Finding Nana

The Georgia Aquarium is ginormous beyond belief. It is literally the world’s largest aquarium and boasts eight million gallons of marine and fresh water. Eight. Million. They have it set up so that you can explore the Georgia’s water life, tropical coral reefs, river wildlife, and cold water dwellers. There is a space where visitors can sit in front of the second largest viewing window in the world. It’s lots of feet high and madd feet wide. Holding back millions of gallons of water, I was pleased to hear it’s two feet thick as well. Construction was completed in 2005, and there was controversy about it all the way through. Grassroots organizers protested the aquarium’s construction, pointing to the hypocrisy of misguided spending: how would a city support a multi-billion dollar endeavor to house fish, when there are plenty folks without homes themselves? How is it fair to charge $30.00 for a ticket (and $22.00 for kids!), and for whom was this establishment created? I only heard about the activism peripherally, and what I heard sounded real and valid to me. I also know though, that I have had some wonderful times at the Georgia Aquarium.

Notwithstanding the controversy, the aquarium is one of my favorite places to bring my little niece and nephew when they visit Atlanta. They are always mesmerized by the Beluga whales, excited by the petting pond (who knew sting rays were so slippery and star fish so bumpy?), and dazzled by sea otters. My four year old nephew also knows an incredible amount about names of fish and life under the sea. A few visits back, I pointed to a weird but intriguing thing and beckoned my nephew to look at the “funky-looking sea flower.” He looked up at me, confused and with a hint of impatience and said, “Aunt Jiiiiill, that’s not a funky-looking sea flower, that’s a sea anemone!” Wow.

My sister told me he knows that he has so much marine knowledge from watching what no doubt has become this generation’s version of The Little Mermaid: Disney’s Finding Nemo. My nephew, who does not watch movies a lot, loves Finding Nemo with an intense passion. He knows all the characters and the story line, and never seems to tire of it at all.

Appropriately, then, he and his baby sister are always thrilled when they see Nemo really swimming at the Georgia Aquarium, in a small tank with a clown fish sign above it. The window is always crowded with dozens of little kids, waving hi to Nemo and vying for his attention. Incidentally, the aquarium has incorporated the Nemo craze by establishing him as their mascot – except instead of Nemo, they call him Deepo (no doubt a way around Disney lawsuits and a nod towards the Home Depot’s corporate sponsorship).

My niece and nephew adore our mother, whom they call Nana. With her, they do art projects, go on walks, and read read read. My niece leaves frequent messages on Nana and Poppy’s voicemail, just to say “hi,” “bye,” or count to eleven (she always skips five, but never stops at ten). Accordingly, my nephew got very concerned when he looked around at the Aquarium and did not see his Nana. “Where is she? I need to show her this sea turtle. I neeeeeed to find her!” We looked a little bit before I convinced him to come with me to the Ocean Voyager section, and that we might just see her in there.

As my nephew and I entered into the darkness of that section, we were both engrossed in the fish, and I could tell that he has momentarily laid down his worry about Nana separation. We were headed toward what I think is the freshest part of the aquarium: a long acrylic tunnel that has water on all sides. Here, one really feels like one is in the ocean. Off in the distance, I saw a diver coming down, which is something I knew my nephew would enjoy. Before I could draw his attention to it, though, he saw the diver as well. “Aunt Jill!” he screamed excitedly, “Aunt Jill, there she is!” Looking up at the diver, and back at my nephew, I asked him who he saw. With a similar look to that which he gave me when I audaciously called a sea anemone a “funky-looking sea flower,” he said “Nana. There’s Nana, Aunt Jill.”

I picked him up and squeezed him tight. “Yes, sweetie. You’re right. There’s Nana,” I agreed, remembering a time when grandparents were bigger-than-life. As if he could hear our conversation, the diver looked down at my vigorously waving nephew, and gave a thumbs-up.

At last, we had found Nana.

Let's Take a Walk... Outside and Together

A couple months ago, I was riding in the car with a young woman I have known for years. She was a 10th grade student in the first period on my first day of my first year of teaching. She is now a senior in college, and doing big things. As cliché as it sounds, I have no doubt learned more from my former student than I have taught her.

This particular day, she was telling me about her new boyfriend, and how other girls were trying to flirt with him. Though clearly not a 21st century issue, she spoke about it in unmistakably 21st century ways.

“I’m saying though. First, she had friend-ed him on MySpace two weeks ago. Then she be leavin comments on his page about three, four times a day. Last week, she Facebook-ed him and then she had the nerve to tag him in some of her photos. All I’m saying is that she better back up, because I will go in his account and block her. And I don’t know why he don’t set his account to private, anyway. He just let anyone friend him, then don’t even require approval on folks’ comments. This is crazy.”

