Humbled

 In 2010 I attended the national conference of VANGO, the organization for  Vietnamese American Non-Governmental Organizations, in Houston. For me there was the hope that I could get some help raising money to bring four high school students from the Bronx on a medical mission with Project Viet Nam after having gone myself the previous spring. Those hopes went nowhere. So did my ambition of scaling this up from a pilot program with four kids who I knew well to something that would build internationalism among students without the resources to polish their college resumes with a trip to do service overseas. The closest I came that weekend in Houston was an enthusiastic CEO of another organization who suggested that we do car washes. I smiled and didn’t tell him about the Bronx.

For Quynh, the director of PVN, I think my purpose in being there was to showcase the safe-drinking-water initiative I had proposed. When we ended up going that spring she had recruited a hydrology engineer to work on wells along with my work introducing a water-testing curriculum to Vietnamese school kids at all grade levels. I think she may also have been showing off that she had a white American high school principal working with and for her. 

A lead speaker was a specialist on emotional intelligence and group process. He closed with an activity in which he gave everyone a river stone - polished by the water - and asked us to write on it the negative quality that was most holding us back. The instructions were to get rid of it within the next day of so, symbolic of discarding that quality. I didn’t do that; I held on to mine for many months. I kept it in the console of my car so I could look at it again and again to remind myself what was stopping my growth. I finally decided that looking at it wasn’t helping. This was not a surprise. What was a surprise was that a young woman from Houston wanted to talk to me about her own challenges. A bigger surprise was that the words she wrote on her stone were the same as those I wrote on mine: Self-Doubt.

There is a degree of self-doubt that has been helpful to me. It enables me to reflect. It keeps me from always believing that I am right. It has always let me apologize to children. When I was a principal it let me give permission to teachers to try things I was skeptical about. But it goes well past that. Today I finished reading a book about Chicana feminism in the 60’s and 70’s. I wrote the editor that I was humbled. Humbled by the courage and persistence of those women. Humbled by the shallowness of my understanding back then when I was following their work from a distance. Humbled by the work of the historians who are recovering their stories today.

But humbled isn’t really an adequate word; humiliated is closer. I compare my professional work and my movement work with theirs and I feel inadequate and wasteful: wasteful of time and wasteful of talent.

Yes. When they were doing all that work I was a few years younger. They were in the world with real people and I was in college. My movement work then was planning and carrying out campus demonstrations and participating in larger city-wide and national demonstrations planned by others. The closest I came to any significant work then was when I chaired the planning committee for a citywide rally to demand the impeachment of Richard Nixon and then when I MC’ed the rally itself. I was chosen by the politically-diverse group to do that because I consistently heard everyone and made certain that they were all heard, summarizing their views and delineating the similarities and differences. I suppose that is a skill. I know that it is a preference that is not shared by those who are more interested in ensuring that their own views “win.” A victory for me at that rally was keeping it to the agenda we agreed on and not letting anyone hijack it, including Representative Bella Abzug who tried to sneak another speaker on as she concluded her own remarks. It is not nothing but it feels small.

That was 1973. For the next few years most of my public political work was in an organization called PARE (People Against Racism in Education). Almost everybody in it was a teacher or a professor of education. Everybody was white. The leadership was aligned with a group called Prairie Fire, which was a kind of above-ground auxiliary for the Weather Underground. We got a candidate elected to a local school board who later served on the City Council and as Manhattan Borough President before losing the mayoral race to Rudy Giuliani in 1997. I suppose helping her get started counts as an accomplishment of some sort, but it feels small. 

I also helped with elections in Washington Heights and in Brownsville. In the Heights, the Orthodox rabbis were sending their congregants out to block-vote for hacks against progressive parent candidates and some of those voters, whose own children attended yeshivas, were happy to take a palm card from my Jewish self, assuming that I was endorsing the same people their rabbis were. In Brooklyn I was a poll watcher because the money in school budgets was enough to get people very committed to controlling the local boards. I was threatened at gun point by some hired hood. The monitors from the Justice Department took my report and I suppose they wrote it up somewhere. I don’t think our involvement in either of those elections made any big difference. 

Worse was when we went to Canarsie where some high school kids from Brownsville and East New York had been rezoned in order to integrate the overwhelmingly-white South Brooklyn schools. We were given a narrative about a violent white community and the need to protect Black teens. But when we got there what I actually saw was a minority of racist white parents who were trying to enforce an unpopular boycott - to bully the rest of the white people to keep their kids home - while most of the white parents just wanted to accompany their kids through the pickets so that they could attend the first day of school. That felt to me like a giant missed opportunity to bring together the great majority of white kids with the arriving Black kids. 

