oh my, it's the end of week 7!

I've been meaning to write this post for the last 4 weeks, but the weeks have been passing too fast. Maybe you noticed that too.

Since the last post, pretty much everything has happened.
After going on a staff retreat in the catskills to plan out the structure of the entire summer, the young people came. At least 50 on the first day. We've been doing a lot of workshops, discussions, and we're starting some projects. But to give you a better idea, the following is a list of everything that has happened at Reach:


Boat exercise
Secrets exercise
Race/Ethnicity/Nationality/Culture discussion
Identity & social control discussion
Self-governance discussion
History of racism in America from an Asian American perspective
Individual race caucuses
Barbeque @ Prospect Park
Homophobia workshop
LGBTQ panel
Transgender panel
Journalmaking
Sewing
Drama
Our own Jerry Springer show, caught on camera
Driving up to Cornell and back down in one afternoon with Don to get 6 computers that CIT no longer uses. Thanks Kelly and Al!
4 fights broke out in one afternoon.
several young women and young men revealed that they had been sexually assauted.

We are going into week 4 of summer youth employment. Next week we will start the project areas in writing, filmmaking, web design, guerilla theater and guerilla art, all with a political focus of course. These were supposed to be the heart of the summer, but lately we've been having trouble with some of the young people, who are taking advantage of our intentional lax attitude (we don't have rules at project reach because 1. we expect that young people are mature and rational, and 2. the young people need to come up with their method of self-governance).
Some of them are very disrespectful of other participants' and staffs' voices, are disruptive, and tend to break down serious analytical discussion into jokes and disruptions. I want people to have a fun time too, but you know, there's a time and a place.

BUT, before I start going down that path too far, I really want to say how incredible it has been to work with all the young people. They all have incredible stories to tell about their lives. When we did the secrets exercise, an exercise where people anonymously posts a secret about themselve which nobody knows, they not only posted, but even had the courage to come out and talk about rape, anorexia, suicide, and being beaten. In workshops a lot of them were very engaged and analytical; they are very mindful of others, are strong and determined despite everything (and I mean Everything) they've faced, are incredibly creative, generous, and are just such great people to be with. It really warms my heart to think about them, and I think I'll have a really hard time leaving.

That has been the most incredible part of the summer. Having never worked with 14-20 year olds in such a setting, I really didn't know what to expect. For a while before the summer I was jaded with the way that our society was educating and producing its new generations of young people. This is based on my experience working with middle schoolers, and my personal experience in the public school system (refer back 2 posts). Mainstream media like MTV, Fox, movies like Bratz, conservative teachers and textbook publishing companies (like McGraw-Hill) and the highly controlled prison-like public schools young people go to are misinforming young people politically and personally. They teach us to accept the status quo (sickest part of all, to internalize and even rationalize the status quo), and to expect that we are entitled to everything - an expectation that crosses class lines. This is why I am even more impressed by the young people at Reach. I don't mean to idealize them because they aren't ideal, and at times I do wish that they were even more analytical and would find the voice and words to express exactly what it is that they're trying to say. But I think our role is also to facilitate that process for them, so that they find that voice through theater, writing, web publishing, or art.

I have so much more to write about and I've got pictures to post so check back soon!

-dk

Some pictures

Emma Osore:


Julie Mac and an excessively large building in Brooklyn:


Hannah Sadtler:


Garden in Brooklyn projects:


When the bird had its creamy ways with me:


Tina, Shaq, and Ding, on the way to Reach retreat:


Snake I found up in the Catskills on the retreat:


Untitled:



-Ding

A brief summary of what I've been doing (for those future cuspers)

So far most of the summer has been dedicated to planning for the summer youth program.
We get our young people from job fairs, and they are paid by the city through the Youth Summer Employment Program (YSEP).

The summer program will be 4 days a week for 7 weeks, with each day split between workshops, counseling, and projects. The workshop are mostly about racism, sexism, homophobia, identity, body image, relationships, personal histories, organizing, and activism. Our project areas are designed to let the young people express their own histories and what they learn at Reach, both to themselves and to the community:

The four project areas:
*Website design (Toussaint): learning the ins and outs of website design, and using them to create an online anti-discrimination resource, post videos from the video project, and from the men's caucus.