Wow. I tried to be in the conversation, I really did. I followed up with, “Word? What’d she say in the comments? Where were they in the photo? How is ol’ boy handling the situation?” But in my mind, I was thinking, “So ‘friend’ and ‘facebook’ are now verbs, and ‘tagging’ someone in a photo on your page might mean sending a ripple of reactions when that same photo shows up on their page.” I was fascinated by her computer-assisted social network fluency, and was stuck on the technical pieces of how all of this was unfolding for my former student, her boyfriend, and the young ladies tryin to get at him.

It’s phat, no doubt. I chat with my cousins in England regularly, and I found a friend on MySpace that I hadn’t talked with since the sixth grade. I check out several of my folks’ new singles on their MySpace Music pages, and I even set up a Catbook application for Ci-Ci on Facebook. Last week, Ci-Ci was Facebook-ed by Lola, one of my friend’s cats. Ummm, no comment please. I recognize I might be in too deep.

But for real though. What are we really into? In South Korea, they started a boot camp to cure “web obsession.” This is a country that boasts that 90% of homes are wired, and the “PC Bang” Internet cafés are the hub of social life for young folks. They are now taking the lead on addressing what is increasingly emerging as a serious problem (in Korea and the United States): Internet addiction. They set up this boot camp with typical military-style reform flair, where a large set of Korean teenage boys go to get “cured.”

Korean Boot Camp Aims to Cure Web Addiction (from NYT, Sunday, November 18th, 2007)

During their time at the boot camp, the boys are denied Internet access, and (re)introduced to outdoor activities, that involve human interaction and teamwork. Sounds nice, right?

Many of us in our late twenties just missed the friendster-myspace-facebook craze during our school years, which seemed to have resulted in some initial mistrust of the setup. And for myself and many of my friends, we resisted for a while, but curiosity caved in and we too set up pages on all the different networks. It turns out it’s madd fun, actually. There are things that we learn about one another that somehow we didn’t know before; there are styles, comments, and songs we use to design our sites that let others know a bit more about ourselves too.

Like most everything, I suppose the key to sanity is finding a balance. So we can do our shopping and bill paying and newspaper reading and chatting and dating and movie watching and music listening and card playing and museum touring and class taking on-line. But in so doing, we miss out on the beautiful encounters that we have from being out in the world.

And I have a few more points I want to make, but instead I’m gonna head outside. I think I’ll walk up the street, through the community center, and to the library. Inside, I’ll check out a real book (that I can hold) from a live person (with whom I will talk). I'll stop by my neighbor's house and ask if he wants to grab a slice of pizza with me around the corner. If he's not on the computer perhaps he'll come...

Incidentally, when I mentioned my amazement/concern/excitement with my former student during the conversation about her new boyfriend a couple months back, she answered with the clear truth “OMG, Ms. Ford… UR SO OLD-SKOOL!”

How Might it Look? Truth and Reconciliation in Context

* In the spirit of blogging-for-building, I post these thoughts in response to my homegirl Holiday’s request (see “comments” under last week’s post)… thanks, sis. Looking forward to your thoughts. *

I was in the sixth grade when Nelson Mandela was freed from 27 years in prison. At age 11, I made sense of the news in undoubtedly middle-school ways, as I tried to fit his release into a context that I understood. As a biracial pre-teen, I was in the process of constructing my own hybridized identity: rockin Cross Colours Malcolm X gear while standing to pledge allegiance to the flag; actions that simultaneously set me apart from my White and Black classmates, respectively. Regarding Mandela’s emancipation, I recall a sense of cloudy exhilaration – excited because bad people would now quickly change their ways; fuzzy because the world seemed much bigger then. South Africa seemed so far away.

In the years that followed, we all watched South Africa emerge from the wretched constraints of Apartheid. We watched as the government oversaw the end of de jure Apartheid structures in 1991, and as the people of South Africa elected Mandela president three years later. In line with the tradition of unparalleled strength and progress, Archbishop Desmond Tutu led South African folks into the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process 1996.