I was finally expelled from PARE because I raised a series of questions about the factuality of their claims that the reason we were a white organization was because we were supporting a movement of Black and Latin parents, parents who we never actually saw. I also challenged their view that racism had to mainly be fought in ourselves, rather than in its systemic control of the schools. So I look back on all that without any sense of accomplishment at all. I wrote up the experience and I think two or three people read that.

Then there was my work in what I guess people now call the movement to build a party. Our circle was small, but its membership was impressive to me. Most of the comrades were Black or Puerto Rican and they included former leaders of the Young Lords Party, SNCC, and the Health Revolutionary Union Movement. I cannot say there were no accomplishments. We established a working print shop in order to provide concrete aid to exiled revolutionaries from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Iran, and Ethiopia. I’m proud of that. We also provided support to the movement for Puerto Rican independence, both practical and with our own literature. But, honestly, most of our own publications were dense polemics with other circles. In retrospect they feel entirely insignificant. I devoted immense amounts of time to typing them up, time which I will never get back. 

I once represented us at a conference in California of similarly-sized circles from Alabama, Missouri, and North Carolina, as well as Oakland, LA, and San Diego. The outcome will give a sense of the emptiness of that work, too. After a couple of days of exchanging views and experiences everybody agreed that some ongoing common work might help us find unity going forward. But some circles insisted that it must be a common study, as opposed to, say, work on international solidarity, or women’s rights. Okay. Then one circle said they would only participate if the study was on the three-worlds theory, which the Party of Labor of Albania had recently denounced the Communist Party of China for holding. I said that we would not be bullied into something by a group saying they would only continue if they got their way, especially when it was about something that wasn’t terribly important to the actual work of stopping exploitation or of transforming the lives of oppressed people. When I got back to New York and reported, the comrades agreed. We had already had an internal split over our refusal to make that same question the absolute living center of our time and attention. And within another year or so we had all drifted apart. 

In the late eighties I spent months writing up a summary of all that work. It included a history of the entire revolutionary movement in the United States as well as my take on all the organizations and trends of the 70’s, so far as I had seen them. I think two other people read it. I suppose it was worth writing because it helped me clarify some thoughts that I needed to abandon.

I look at all those meetings and wonder what was accomplished.

Meanwhile, I was teaching high school. Even in my worst moments of doubt I can’t write that off as a failure. There are simply too many former students telling me what a tremendous difference I made in their lives. But I keep asking myself, “In what way?” I imagined myself, first and foremost, a teacher of social studies. I imagined myself raising generations of kids who would be skeptical of the official story, who would dig deeper, who would even be original thinkers. And many of them did remarkable work. 

I am proud of the girl - now a 48-year-old mom of two - who thought the 911 system was a scheme to ignore emergencies and arranged a class trip on a school holiday (and got her classmates to go!) to the phone center. She concluded that the system would work better if callers would take a breath and be more cooperative with the questions the operators ask. I am proud of the three boys - now fathers in their early forties - who reimagined Langston Hughes’s poem “I Am the Darker Brother” as being about younger siblings, which all of them were. I can go on… and on.

The problem is that none of them can. When I bring up these things, with a few exceptions, they don’t remember the significant and original intellectual work they did in my classes. They remember my encouragement. They remember my consoling words when they were down. They remember grace that I don’t believe I have. They talk about wanting to model themselves on me. They almost never speak about academics. One woman who is near fifty remembers me standing in the gap because her dad, a former Black Panther, was locked up from the time she was thirteen. But she doesn’t remember that I brought another former Panther in to address the class when he was finally released from prison because of massive irregularities in his original trial. She doesn’t remember that I had him speak privately to her about her dad, whom he knew well.

I know this sounds whiny. I know that having a strong positive impact on three generations of young men and women matters. I know that I should feel good about a highly regarded counselor who tells everybody that she learned it from me. I know that a school administrator who repeatedly credits me as mentor is a good thing. It’s just not what I set out to do. I wanted to teach the history that isn’t in the books. I wanted to raise up kids who would transform the world.

That plan to allow urban youth the opportunity to do international service crashed and burned in the absence of any funding. Even my Plan B died. I was going to bring my pilot group of four by car to participate in a Native youth leadership camp in New Mexico. The execs, who had previously interviewed me for a position on their board, never got back to me.

I wrote two books of historical fiction about the US in the early 20th century to teach the stories that have been erased to readers. But if the number of actual readers reached fifty I would be surprised. I am hurt by the sheer numbers of former students who excitedly purchased those books but never read them.

This week I read that book on Chicana feminists who accomplished so very much and I held up my life against their lives and found it wanting. I wrote the editor to thank her. She wrote back immediately and appreciatively. But every word of her response felt like critique of my compliments: It isn’t her work; it is collective work that she participates in with colleagues and with the subjects. They aren’t recovering the work of the 60’s and 70’s; they are continuing it. They don’t participate in the isolation and competition of the academy; they subvert it. I am so excited to hear this. I am so chastened by it.