Comrade Keller

"I had once believed that we were all masters of our fate-- that we could mould our lives into any form we pleased....I had overcome deafness and blindness sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly into life's struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance on a subject I knew little about. I forgot that I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment....Now, however, I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone." --Helen Keller

For the past two days at speech camp, Sal has assigned my students to a coach who is headed to grad school next year. To my delight, while teaching them the basic components of limited preparation speaking events, he has been indoctrinating my kids with equal parts Marxism and Chicano pride. I was a little unnerved when, as he was explaining how educated and well-spoken his black civil rights law professor was, he stopped, looked at me, and said, "Dude was as white as you," but I restrained the urge to claim the Brown pride of being the (albeit disowned) daughter of an Indian father in order to avoid interrupting him from preaching the truth.

At first part of me worried that his radicalism might prove to be a bit jarring for my well-behaved ninth graders and another part worried that they were wandering too far from the training they needed in the event. But then I looked over at Kim, who had asked to write an original advocacy piece about Latino rights and had been denied the request by Sal with the claim that it was "too controversial" (only because we live, and will be judged by parents living, under the Orange Curtain), who was hanging on to Daniel's every word and sharing her frustrations that her own dad seemed to be ashamed of his own race in what she views as his obvious favoring of his "light-skinned" kids over his browner ones. And then I watched as Sebastian, my statistics nut, took the initiative to cross-check Daniel's argument that segregation still exists and can be documented most obviously in school demographics by searching online to find the percentage of "Hispanics" attending his last school (his findings: 94%). At that point, Aaron explained how he had seen the same thing proving true in his observation of the changing demographics of the passengers on the Fullerton-Santa Ana bus when they crossed the border into Santa Ana for the first time yesterday (I finally decided it's too much of a liability for me to be driving them home in an uninsured car, especially since my "check engine" light went off last Friday as I was fighting the traffic back to my aunt's and I won't have any money in the bank to check it out until the end of September when our first paychecks kick in). Mextli talked about how much her friend regretted being enrolled in the local private school, Mater Dei, feeling like one of the only non-white kids there. Rocio stayed quiet during the short time I observed, but I couldn't help recalling the story she told me last week about how her parents had managed to cross the border illegally or how difficult it had been for her to ask me for lunch money during the first week of camp and how hard it was for me to realize she still doesn't have access to the money she said she would now that I don't have anything left to give when I asked her why she wasn't eating with the other kids yesterday.

To make a long story short, in those brief two minutes, I decided Daniel was giving them the very education James Loewen advocates in the book I picked up to read over the weekend, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. I figured I was pretty edgy and progressive as a literature teacher who is always trying to open up the canon of selected works for reading, but I realized that I missed the boat just last year when I complained my way through teaching the play about Helen Keller, The Miracle Worker. Turns out that after the sister struggled to learn her table manners and show her gratitude to her teacher by spelling "T-E-A-C-H-E-R" into Anne Sullivan's hand, she later reclaimed her necessary wildness to advocate as a radical socialist when she gained a "vision" (har har-- ouch!) of the role that class was playing in the incidences of blindness in the country ("Men who were poor might be blinded in industrial accidents or by inadequate medical care; poor women who became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindness" (21)).

I realize I'm still unwillingly a contributing member to the system of oppression that keeps all of this madness in motion, especially now that I'm a federal employee, but I'm just feeling grateful today that I've broken free of the private school bubble, at least when it comes to the kids that I finally have the credentials to learn with.