*Just Videos (Veronica and Tina): shooting and editing videos about social justice issues in the community.

*Guerilla Theater (ShaQona): improv & street theater, as a way of liberating the inner voices and communicating anti-discrimination messages

*Guerilla Art (me): reclaiming art from the galleries and into the streets, to spread the messages we learn at Reach and place them in strategic places, with wheatpasted flyers, zines, stencils, stickers, messages in bottles, and subverted advertisements.

We'll also be doing writing and journaling so we can reflect on the whole process.

I'm very excited for what we have (and haven't) planned. In addition to all this we'll also be taking trips to museums, beaches, and parks. I'm a little intimidated about leading a guerilla art group because I haven't done so much guerilla art myself, I've just seen some really cool ones. Also, I'm a little intimidated by the prospect of counseling 5-6 young people. I'm good at listening and asking questions, but not good at challenging mentees with tougher questions that might make a huge difference. It's always easier when counseling to agree with the person and sympathize with their problems, and while I can see the pain or anger they are in, sometimes it's more of a problem with them instead of their friends/parents/environment. How do you tell an emotionally distressed person that they are the ones who are hurting themselves? Well I guess just like that.

Of course that's not the only type of difficult case, but I would still like to make counseling one of my higher priorities this summer, in addition to creating a really dynamic guerilla arts project with the young people.

wow I really got off track...here's what else I have done so far:

At the job fairs for YSEP I handed out quartercards (image to be upload soon) and talked about Project Reach to >1,500 youths looking for employment. According to Don, years back there were so many jobs that they didn't have enough people to take them. Now the city has less money and has a surplus of youth instead of a surplus of jobs. This was quite evident at the job fairs. Our first site was at a mostly Chinese high school, near Chinatown. There were nearly 1000 people lined up looking for jobs in a really small, cramped auditorium. Our second site was at another public school, with young people cramped into an audiorium where the AC had malfunctioned (conveniently on a hot muggy day). They were led in groups of 30, lined up, lectured, and then dispersed in a room full of employers. By the time the 6th group came, most of the employers had already filled up their slots and left, so that the only people left were us and a few other places, so that there were 30 people coming into an auditorium with three choices. We felt really bad for them so we couldn't leave, but we had to because there was still another day of recruitment.

Here are some reactions from the young people when I told them about Project Reach

Me: "hey, have you all heard of project reach?"

them: "no"/[shake head]/[looks away]

me: "well we're one of the orgs you can sign up with inside, and we are working to stop racism, sexism, homophobia, and discrimination in the community" [give them quartercard]

them: [shake head]/[look at quartercard]

me:"have you thought about what kind of job you wanted to have this summer?"

them:"no"/"yea I wanna do daycare" (8 times out of 10)/"construction and labor" (which they wouldn't have found at this job fair)/"yea something with sports"

---------
well, what I can conclude is that most of them have some vague idea of what they want to find at the job fair, and it's usually always daycare or sports, or working with kids. Then they come and find something at the YMCA or some other summer camp, and no matter how much we tried to sell Project Reach (we were the only ones quartercarding in addition to tabling), there were very few youth actually interested in doing anti-discrimination work. Most of the youth (>90%) were people of color, so it seemed strange that they didn't want to work on issues that have doubtlessly affected their lives.

Looking back, if someone approached me with such a proposal when I was in High School, I probably would have just thrown the quartercard on the ground, knowing the janitor will pick it up. Needless to say I have changed a lot since then.

Let it be known, I held fairly conservative views on race. What a surprise it is then, to remember that I mostly watched Fox, and learned from conservative teachers (Mr. Miale, my 8th grade confederate flag-loving patriot history teacher, Mr. Horowitz, whose American History class defended Vietnam and neglected all the student movements of the 60s, and Miss. Viscome, my dear German teacher who I really liked but would show us Fox news during class, loved Bush, and fear-mongered terrorism post 9/11). Most of my friends had been white and we'd make racist(not just mildly racist, but really horrible) jokes during lunch and purposefully leave our trash next to (not inside) the trash can. It really sickens and pains me to remember that I took an active part in this.