History offers us multiple examples of ways to deal with crimes against humanity. It seems that on one end of the spectrum, we have seen criminal court proceedings, including indictment, and conviction (remember the Nuremburg Trials, following WWII). On the other end of the spectrum, we have seen blanket amnesty programs, that often coincide with the inability of those in power to acknowledge that a wrong had been committed at all (remember the lack of repercussions for the thousands of individuals who owned slaves in the United States). Somewhere in the middle of those extremes lie Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs). If we can imagine the continuum taking on a three-dimensional quality, TRCs may exist somewhere above blanket-conviction or blanket-amnesty programs, as they seek humanity, common ground, and growth. And if we can imagine the continuum taking on a four-dimensional quality, we can begin to understand the way TRCs necessarily transcend time and space to allow people the room necessary for authentic healing. I speak of TRCs pluralistically, because South Africa is not the only place to have participated in such processes. They had TRCs in Sierra Leon, Guatemala, Peru, and several other places too.

Engaging in such a process requires an unbelievable amount of courage, as honesty is the conduit for reconciliation. When brutality has defined groups’ interactions, truth is unavoidably painful. So perhaps we must ask ourselves if acute pain for a finite period is more bearable than dull pain for eternity. Perhaps the hope that is woven into participants’ testimonies has both therapeutic and imaginative powers.

Keeping with the essence of an e-building session, let me pass the mic: if we could initiate a TRC, how would it look? What do we think needs healing? How would a global TRC take shape? Who would participate in a national TRC? How would we design a state-wide TRC? What about one for our cities? Do we need a TRC in our homes?

…and we can keep this going, y’all…

How might we construct a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for ourselves?

"Thanks, but No Thanks"

I do not think the United States Government should give Reparations to Black people for the wrongs committed during slavery. I feel very strongly about it, actually, which sets me in a different camp from many of the folks with whom I often find my arms linked. But my justifications are such that I want the Reparations heads to hear me, and I look forward to building with them to see where we might go from here.

There is no amount of money that can come close to addressing the sinister atrocities of the kidnap, the middle passage, and the centuries of chattel bondage. There is no price that can be paid to address the subsequent lynch mob formations, sharecropping setup, and strange fruit harvests that have so intricately laced “The American Experience,” whether or not folks today choose to acknowledge it. And we don’t have to look hard to recognize contemporary parallels to these historical malefactions, either. Lynch mobs still operate daily, as evidenced by the recent incident in Ithaca, when a Black middle school girl was assaulted by a group of White boys on the school bus. Intentionally-created debt conditions, such as the sharecropping structure that tied newly-freed Black slaves to the land, come today under the guise of predatory lending and too-high interest rates that disproportionately harm folks in poor communities of color. And the Strange Fruit about which sister Holiday sung are so much a part of our contemporary context that nooses are showing up everywhere from small southern towns to Ivy League campuses. The legacy of slavery creates a unique time-space-experience conundrum, where many of us find ourselves struggling against contemporary manifestations of historical hegemonies. We are in constant conversation with our ancestors.

Five dollars, five hundred dollars, five thousand dollars, nor five million dollars can change what has been done.

Thus I clearly do not team up with anti-Reparations folks who claim that what was done is over, and we should leave it in the past (“I certainly didn’t hold slaves, and you were never a slave… so why should my tax dollars go to lining your pocket?”). Neither do I agree with those who assert the impracticability of the plan (“How would they know who to give the money to? What is done with biracial people? What is done with African and Caribbean Black people, whose ancestors were not slaves in the U.S.?”).

I’m saying that we are due an apology: public and grand and sincere and well-publicized. And I’m applauding those state governments and Fortune 500 Companies that have taken the lead in recognizing the ways in which Black slaves contributed to their vast success.

My problem with financial Reparations for Black Americans is the inevitable aftermath that would be linked to such a federal program, both on moral and political grounds. Morally, I am uncomfortable with the connection between sincere apology and money. The capitalistic society in which we live measures the magnitude of most things by the corresponding monetary value. There is a very real danger that even well-meaning folks would feel better about the whole “slavery thing” if at least they had put five on it. Politically, I have no doubt that the federal programs that are already under fire from those who claim racism is over would be wiped out for good. Those who consistently fight to dismantle Affirmative Action, WIC, Section 8 and like programs (which, we know provide aid not only to Black people) will become even more irrational in their leanings: “We gave ‘em money, what else to they expect?”

I agree wholly with Reparations proponents who point to our 40-acre-and-a-mule-less status and the ludicrous historical inaccuracies in our children’s textbooks as ways that we have been robbed our due. I support efforts to address these wrongs, such as targeted first-time home buyer programs and curriculum transformation in primary and secondary schools. And I think of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and wonder how we might learn from it to develop a process that fits our context. But I ultimately believe that the attendant risks of moral or political backlash are too great to accept a check – for any amount of money – from Uncle Sam.