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CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan, Transcend Art and Peace
Created: November 13, 2001
Latest Update: November 25, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

I certainly don't mean to give you the impression that this has been a devastating experience. It's been great good fun. It's just that having won the race, made it to the top of the mountain, you look back and wonder why some of it was so hard, why you didn't know all along that you were going to win.

Yes, I wish I had done more for Elizabeth and J.B., but they were a delight to work with and we all enjoyed what we accomplished. I could never have done that without the whole kit and kaboodle of them. Sue Kirsch brought the thread of record and files. She knew what was happening, when we needed to be alert. She was wonderful. It was almost like having another Marian Rosser. There was Bill who brought so much in the way of calm cool expertise. So he got a little upset with us at times. But once we pointed out that he was expecting a lot, he simmered down and perked us up.

In the beginning there was Carol. Carol, bright-eyed, eager, inventive, with three kids whom she ended up supporting. Hers should have been a genuine liberal arts education. There were professors in her genealogy, but she hadn't had the chance to pursue a Ph.D. because she was a girl. From our first field studies classes, from which the Center was put together, we traded instrumental and socio-emotional roles. We were usually so busy that we didn't get out until late at night. The closer we got to pending deadlines, the nervouser and nervouser we got. But teaching went on all the time. Carol and I soon figured out that one of us should deal with people, and one of us with the deadline. I still remember her walking into the office and sighing with relief, "Thank God, Carol's here. I don't have to deal with people anymore."

By the time we liberated the big room in the basement, Carol was ready to go to UCLA for her doctorate. She taught special classes with me. She was talented and could write in Stanford English. But she worked with me, and so she, too, was treated as though she wasn't one of the brightest students we ever had. No one bothered to investigate what she did teach and offer. They just "knew" that what we did was less than substantive.

I'd worry that this was paranoid on my part, except that one day Carol herself told one of my classes, "Oh, I don't do that "touchy, feely" stuff." I guess she meant that I did. If you don't demand standard English before you're willing to engage the intellect, then clearly you're "touchy, feely." Once at UCLA, Carol became a more "serious sociologist," and barely worked with me anymore. Too bad the department didn't know that. They continued to label her as one of me. Even after she completed her Ph.D. at UCLA. Amazing how labels stick. "Knowingness," again.

None of those early years would have been possible without Carol. Odd how the structural context sometimes pulls apart those who are attuned to one another. And that's another way we kill the revolutionary. Take the bright lieutenant and invite him/her into the traditional fold. The price: acknowledge how your revolutionary ways need to be repented and deny your former revolutionary pals.

I remember how excited I was when Carol got into UCLA. Now she had access to all the stuff I never had. She would find out how to submit articles, to make the right contacts, to publish. Yippee!

Yeah! well once again, it didn't work like that. Carol was hardly at school anymore, for obvious reasons, like UCLA. So Aging Wolf and the new directors kind of ignored her. We lost that whole part of our team. The new group kind of forged a whole new center of their own.

J.B. was gone then, too. And Sue had graduated and gone on to work for one of the local city groups. Of course, at a phone call they all appeared to deal with crises. But the daily routine missed them all. I missed them all. Elizabeth missed them all. What was it we missed? I wonder . . .

Maybe that was a part of the difference. We had been a community. If anything went wrong, and lots of things did, one phone call would bring us all together, like a family. And every one of us pitched in to right whatever was wrong. That wasn't a rule we made up. It just was. Like that time someone was taking pictures and there was absolutely no one white around. Every single person in the office was black or brown. It was going to look like we were an African American Center. J.B. and I took off, and fifteen minutes later came back dragging some of our white students. We had diversity again.

Then four months later, ten students marched in complaining that all our directors were white. We were racist. One phone call, and J.B. appeared. He sat them down and told them how he and I had to go out and round up white students just a few months ago. The complaining students had just come on board. None of them had had time to reach director status. Crisis averted.

They were right, you know. I had just hired Lois and Joanie. Both of them were blondes. Every one of our black directors had graduated. And Lois and Joanie just happened to be there. Lois and Joanie weren't part of the Aging Wolf group either. It's not like they were excluded. They simply didn't fit. They were the start of a whole new group of students with their own agendas, like Carol who had gone on to UCLA and Susan, who had gone on to Berkeley.

Lois was heading for UCLA and her own social development program for street kids victimized by the system. Our center offered a place to work on her data, plan her program, and move toward publishing her data as a dissertation. And our center had been "home" to her since she was 17. I still had fond memories of schlepping her and Carol and Sandy and Darlene to San Francisco for the first National Hooker's Convention in San Francisco with Margo St. James. We had stayed at the Mark Twain hotel, right across the street from the Methodist Church that hosted the convention.

Now Carol was at UCLA, Lois, too, had gone on to UCLA, though still teaching for us in the center, Darlene had gone on to Atlanta and a social work job, and Sandy had graduated. But those memories still held us together. Lois had stayed in touch with Margo St. James and became active in Coyote, while developing her program.

We were all intensely committed to the community work we had chosen. This wasn't just a job. It was our lived reality. And that bound us together. But maybe we didn't look like we were together, because we scattered all over the country. Well, yes. But that was how we grew.

