004: Voices of the Self

In Voices of the Self, Keith Gilyard uses himself as a critical point of study to illuminate the transactional nature of the school system and its effects on the black population writ large as well as himself. His book alternates chapters — odd chapters being critical investigations while the even are written memoir style and give texture to the account of his life.

I found the form of his work to be fascinating — representative of the double consciousness in a way.  There’s the lived experience and then the need to examine and unpack the experience in order to render it digestible. He’s able to extrapolate meaning from his childhood in a way that is both specific and universal. His experience feels familiar — in both its joys and pitfalls — suggesting an inequality in the education system that is both insidious and far reaching.

I’m interested in the transactional nature that Gilyard points to in the text. Is there a price too high for education as a young black child? Does it end up being worth it in the end? What does one gain and lose after years and years of going into emotional and psychological debt by traversing the inherently racist educational system?

 

003: Teaching As Activism

Recently I had the opportunity to interview Valencia D. Clay, a Baltimore Public School teacher who has recently gained media attention for her “activist-style” teaching in the classroom. Teaching, for her, is activism and she uses her classroom as a safe space for black and brown students who have negative experiences with literacy. Many of her students come to her well below reading level and have been dismissed by a system that is designed to “help” and “educate” them while totally ignoring their lived experiences and social and cultural literacies. Clay seeks to reclaim this via teaching, infusing her classroom with her own canon and validating them every step of the way.

This experience, for me, tied in perfectly with the readings connected to literacy and Prince Edward County’s “Free School”. The resilience and persistence of the educators was able to overshadow a neglectful government (similarly to Baltimore) and create a positive space of learning for black children. Those teachers, and Clay, are hyper aware of the pipeline that has been built into the very fabric of the educational system and are doing everything in their power to help their students recognize and overcome the challenges that have been set in front of them.

It makes me wonder, then, what do we need to do to change this completely? To eliminate this purposeful miseducation? Who/what do we need to remove?

002: Talkin’ And Testifyin’

When I think of black American English, or “black talk”, I automatically conjure up memories of self-correcting “I be” and feeling ghetto for slipping into the pattern of speech I was hearing around me. I grew up with two highly educated, woke parents who introduced me to Ntozake Shange and Sapphire before I could ask for literature by and about people who looked like me. My bedtime stories were “The People Could Fly” by Virginia Hamilton and we actively celebrated Martin Luther King day. My parents named me Tembe, a Hausa name, to keep me connected and grounded to a community for years to come. My name is distinctly African and my family is distinctly black but it was made very clear to me that we weren’t “ghetto”.

My parents have both adopted a “middle-class black vernacular” (if that’s even a thing) — one that involves vernacular backflips but never quite slips into fluency. They taught me to speak “properly”, so much so that I was called an “Oreo” in black circles and teased for acting “too smart” or “better than everyone else”. I attended largely white private schools (with two years of public school thrown in for variety) and was thoroughly indoctrinated in my two educations — the standardized version I received at school and the customized one I received at home.

It never occurred to me (at all) as a young student that there was anything to vernacular English. I didn’t see the value in what I perceived as a ghetto way of speaking until I found myself deep in the pages of Push and Their Eyes Were Watching God. I understood, then, its place in literature but was still hazy on its meaning and value in everyday life. Reading Talkin’ And Testifyin’ widened my perspective to be more inclusive of the rhetoric and grammar associated with AAVE, to understand it as more than just the result of “lazy English” or a sordid mark of poverty.

Talkin’ And Testifyin’ takes the time to explore the syntax and vocabulary of AAVE and render it clear to the “academic”. She switches in and out of AAVE to not only highlight the legibility and readability of written AAVE, but to highlight her fluency. This lends to her authority on the subject and creates a familiarity between her and her reader that suggests — this is for you too.

001: What Is Literacy?

When one thinks literacy, the immediate thought is reading, writing and preset standards of education that are disseminated by a Eurocentric schooling system. This system has determined what it means to be literate and often necessitates reading, writing and speaking English. Literacy has become weaponized and used as a tool to violently enslave large swathes of people whose own forms of literacy has been discounted, ignored, and demonized.

