The blood beneath my bruise
One of my favorite but most challenging courses this semester is called Community Empowerment Through the Arts, an innovative collaboration between the School of Social Work and the Residential College at U of M, which I think is sort of like an honors arts program for undergraduates. There are only five social work students in the class with about 15 20 to 21-year-olds, which makes for an interesting dynamic. I have definitely despaired for humanity after several of our larger class discussions, for example. But the best part of the course is that we get to engage in community outreach and service at various agencies throughout the county. Each social work student is in charge of planning groups or activities, along with the site coordinator at the agency who is also in charge of supervising us, and sort of corralling the undergrads while trying to ensure that they have a learning experience around issues of social justice. Once a month, the site coordinator and I co-facilitate a discussion with the students around the work we’re doing and try to inculcate some sense of awareness about privilege and oppression in them. I’ve at times been pleasantly surprised and horrified, so it’s a bit of a toss-up as to whether any real consciousness raising is taking place.
For two hours every Tuesday night, I get to lead (along with the undergrads) a sort of writing workshop for slam poetry, short stories, and rhymes with a bunch of teenagers from Ypsilanti (the town next door to Ann Arbor). The agency where I’m placed is, among other things, a drop-in center for homeless, runaway, and other “at-risk” youth. It operates from an empowering, collectivist perspective and is really one of the only places in the town where it is safe for these teenagers to be out about their sexual orientation or gender identity, to talk honestly about the abuse or trauma they have experienced, and to do things like use the internet, get condoms, and something to eat or wear if they need it.
We’ve been doing the workshops for a couple of weeks and have gotten a core group of participants, along with an Ozone House alumnus who is now in his twenties and wants to give back to his community (he attends and videos everything). All of the teenagers are Black and with the exception of our first week, they are all female. The majority of them identify as queer. From some of the discussions we’ve had so far, I would estimate that most of them have experienced sex abuse or witnessed domestic violence in their family of origin. They have all been homeless or at risk of losing their housing at one time or another due to a variety of factors–poverty, their sexual orientation, drug use. All of the students and I are white. Due to snippets of conversation about summer homes and parental occupations, I think it’s safe to assume that the students are all from, at the least, upper middle class backgrounds.
The reaction of the teenagers to us has been very interesting to me. Because the site coordinator has done groups with many of them before, they trust her and sort of accept us by proxy, or so it seems. Some of them seem to be intimidated of us and sort of avoid direct conversation or adopt a false bravado and talk loudly about sex and drugs and other topics they apparently think will shock us. Some of them intimidate the students, which I must admit provides me with some level of amusement (cf. that Ani DiFranco song where she talks about white people being scared of black people and bulldozing out to the suburbs).
Our activities differ from week to week. My site coordinator has a loose idea that she wants us to focus on relationships and the words we use within them and about them as an overall theme for the semester. We’ve been warming up to relationship talk by doing various writing exercises meant to sharpen an eye for detail, open minds to alternate viewpoints and explanations of truth, and play with language that’s generally forbidden–last week, for example, we had a great discussion about words like bitch, dyke, whore, and the N-word, whether it’s ever acceptable for us to use them, whether we can reclaim them, whether it’s always unacceptable for certain people to use them. One exercise centered around colors. We divided up into groups and each group chose a color they liked, wrote down all the words they could think of that were associated with that color, and then composed a poem using as many of the words as they could.
I was in a group that chose the color blue. Some of the words chosen were obvious: depressed, unhappy, sad, water, sky. Some of them were more interesting: gang, smoke, kool-aid. Due to the invisibility and normalization of white skin privilege, I chose the words “veins” and “bruise”. Several of the girls looked at me quizzically, and with realization dawning on me, I said, “Because bruises turn your sin blue. That is, if you’re a white girl.”
Some of the girls giggled but they all agreed that “bruise” should definitely go on the list. One of them, a girl I’ll call Morgan, nodded and said, “It’s the blood beneath your skin that makes that bruise turn blue. If you don’t have as light of skin it turns black.” I thought that was a really simple statement but beautiful and we decided to include it in our poem, which went like this:
The blood beneath my bruise
The scarf worn by the gang
The way I feel alone in my room
Her eyes reflect the ocean as she looks into mine.
The color of the sky
The music my grandmother loves
The air we all breathe.
Morgan has quickly become my favorite participant, and I hope she continues to come back week after week. She has a small frame that she cloaks in ultra-baggy clothes and chains, cornrows and an adorable gap-toothed smile, an ever-present hat and an impressive collection of sneakers. She wears a ring with her girlfriend’s name on it and has a date tattooed on one of her forearms, 10-22-05, which is the day her brother was shot and killed in Detroit. Last year she dropped out of high school but is now going back. She’s currently living with her girlfriend’s family. I don’t know why she doesn’t live with her own family, but it’s common for a lot of the kids at Ozone House to have been kicked out of their homes when they came out. (In fact, that’s a huge risk factor for LGBT youth everywhere, and the reason why a disproportionate number of queer-identified youth turn up in homeless shelters, as “runaways”, and in street outreach programs.)
Next week I’m going to see if we can take the video camera outside so the girls can show me some of their favorite places in Ypsilanti. We spend a lot of time hearing about the community’s weaknesses–high crime rate, drugs, prostitution, nothing to do if you’re a teenager–so I am hoping to get a glimpse at some of the things that the girls and Morgan especially identify as positive. Of course, since it’s already getting down to the mid-30s in the evenings here, my idea may be met with some resentment.
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