Community organizers

So here is my OMG from today's class:

OMG they don't know why or how "community organizer" became such a loaded term! Ok, one person knew that Obama considered himself a community organizer. But no one remembered that Sarah Palin disparaged them. Where were they?!?!?! Just 5 months ago, right? Sheltered? Inattentive? Selective? Or maybe Palin's comment didn't have that much play except among those of us who got offended. Hmmmm.

But today was a good class. We discussed "Philip Vera Cruz: A Personal History..." with questions like these:

• Let’s call Philip Vera Cruz a community organizer. A loaded term, I know. So let’s reload it. How do you think Philip Vera Cruz would define “community organizer”? Think in terms of knowledge, qualities, skills and other factors that you think are important.

I also asked about his lessons in leadership and coalition building and participation. Most importantly, I threw all sorts of current events into the mix: harassment of day laborers, "illegal immigrants," the stimulus package, majority rules, bi-partisan "compromise", driving while brown. What does Philip Vera Cruz's personal history have to tell us about these issues? Got a lot of participation! And my favorite, we got some disagreement and surfaced some prejudice. Teachable moments! Yeah!

Butterfly kisses and consequences

Today in my Asian American Sexualities class, I had the students share their first writing assignment with each other in small groups, a 1-page paper entitled, "AAPI Sexualities are..." Their responses were many and varied, and that was the point. It's the first week of class and I'm trying to assess what they know and think coming in, and to show them each other's perspectives.

And to let them sit there in that ambiguity. I told them that I would rarely try to push our conversations toward convergence or agreement. I value the ability to entertain a thought without accepting it (Aristotle). Good thing I have a high tolerance for ambiguity.

At the end, one student remarked, "Well, there are no right or wrong answers." To which I replied, "True, but there are answers with consequences, and we'll be learning about how severe some of them can be."


Somewhere in the sharing, there was occasion to bring up the annual fertility festival in Japan (http://www.wordpress.tokyotimes.org/?p=2088) which I called the penis festival. They got a kick out of hearing about such a thing. But as I was driving home, I thought to myself, if it's a fertility festival, and couples go for good luck, why is the phallus the only symbol for fertility? I'll ask them next class. Shout out to my sistas in the Pukengkeng Liberation Front.