V2: In light of the "fight with bureaucracy" moments, this afternoon we took our class to the Harold Washington Library to see the Afro-American History Month performance for kids that age. For 7th grade. I was so incredibly insulted, nauseated, incensed. I was incensed. I sat there [inaudible]. I sat there and they opened up by saying, "This is the story of the Afro-American people. This is Afro-American History Month. And Afro-Americans." They put up a globe. They said, "This is America, and this is Africa."

Olivia Gude: Who were these people?

V2: Harold Washington Library Staff and Administration. "Today, we're going to talk about the people from this place who live in America." As if we had come over on a cruise ship or a vacation tour. They went on to talk about why they chose the performance pieces that they did. The first one talked about, "In the village, we had the little African drums. Here's the village. Here's the little stupid man." One of them's lazy and the other one is hard-working. And the lazy one is suspected of being a thief by the hard-working one, because his things are coming up missing, and he doesn't know how or why. So then he's stupid. He's stupid, and his brother was lazy. It talked about how they both got themselves into even more ridiculously stupid circumstances, and ended up accusing one or suspecting one another of doing something wrong. One was suspected of being a thief, and the other of course was suspected of being an idiot. After that, they sang…

Olivia Gude: How many people were there?

V2: Oh, various people.

Olivia Gude: Did people stand up and say anything?

V2: Nope, nope, nope.

Olivia Gude: Who were the performers? A troupe?

V2: No. Puppets.

Olivia Gude: Puppets?

V2: A puppet show.

Olivia Gude: Who were the people that were running the puppets?

V2: The staff. From the Harold Washington Library. And the thing that particularly just tore me to shreds was that never, when you hear about the Holocaust in Germany, it's delivered even to babies in a raw sense. So that you will know the horror. So that A, it will never be repeated, and that B, you will have compassion in your heart for these people who are just trying to cut out a peaceful existence in this faraway land. So that you always in the back of your mind, no matter what happens. You hear about their struggling with the Palestinians and they're struggling here and struggling there. You know that this will be a forever-scarred people, because of this. And their reactions to whatever may have something to do with this.

Olivia Gude: That's unreal.

V2: However, we came over…You know, I've never heard of Holocaust survivors referred to as, "the people from Germany who now live in Jerusalem."

Olivia Gude: Right. That's terrible. What an awful thing. I think that's where they entered that idea that went into when you're teaching and you say, I don't know how often this happened to me, how many years ago…a decade ago or something. But you go, "The slave were," even if you say it nice, "The slaves." That's kind of weird. Because you go, "The slaves," and it's sort of like saying, "Here were these slaves," and maybe they might get liberated and become people. If I were enslaved, would I be a slave, or would I be a person who was enslaved? You know? I'm remember starting to realize the issue of that language issue that's so profound. I think it's connected to the issue that you're talking about whether or not people…whether the language we use, embedded in the language, is a quality of compassion. You know, one thing you might want to look at as you're doing some of this work is that on that Spiral website I told you about…and by the way, if you lose that address, if you type Spiral Art Education in google, it'll come up. But there's an article on there that's actually made me happy to see people have cared about this enough. It's like 100,000 copies, it's been on teaching tolerance. It was in the National Education Association and it was in Principal Leadership, which is the Magazine of American high school principals. Basically, it's an article about drawing color lines. It's about teachers talking about symbolism of black and white. One of the things it was based on is my own experience of sitting there in this day and age watching a student teacher say, "And here's this negative black symbolism, and here's the white that means purity," and stuff. And I really hit a question which I think is a profound question for educators. That is, our job is to teach kids to read, in the broader sense of the word. But I realized that if you're teaching kids to read, you don't read just words. You need to understand complex ideas and sets of symbolism. I realized that if I were going to teach kids to read the literature of this society, I'd have to teach them a symbol set that privileged light over dark. That is intrinsic to much of the literature of this society. When I thought about it, the same issue is reading painting. So I thought that you could say, "Well, I'm just not going to have anything like that in the curriculum. Anything that carries that kind of symbolism." Then I realized that what I was thinking was, "You can't protect kids from this. They're going to be exposed to this. They're also going to see Disney movies and lots of other things. So one of the things that this article is about is this project that Washington Irving School did on these 8th-graders investigating the whole notion of black-and-white symbolism. And how that's racially charging our language. And then we look at the work of Tom Feeling. I don't know if you guys know his work. He's an artist. He's done an amazing work called, "Middle Passage." The book has no words in it, and it's an illustrated history of the middle passage. One of the things that Mr. Feelings did was to deliberately switch the symbolism of dark and light. It's interesting. I worked with this a lot over the years, now. You tell people, "Look. This is not natural to assume that light is good and dark is bad." Oh, no, no, no. People are always utterly convinced and it's hard-wired into your brain if it's not cultural information. Then when you show them this book where there's this looming white fort and then there's this black body. Here are the white sails of the ship. You know? And you start to realize that in the context of this story, of course, white is just a horrifyingly scary color. And it makes you realize how culturally-conditioned that is. I mean it's just a magnificent thing that he did this book. I think it's one of the things that just turns peoples' heads around. I think that that's long and slow and patient work that we teachers do. We have to try to come up with the kind of curriculum in a creative way that challenges these kinds of things and gets people to re-think. I think that it's an important issue for children of all races. The project that I did with the kids was a project in which we deconstructed symbolism of the "Lion King." We looked at how the movie which was supposedly an Afro-Centric movie consistently privileges lightness over darkness. One of the things that we talked about…Irving school is an integrated school. It's like evenly Puerto Rican, Mexican, black, and a few white kids. Probably more, now. But one of the big things that we talked about that was so interesting was, "What effect do racist symbolism systems have on white children?" That was one of the coolest parts of the project. Normally, you're always, "Oh, you know, it gives the Black children a bad self image." Which it does. But I mean what's interesting is that you spent a lot of time talking about, "What is this?" And you can really see these kids really grappling with the idea of the construction of white supremacy. How people started to feel that's natural. It was a really great experience for me. And that's one of those schools. Whenever I do one of these interesting projects at schools, I always say I can do them because I'm going into a school where there's a context that the teachers create to let that kind of thing happen. There are a couple of good teachers. Sometimes, like at Irving, there was a whole school where Madelyn [inaudible] had that school organized and going in those days. But it's a work that I think we all do as artist-educators. So I feel bad for you that you had to sit through that experience, and that the children did.

