest-risk-of-being-killed-by-police
Divergent discourse between protests and counter-protests: #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter.
Black Lives Matter or All Lives Matter? Color-blindness and Epistemic Injustice*
Randall Barnes puts February 2016 into perspective with a detailed analysis of Blackish: