There is a horrible magic happening right now: high school students who survived the Parkland school shooting, along with peers in South Florida and across the country, are calling on our elected officials to do something about gun control. It is a sign of abject national failure that students, many too young to vote, have to take on the engrained ‘thoughts and prayers’ congressional and media ‘so it goes’ response to these tragedies. But we here are cheering them on, and we’ll be following developments closely.
If you’re getting caught up, here are a few write ups that are worth your time:
We’ve been thinking a lot lately–as probably evidenced by our slightly-unplanned lack of activity. Thinking about what our mission is, thinking about what we’d like our communities to become, and thinking about what the past year has meant for us all.
Some of the thinking you’ll see in this space soon, as we resume our Small Stones Interviews with people resisting in large ways and small, working to make our country and their home towns just a little bit better.
The Ella Baker Center is re-publicizing this post from 2013: Ella’s Song: “We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest Until it Comes”.
We found the words of the post comforting. As the author notes,
The song is an anthem, a meditation on the ultimate lesson of the freedom fight passed down generationally by Ms. Ella herself that is meant to be spoken boldly out loud or under one’s breath as the situation demands to empower both purpose and resolve.
We are also proud to share the news that some of Ézé’s pictures from this past weekend are helping folks understand the hatefulness of the white supremacists. (We featured his work and words here).
Here’s one of his pictures that’s been picked up by the AP. The man pictured is accused of killing Heather Heyer, the protester who died.
Ézé is on Instagram here. Below is a screen grab of another of his photos from the past weekend.
“…and then some of them took a knee and got out their gas masks, and at this point I was telling some of the policemen, ‘This is not necessary! What are you doing?’”
photograph courtesy of Ézé Amos
In our most recent interview with photographer Ézé Amos, we mentioned that Ézé would be out again on August 12th, the day of another planned right-wing, white-supremacist march. That march, and its aftermath, are currently taking place.
We’re reposting our interview with Ézé to do what we can to highlight the strong grassroots community response to this horrific Nazi march. (And yes, we’ll stick with the term ‘Nazi’ so long as participants are carrying swastikas.)
Stay safe out there, all. Thank you for your courage.
###
Here at Small Stones, we define education, and educators, broadly. So often, classrooms appear in the most unexpected places.
Resist! Protesting the Ku Klux Klan. Photo by Eze Amos.
As we continue our own work of interviewing some of these educators, we wanted to share with you work from a friend of the blog. Photographer and photojournalist Eze Amos, a Charlottesville, Virginia local, has found himself in the middle of some of the larger protests and counter protests that have taken place since the 2016 election. We are featuring some of his images in this post; there are far more on his Instagram feed.
Resist! Protesting the Ku Klux Klan. Photo by Eze Amos.
Resist! Protesting the Ku Klux Klan. Photo by Eze Amos.
We were fortunate to be able to talk with Eze about his experience at the counter-demonstration, and here’s what he had to say:
What I saw, after the KKK guys had left the city, is they drove off with police escort right in front of them, and there was a [police] car behind the convoy of KKK guys. I’ve been telling friends about this actually, they were definitely given—the only thing short of red carpet treatment was actual red carpets. What they give them that day, it was amazing. Anyhow, the police escorted the KKK out of the city. And of course, people were still agitated—KKK came to town—so there were still people out in the streets. Nobody was being violent.
The police, the state police that were all in riot gear, turned around as though they were leaving. [Then] they went back up to the park and then suddenly they turned around, and then some of them took a knee and got out their gas masks. And at this point I was telling some of the policemen, “This is not necessary! What are you doing?” But they just kept doing what they were doing, putting on their masks, so I immediately stepped a little bit away from them.
Moments later, I heard the first gas canister go off, which was without warning. They didn’t warn anybody. So of course some of the people saw that this was happening, that the police put on gas masks, so they wrapped cloaks around their faces, to prevent whatever gas they were going to deploy. Now they’re charging those people for covering their faces in a public place, which I think is ridiculous. So that was what I saw. The police deployed the gas after KKK had left. KKK had left, and twenty minutes after they had left, this whole gas thing happened, and they deployed three gas canisters.
And the craziest part of it was after they did this, the crowd, you know, people were still on the streets, and the police just turned around, got in their vans, and drove off. The state police. So they weren’t really deploying the gas to displace the people or get the people out of the street, they were just doing it for exercise, I think, because it doesn’t make sense that you’d deploy gas and then you’d turn around and just leave the people on the street and just drive off.
So basically, that is what happened. That’s what I saw. I got some photos to back that up. You can see [from] most of the photos, I didn’t get right to where the gas was deployed initially, because of course I was running away from getting the gas in my system, and I got some, I got pepper in my face and stuff, but, yeah. That is what I saw. That’s what happened.
Police ultimately used tear gas, and 23 counter-protestors were arrested. Local activists are currently preparing to oppose a planned Alt-Right March on Charlottesville. If you’re interested in helping out, you can contribute to Solidarity Cville Anti-Racist Legal Fund here. You can also use an ACLU-spearheaded form to register your thoughts with the Charlottesville City Council.
