Letter to My Children: The Overflowing Privilege Bucket, Land Ownership, and Uncommodification

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Letter to My Children: The Overflowing Privilege Bucket, Land Ownership, and Uncommodification

Dearest Beloveds,

Courtesy of cleaning chores Bean does weekly at school she now notices areas where cleaning can happen in our house (hooray the invisible/implicit becoming visible/explicit!). In addition to organizing her own room, the family has received her good energy wiping out crumb filled drawers, polishing copper pots, and sweeping pet hair off stairs.

One recent winter dark Saturday evening, your father and I sat and read on the couch by the fire.

Full of energy post dessert brownies, Bean decided she wanted to polish silver.

Dragon piped up, “I want to polish too!”

“There is plenty for both of you, just put on an apron to protect your clothing.”

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Letter to My Children: Whitey On the Moon

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Letter to My Children: Whitey On the Moon

Dearest Beloveds,

I almost guarantee this poem is not one you might encounter in your academic career. If not, I salute your teacher. If so, well, you chose to come down and join this family with me as your Momma, so you’re welcome - you get to read it twice. (I can feel the future adolescent eye rolls.)

Courtesy of The Emerald’s June 23 2020 podcast entitled Space Hex: The Curse of Restlessness in Worldviews of Perpetual Escape, I have been exposed to Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey on the Moon" released in 1970. Here is the full text (and you can hear Scott-Heron performing it below*:

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arms began to swell
And whitey's on the moon
I can't pay no doctor bills
But whitey's on the moon
Ten years from now I'll be paying still
While whitey's on the moon

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Letter to my Children: Thoughts on Somatic Capitalism

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Letter to my Children: Thoughts on Somatic Capitalism

Dearest Beloveds,

Over the last couple of years, depending on circumstances and audience, I would dust off this joke.

“The history of the world could be written as - I don’t want to dig my own potatoes.”

And then I would pause for laughter.

I am retiring the joke. I have dug fewer than 1% of the potatoes I have eaten in my lifetime. It doesn’t feel as though I am the right person to say it. It also feels, given that I am trying to dismantle the overstory of capitalism from my cells - too tragic.

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Letter to My Children: Somatic Capitalism

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Letter to My Children: Somatic Capitalism

Dearest Beloveds,

I am using the term somatic capitalism to expound upon the capitalism I am trying to unravel from my cells. Cells that have been very well educated in this model from a very young age.

What model are you talking about, Momma?

This model darlings, the model of education as stated by this ungrammatical and embarrassing sentence on the official website. The United States “ED’s [sic] mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational education and ensuring equal access.” There are so many parts to that ridiculous statement I want to tear apart.

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Thanks, I will insert my own speculum

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Thanks, I will insert my own speculum

This is my promise to the Universe. As sterile stirrups glean in harsh fluorescent lights, that is my statement. If they can’t take 30 extra seconds to show me how to put a medical instrument into my own body - then no.

No.

NO. I am walking out and finding someone else.

I did not go through the insanity of a bone marrow transplant to keep my mouth shut in this precious life.

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Homeschool learnings: First Landing vs Plymouth Rock

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Homeschool learnings: First Landing vs Plymouth Rock

Recently we visited the number one state park in Virginia: First Landing State Park. So named in honor of the “English colonists” who first landed in 1607. The beach was warm, the cabins were delightful, the bicycling under the fir trees was peaceful and magical, and my brain exploded with the history.

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Antiracist Triad: The process begins

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Antiracist Triad: The process begins

In early December of 2020, I made an ask of my tribe for two people to create a triad of white-bodied individuals to do antiracist work based on the description Resmaa Menakem wrote about in his article entitled, “When White Bodies Say, “Tell Me What to Do”. The Voice of Love, my gut, my heart, had been tugging me in that direction ever since I read his piece in May of 2021. His article provoked on so many levels and its main gist is this.

Get out of your white privilege bubble, seek confrontation to expose your bodily experience of racial trauma, examine your life, and “commit to growing up.” Do this with a lifelong triad (here is an excerpt from his article).

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Letter to my children: Privilege and Poodle English

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Dearest Beloveds,

We are going to dive in right away with a quote from Vershawn Ashanti Young’s amazing article entitled Should Writer’s Use They Own English?:

Cultural critic Stanley Fish come talking bout - in his three-piece New York Times “What Should Colleges Teach?” suit - there only one way to speak and write to get ahead in the world, that writin teachers should “clear [they] mind of the orthodoxies that have taken hold in the composition world” (“Part 3”). He say don’t no student have a rite to they own language if that language them them “vulnerable to prejudice”;

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