Lois came flying in at odd moments, excited, pouring out some story about what had just happened, and rushed off to do whatever she was doing in teaching then. Joanie usually came with her. Joanie, a stewardess by profession, kept the same pace Lois did. Exuberant, fascinated by the night life of LA, brilliant and restless, they never lacked for fascinating adventures. And they showed little interest in the discussions with Aging Wolf. So we had these two separate groups operating in one space.

Aging Wolf's group was more formal. There was considerably more of a hierarchy there. That just didn't work for us. Never had. We tended to yelp at those who didn't pitch in and do their fair share of the grubby work. And I had become very spoiled to this group's inventing its own work. We didn't do busy work. If there was nothing pressing, we figured you'd find a book to read, or find someone to work with. We didn't worry about filling up every minute of our time. We were too tired for that. The place never really slowed down. So whenever there were five free minutes we grabbed a coke and basked in the pleasure of down time.

Sandy once brought in a sweet, pathetic young woman. We found her with Sandy in the office. We had no idea why she was there. Sandy just hovered over her and seemed to care for her. That might not have been so bad, but there was no room in the office. We were tripping over each other. And there the young woman sat, sad, weepy, being comforted by Sandy. We pounced as soon as she left: "What was she doing here?"

"She's very depressed. She needed someone to look after her."

"Sandy, we WORK here. We don't do counseliing. Don't you ever bring anybody up here again like that.

Now, why didn't we have Marlene then? Marlene would have found a space to plop the young woman down, and she probably would have successfully comforted her - but absolutely not smack in the middle of our work.

Carol and I were both task-oriented. The most important thing was the work, and the quality of the work we turned out. Come to think of it, I think Sandy was probably a psych major. She was lots more into counseling than we were. Which come to think of it, seems pretty funny when I recall how Aging Wolf disliked our talking-problems-through sessions. As would we had they been counseling sessions. They were work sessions where the dilemmas of the work group had to be ironed out. And we did have dilemmas. Like one person deciding they knew more than others, and then ordering those others about. Like someone taking personally a rejection that was prompted by panic at an approaching deadline. When left to fester, which is easily done in a fast-paced organization where everyone comes in at different times all day and evening every day, minor slights grow into major set backs and interpersonal wrangling.

But that's how we'd always worked out the wrangling. Together. Free clinic groups where we opened up and shared our feelings. No, we did not beat pillows. Thank God! We weren't looking for phony emotionalism and plastic intimacy. We were trying to hear each other over the press of learning and work. Our lives were hectic. We just needed a break every now and then to remind two sisters that they were both important, and that the one had to stop telling the other what to do. When we all said "Stop telling Roberta what to do." Marilyn heard us. The whole group could do what none of us could manage separately. And there we were putting into practice what we'd seen in the Free Clinic just a couple of years ago. We used everything.

But Aging Wolf and Maxine and Barbara didn't like the "counseling." I got a feeling we were approaching "touchy feely" again. If Marx had escaped my peripatetic education, so had positivism. It never occurred to me that we should be "objective," and "proper, translate unemotional" and not allow emotions to affect our work. All my training in learning theory stressed the social context, the affect at the different levels of learning, the affect that attaches to power. So here I was, once again, shoving a foretaste of postmodernism down everyone's throat, because I had never been adequately socialized to either Marxism or positivism.

Well, a funny thing happens when you rule out emotion. Things get kind of rule-guided, and, of course, some of the rules don't fit some of the people, so things get kind of structurally violent. When those who have the privilege of working 10 to 2 set up for those who come racing in whenever they can, in between the myriad classes and kids they need to manage, you begin to find that some of those who have to hang around until the work is actually done are left alone in the late afternoons and evenings, coping as best they can. And after a while they notice that they're still there, while the others (of privilege) are home having supper and doing the theatre or whatever they do in the evenings with their family.

And then comes the purple-eyed monster who comes in the next morning and finds a pile of papers left on the table, messy and unappealing for morning coffee. Morning person says late working people never clean up. We of the morning do all the work. And then the crew from the night before comes in and fails to appreciate why these people who never undertake more than can be completed by late afternoon think they do all the work. That's the dilemma of a part time staff, of volunteers, of learning workshops, and of over stressed and over tired people. Each group is sure it does all the work and the others just bask in the glory.

And so I sat for a while. Didn't think. Just sat. It doesn't work without trust. But trust doesn't work when you accept someone as colonized. Now, I know what I mean here, but it's messy. I gotta think for a minute. I didn't know about colonization then. Institutional racism was a radical concept, never mind colonialism. Unless of course you were black and lived it like Frantz Fanon. But looking back, with all the embellishment of memory that chooses what it wishes from the historical data, there was some colonization going on here.

Aging Wolf came home and found the Center to his liking. Aging Wolf had some pretty wonderful students, both with families and community commitments, who had status on the campus and in the community. Privilege, in other words. To that we add this crazy energized group committed to social justice and change in what were pretty radical ways. This crazy energized group didn't have money, didn't have professional status, didn't have community standing, didn't have either the arrogance or prestige of age, and was doing things in a totally unorthodox fashion that relied on emotion and intensity of commitment and on social equality.

I think what happened is that the group with privilege accepted the group without privilege, but understood all the younger crazier group's shortcomings and so concluded that the privileged group deserved to reap the benefits and the status of all the work. Now, I 'd call that colonization.

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Word Count:

2320 words. Former word count: 16100. Total word count: 16100 + 2320 = 18420