V2: What really bothered me was that it was a predominantly white audience. There was never a time when they even delicately dealt with that there was some angst, there was some pain, there was separation, there was some jumpstart…as far as dealing with how to re-orient our communities into some kind of civilized pro-active group of people. If we never look at that, we're missing the compassion factor. If we take out that we came over here on the…that we're just the people from Africa who are now here in America and live here in America, then you can't have a complete picture. You can't look at that. Then you back that up with, "These people are lazy, and these people are stupid." You can't. There's a missing picture of it. Education was illegal for this amount of time. And you're clinically depressed because you went to war for two years. So how clinically depressed are you? You know? You had to deal with this problem. There was a sense of compassion that was extended to the survivors and the descendents of the German Holocaust that is absolutely necessary to heal the community, and for us all to live together to the point that we're a multicultural, understanding, growing, living, positive community. And we just cannot continue to move it out or put a Band-Aid on it.

Olivia Gude: That's a good example of the kind of issue. You know, you talk about the fake, multiracial mural. You know? That is that you basically try to say there's a harmonious society by covering over indifference and injustice. Basically, there's a really funny article from this cool magazine in Canada. There's a really cool multiracial group of artists in Toronto. They do some really neat work and publish this magazine, "Fuse." There was an article in there about the United Colors of Benetton. One of the things it quotes is this William Blake poem. There's a little black boy in this poem. My English Literature is having a breakdown. 1850 or something in the 1800s. Basically, this little black boy is saying, "But all my soul is white." And this image. You know, this is the same kind of image. What they started to say was that in these Benetton ads, a lot of times, the kids are sticking out their tongues. "All our tongues are pink. After all, we're all the same." And that covers over injustice. It sounds like to me that something happened to you that I'd sort of say, "You know Paul Freire? "Pedagogy of the Oppressed?" It's an amazing book with this educator. If you do art stuff, he's a wonderful person to read. It's a classic book that's been translated. Actually, [inaudible] was a disciple of Paul Freire in Brazil. The reason she's here is she was one of many people who had to flee Brazil when there was this real repression of these revolutionary educators. But Freire says that his idea of education is looking for these generative things in the community. What are the themes around which something has to happen? He says that there are what he calls "limit situations." In limit situations, or where it seems you come up against a limit of possibility, for me, as a girl doing the Roseland Pullman Mural, the limit of possibility was that I'd moved to this neighborhood on the Southside. I didn't really know…I mean, I'd lived in Hyde Park. But I didn't realize I was going to move into this neighborhood, and all of a sudden, it was like, "These are white and Latino people and all the black people are over there. And they don't cross the tracks." And it was like, "Oh, my God. What have I done?" And basically, what we said was that the limit situation is a literal limit between the neighborhoods. What Freire says is that when you come to a limit situation, you think it's the limit of possibility. But actually, it's the place where possibility begins. Because what you do is you go to that limited situation and you make a limit act. And for us, it was to paint that mural. But I think that for you, it sounds like the limit that you came up against was a lack of understanding, and that your limit act may be like your work in the world for this next period of time. It could be your life. But I think you really need to make a limit act that engages the people of the Library, so that this can't happen again. You think about it not just in terms of telling them. They should be told. But thinking about it strategically, when you go in. You don't go in just saying, "Don't do this." You say, "This is what we want. We want this much money to do a program next year, which is going to be done by this person, this person and this person." You know what I mean?

V4: She wrote a letter.

Olivia Gude: Well, thank you for coming.

[Applause]

Olivia Gude: And Jay, if you will e-mail me, I'll send you one of those CDs that I have.

M2: I definitely will.

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