speach tree

text: how complicated can a person get how about as complicated as an onion how about as a newspaper as an imaginary aquarium as the organ that serves as a floating device in certain fish as a political thriller??? (and on the back...:) as compplicated as a 3 year old asian girl who sits on the steps of her family's row house and says hi to anything that moves how about

text: how deep/ can this room grow as deep/ as deep as our voices/ as the Pacific/ and the words/ that wander and run into the walls like flies/ the fireflies,/ they rise up from the bog/ outside the Kaleidescope Room/ like spirits from their graves/ noting nothing/ after all they are not/ tourists falsh- ing shiny asses at the sun, / the moon/ and everything in between/ and meanwhile you/ and i we think of/ nothing, or anything, whichever/ you prefer because after all/ we are not fireflies/ and we can say/ whatever we can think of.

providence can be a brutal city, just like any other. in this glass box I watched the ocean fall in sheets outside computer clusters, braid inside the gutters. umbrellas made no difference. this is the version i actually ended up using: Providence can be and has been just as brutal as any other city in the country, but i was safe and desperately warm within the glass cage, watching the Atlantic fall in sheets, watching the acid rain braid itself into the gut- ters, wringing words like fair- trade coffee from my strained eyeballs to stain the imaginary page on my computer screen.

There is a difference between conducting a media campaign against an Ivy League university and addressing racial and youth profiling of young bike-riders in Prince George's County, MD. I talked with GM who has a lot of experience in local goings-on and has lived in the area for a long time. Here are some notes on the conversation (not direct quotes): msn (me): i had a conversation today (friday) with the students in our summer camp bike program about racial profiling, or "biking while black/brown." it reminded me a lot of the work i did at brown university to try to connect racial profiling on campus with police brutality off campus. GM: it's really important to express support for the victim(s) so that they know that they are not suffering alone. it's a problem though when campaigns become all about cultivating empathy for the victims and the victimized. msn: that may have been the main problem with our efforts to address racial profiling at brown. that's why...

RACIAL PROFILING – Bike Safety & Repair Program, Free Minds Collective Summer Enrichment Camp @ William Wirt Middle School & Center for Educational Partnership Riverdale, MD (Prince George’s County) July 2007 1. ASK: what is racial profiling? (See definition below) Have you ever heard of the phrase “DWB”? Driving While Black/Brown definition: (From an education website: http://www.education-world.com/a_lesson/02/lp252-05.shtml ) racial profiling is the practice of targeting a person for criminal investigation based on his or her racial characteristics. Profiling can also be based on other characteristics, such as age (YOUTH) or gender (MALE). Discuss the following statement from ACLU: “A July 2001 Gallup poll reported that 55 percent of whites and 83 percent of blacks believe racial profiling is widespread.” 2. How is this related to bike-riding? (BWB – Biking While Brown???) 3. ASK questions below – how would you feel etc.? Ask students: Have you ever been stopped by police a...

mi-house (instead of mikasa) mikamion (mi camion) mikarro (mi carro) mikamisa (mi camisa) pinky chika reddy chu-chu

July 19, 2007 I’ve been thinking about this all week, and I finally got to talk about it with GC and DW last night, which was very helpful. But first, I should start with the problem, which is that: I tend to get more or less flustered when one of my students asks me to talk about something that I have complicated feelings about. It hasn’t always been easy to ask people about their feelings or about their families, or where they come from; but now I find this much easier than to talk about feminism, or white supremacy, or immigration. The other day one of my students (IJ) asked me about the shirt I was wearing – depicting a Zapatista with a bandana around her mouth and braids down the sides. Below, the letters EZLN. He was like: - What is that – EZ…L…N? Is that like a gang? I ended up saying something like - Well, … they’re more like… freedom fighters. To which he replied: - So are we gonna fight? And I said: - Uhhh… well, first you need to know what you’re fighting for. - We fight for...