In Pahl’s “The Teaching of Literacy”, she argues for a more inclusive version of literacy that draws from the personal experiences of the student. She uses Winston and his vignette as a case study of the effects of inclusive literacy. Winston’s incorporation of his own cultural knowledge points to a literacy that does not rely on one set of cultural mores to be deemed readable or valuable. Pahl encourages and urges teachers to expand on the meaning of literacy and how it’s deployed in the classroom. She also invites us to widen and expand the definition of literacy to include social media and new forms of communication rather than the stringent ideas of reading a book and writing a formal essay. This expansion allows for new and innovative ideas to take shape both in the classroom and outside of it.

While I understand that the audience for this text are teachers who are looking to expand their understanding of literacy, the text perpetuates the Eurocentricity of literacy by refusing to interrogate the mantle on which it rests. The text pats Winston on the back for conforming to a “traditional” style of literacy but never asks how further assimilation damages the literacy and language he entered the classroom with.

Girls Do It Better : A Living Archive

🙂

https://girlsdoitbetter.squarespace.com/

On Neural Lace

I read the Teen Vogue article on Elon Musk’s company Neuralink and their plans to have people be able to just upload and download their thoughts through a process called “neural lace”. All I could think about was the closing of The Circle and how frustrated she was at the end of the novel because she was unable to hear Annie’s thoughts while she was in a coma. How she felt it was selfish of Annie to be unable to access the thoughts she was having. This ideology seems eerily similar to this project, largely in part due to the implanting of electrodes onto the brain in order to upload and download thoughts. To Elon Musk, this is a great idea (although I’m not sure what you gain from a project from this asides from it being “cool” in the sci-fi sense. What does one stand to gain from merging biological and digital intelligence? There hasn’t been a clear stance on this by the writer so I decided to do some more digging. I came across waitbutwhy.com (article here) which discusses Musk’s project in depth and now I have feelings.

So the conceit is — we have an incredibly old way of accessing and interpreting language that originates in the brain. Essentially, out of everything we’ve accomplished thus far, we are still communicating with each other the way we did 50,000 years ago — by talking. Enter the BMI (not the reductive, go to the gym type) or brain machine interface to the uninitiated. The main preoccupation of the BMI is to communicate directly with the brain (really its neurons) and have the brain communicate with others in the outside world, directly. BMI’s already exist in the form of cochlear implants and deep brain interfaces (a technology that helps people with things like Parkinson’s tremors). Neuralink would essentially be able to read out information from the brain directly, something that definitely sounds straight out of a sequel of “The Circle”. But the author likens my trepidation to Lasik eye surgery – people were super nervous before they actually dove in and started doing it even though upon completing the article I still felt an overwhelming amount of fear. I still don’t understand the benefits of this type of communication, save for someone who is unable to do this due to disabilities (the current preoccupation of BMI’s). This “digital tertiary layer” would essentially allow you to communicate with the outside world and people with similar implants in a much more advanced way than you do now. But is that a good thing? Even though it seems good natured and futuristic, something about the idea feels wrong. It jeopardizes human connection and we begin to rely on tech in a way that we pretty much can’t come back from. If your brain is attached to the cloud – what stops you from living in a VR or AR space — almost like actually living in the Matrix. Idk, it freaks me out.

What about you guys?

 

But Some Of Us Are Brave

I think Bailey’s article is interesting because it really renders the work of racist projects within tech clear. I think racism is a loaded, scary subject that often gets treated as something that only the KKK or nazi’s participate in — when in actuality racism at its most sinister is in the systematic oppression that occurs. While technological advancements are great, they often come at the expense of black and brown labor that goes unacknowledged or undervalued. I think it’s an important project to recenter rather than marginalize because it really gives much needed representation and truth to a space that seems closed and singular in its perspective.

Bailey argues that rather than trying to “add people in” we should be paying attention to what’s already there. There isn’t a need to try and recruit talent because people are already engaging in digital humanities outside of white men. The scholarship is already there, it just isn’t being foregrounded in the same way that white scholarship is, largely because the system is designed to ignore and edge out perspectives that do not coincide with dominant white ideologies.

I find myself agreeing with her. There’s something to be said for meeting a community where it is rather than attempting to bend it to fit a rigid structure that isn’t meant to accommodate their ideas.