Unless the city revokes the permit for the August 12th march, we may, unfortunately, be featuring more images from the ensuing pushback.
Resist! Protesting the Ku Klux Klan. Photo by Eze Amos.
Wayfaring Stranger is an old North American folksong that’s been sung by artists as diverse as Burl Ives, Johnny Cash, and Ed Sheeran. We like this version by Rhiannon Giddens. Lyrics below.
A restful weekend to you, from us!
Wayfaring Stranger
I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger
Traveling through this world of woe
But there’s no sickness, toil nor danger
In that fair land to which I go
I’m going there to see my father
I’m going there no more to roam
I am just going over Jordan
I am just going over home
I know dark clouds will gather round me
I know my way is rough and steep
But beau-teous fields lie just before me
Where God’s redeemed their vigils keep
I’m going home to see my mother
She said she’d meet me when I come
I’m only going over Jordan
I’m only going over home
I’m just a going over home
“…and then some of them took a knee and got out their gas masks, and at this point I was telling some of the policemen, ‘This is not necessary! What are you doing?'”
Here at Small Stones, we define education, and educators, broadly. So often, classrooms appear in the most unexpected places.
Resist! Protesting the Ku Klux Klan. Photo by Eze Amos.
As we continue our own work of interviewing some of these educators, we wanted to share with you work from a friend of the blog. Photographer and photojournalist Eze Amos, a Charlottesville, Virginia local, has found himself in the middle of some of the larger protests and counter protests that have taken place since the 2016 election. We are featuring some of his images in this post; there are far more on his Instagram feed.
Resist! Protesting the Ku Klux Klan. Photo by Eze Amos.
In which a teacher, a preacher, and a lawyer walk into a blog…
In case you missed them, here’s a quick round up of our Small Stones Interviews so far. We are hard at work on bringing you the next round of stories from educators doing the work during these times. If you or someone you know would like to talk to us about your own experience, we are ready to listen!
As a teacher, I still bring into the learning space the same optimistic approach I always have, because I don’t feel less optimistic. I still talk with students about their responsibility to themselves to be their true self in the face of the messaging that’s horrific right now. No one can take care of their well-being better than they. So, I don’t feel an urgency or that it’s more difficult at all. Whether I’m working with the teens, or with the college students, I’m always trying to ensure they are kind to themselves in the process.
The religious left has been around as long as the religious right, but there’s a lot more thought now around how we are meaningful participants in what I think is really a nationwide civics education. How does a bill become a law, what does the FBI director do, how much can be decided through E.O. [executive order] vs. the courts vs. anything else, and as we’re educating ourselves on that, what, then, is the appropriate witness of people of faith? Because part of what happens in the US is that when you get the separation of church and state, you choose what that means. For me, it means that it is the job of the church to critique the state. That we have the necessary moral obligation to speak on behalf of the widow, and the orphan, and the refugee, and those who do not necessarily have power in any given administration, and to look for where that shadow side of things is. And that, I think, is the civic obligation of religious institutions.
It does feel really weird to feel like we might be seeing the end of the political system as we knew it. I mean, yes and no? I don’t think it’s hopeless. I think there is some chunk of people who will, well, die because of this administration, and a bunch more whose lives will be made much, much more difficult, but I think there are things we can do. First, I think we can fight—and people are fighting—to protect as many people as we can right now. So, to me, that means lobbying, making calls, bringing civil rights lawsuits, and to some extent that’s working.
Overall, the study concluded that when adults compared white girls and black girls they viewed black girls as needing less nurturing, less support and less comfort.
“Ultimately, adultification is a form of dehumanization, robbing black children of the very essence of what makes childhood distinct from all other developmental periods: innocence,” the authors wrote. “Adultification contributes to a false narrative that black youths’ transgressions are intentional and malicious, instead of the result of immature decision-making—a key characteristic of childhood.”
The authors wrote that these perceptions may be contributing to discrepancies in school discipline and juvenile justice charges among black girls. The study noted that black girls are five times more likely than white girls to be suspended from school and 20 percent more likely to be charged with a crime.
This sets off alarm bells for us for many reasons, particularly through our current lens of SEL. If black girls aren’t given the space that all children need to practice learning about and handling emotions–or are given that space grudgingly, without the benefit of being seen as children in need of support–we as a society are setting them up for consequences both earlier and later in life.
We’re headed to an oral history training! Today through Friday, we’ll be attending a four-day workshop in San Francisco to learn how to best bring our interviewees’ stories to Small Stones.
Emily has admired and taught with Voice of Witness’s books for years. (They’re the folks running the workshop). We’re terribly excited, and plan to provide updates to the blog as the week goes by.
We love you, Angélique! Angélique Kidjo sings Malaika.
Image: A. Kidjo’s Twitter profile.
We’re happy to Angélique Kidjo all day; it’s the resonance of her voice that blows us away.
Malaika is a Swahili-language love song probably best known in the U.S. via Miriam Makeba’s rendition. Kidjo’s version, below, is sung with the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s representative of her efforts to combine different music heritages for the sake of both artistry and bringing people together.
.small stones. 