My Unessay

For my Unessay, my plan is to investigate the concept of authority and the power of the influencer as well as who the influencer was, what she is now, and who I predict she will become. I will also discuss Instagram + Twitter and the way the platform has amplified the voices of those who were previously unheard of as well as created a new, innovative form of marketing.

I want to investigate this topic because as an editor, my job involves talking to and engaging with talent regularly. I experience the levels of access they have to services and experiences and ten, even five years ago, that wouldn’t be the case. For example — backstage at runway shows is reserved for editors and press, the primary function being to interview the lead artists and get quotes for our stories. This year, at the F/W ’18 show, I saw some top level influencers backstage at Wang. I was confused more than anything else — mainly because I wasn’t exactly sure what their purpose was…

That small thing signaled (at least to me) that change had happened in the industry and would continue to happen. A week or so later, we see major long time editors stepping away from some of the biggest publications in the world. Gone are the days of the celebrity editors — people barely bat an eyelid when Anna Wintour enters a room anymore, especially if Kylie Jenner is anywhere in the vicinity. I’ve seen this trend happen in fashion so I’m curious to see if it will extend into academia.

Discourse has already become preoccupied with the aesthetics of the blogger so for now there’s a distance between the academic and the influencer but will this change? The need for social presence and social cache is increasing, evidenced by celebrity authors like J.K. Rowling and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or celebrity schoolteachers. I follow one young lady in particular (@valencia_valencia) who is a teacher/professor who tapes herself giving lectures and talking to her students. She currently had 40K followers and will most likely continue to grow her following. By displaying her talents this way, does this put her in a better position to access opportunities in academia? Or is it still happening in a more traditional format?

My project will most likely be in a website format even though I’m still in the beginning stages of how to best present this information. My question for you all is:

What do you think is the most compelling way to display this information?

How would you all want to see this take shape?

Baecation Planning – Google Maps Style

For this week’s create I decided to plan out me and my girlfriend’s upcoming vacation to Tulum, Mexico. We chose Tulum because it’s one of my manager’s favorite places and the world and the views are out of this world (well obviously in this world because I’m able to). Peep the views ahead:

 

 

Ever since me and my girlfriend went abroad during undergrad, we’ve been bitten by the travel bug and try to travel once a year. With graduation and job hunting we weren’t able to go anywhere last year, but now that we’ve both settled into the working world, we want to make the effort to get away and unplug — at least once a year.

I started by looking up different reviewers on TripAdvisor and reading blog posts from different travelers that have visited. From there I started mapping the places onto a grid of Tulum.

The above are places inside town.

There’s tons to do in Tulum, from sandy white beaches to endless Mayan ruins to explore. This tool was helpful for thinking about how to get from one place to another, and I was able to draw a line to better guess at the proximity and how walkable the area is.

One of the things I found coolest was that it lists all of your markers on the side for you to review : a great way for me to keep track of all the places I want to visit and check off my list.

As you can see, the places I want to visit are all up and down the coast so a fair bit of planning is definitely necessary to get the most out of our vacation.

I think its definitely worth it ^^

The Circle or The Future of Facebook?

So this book is interesting (I didn’t know this was the book the movie was based on, although I haven’t seen it), mainly because it feels a little too real. It feels a bit like what I would expect stepping onto the Facebook or Google campus on my first day. It’s mod, hi-tech and has an almost too-good-to-be-true vibe. The Circle operates on the conceit of “transparency” which reads as hyper surveillance. It’s this extremely idyllic world where everyone seems happy, well adjusted and thrilled that makes me feel uneasy. Not because it isn’t possible to love your job, but because things that seem too great and perfect rarely are. For the purposes of this blog post I’m focusing on the character of Annie and how in the midst of this dystopian novel, Eggers finds a way to recreate the blonde who has it all. As the “perfect” employee and part of the Group of 40, Annie seems like the most put together girl in the universe, yet we all know that the other shoe has to drop at some point.  I haven’t gotten super far in the novel yet, but something is telling me not to trust her. Whenever I hear her gush about the Circle I’m like …

There’s an insecurity in her perfection almost and I can’t wait to read on and see what it is. Maybe her ‘perfection’ is just a result of Mae’s perception of her but I think there has to be something more to the story. The girl who is involved in 100 clubs and somehow manages to do it all is usually a closeted alcoholic or eats her cheerios and milk separately — maybe she’s guilty of both. Idk, what do you guys think?