These were the sources and influences on a high-school aged Asian. Despite the fact that I was a minority who hadn't been in this country for too long, despite the fact that I had experienced discrimination, I was still decidedly apolitical, disempowered, and discriminatory. So I guess I shouldn't have expected too much from the young people of color who didn't care about discrimination.
After all, they probably are taught to think that racial categories and stereotypes are unchangable and biologically rooted, that gay people are purse carrying queens, that girls are chicks, and that it's okay to make janitors pick up after you. Maybe this was just an education and social environment that was unique to me and my high school, but I highly doubt that I was the only one to learn from conservative white America.

In any case, we eventually got over 40 young people (out of over 1500) who wanted to work with us. The group is predominantly female, Black, Asian, Latin@, Hapa/mix, South Asian, and White (from biggest to smallest group). Summer program starts Tuesday, and I am really excited.

Privilege, "service", and community.

This was supposed to get posted a week and a half ago, but I just had to finish writing the last few sentences:

Initially when I got to Project Reach, I was very timid at meetings. I’d only ask questions to get updated on what people were talking about. I felt it was inappropriate to participate in a discussion in which I had no prior involvement. I figured that every day would get me a little closer to being on board with the rest of the staff. Surprisingly it happened quite suddenly last week.
To protect the dignity and anonymity of the staff I won’t mention their names, but what happened was that power-dynamics and pre-existing staff tensions erupted at a meeting last Thursday, and people ended up shouting, screaming, pointing fingers, making very personal attacks, exposing what other people said, shaking, and crying.
I was just sitting there looking at everybody else, feeling like I needed to say something but then remembering again, that I know close to nothing about people’s deeper histories with each other.
My eyes started tearing up too because I just get really emotional when people who are supposed to get along fight with each other. I felt the same as when my parents shout at each other, recoiling in to an internal fetal position and wanting to yell “why can’t you all just be nice!”

Traumatizing as it may be, it was really a blessing in disguise. After it happened, people were saying things like “welcome to Reach” or “see, now you’ve been initiated”. Not really knowing how to respond, I just kept petting the cat (we have a cat at Reach named Church). Afterwards I did more comfortable at meetings and giving suggestions or even trying to facilitate. I feel good to have become part of the organization so early in the summer. This is not to say, though, that my privileged outsider status is erased. I still feel uneasy trying to facilitate meetings, because I think I continue to represent the intrusive college student who has only had a short history with Reach, whose roots aren’t connected to New York City, and who has more privilege than the staff and the youth participants.

Something that Project Reach stresses, which I brought up in an earlier entry, is the concept that by creating a movement of the victimized and the oppressed (people of color, immigrants, the poor, LGBTQ, differently-able, etc) is unproductive, because it’s not the oppressed that has to change, it’s the oppressors that continue to enforce racism, heterosexism, classism, and the rest. This means that whites must address racism (and the concept of whiteness) in white communities, males must address sexism (and the concept of gender) in male communities, and straight people must address heterosexism in their communities. To be an overprivileged person working to “lift up” or “serve” the underprivileged is both patronizing and colonial in its nature, because it not only undermines the ability of minority communities’ self-determination, it also problematizes the underserved community, not the community and the institutions which have underserved them in the first place.

This made me revisit the model of the CUSP program, where on almost every brochure and webpage it says “serving NYC’s poorest neighborhoods”. This reflects a missionary and patronizing attitude because it emphasizes the class differences between CUSPers and the communities we work with, implies our roles as the smart college students who will lift up the poor, and really is just inaccurate – we are working with very poor communities yes, but not the poorest. We are also working with racially marginalized communities, different gender communities, with extremely well-funded organizations (and many not so well-funded), not to mention medical researchers, not just the economically marginalized.

None of us are doing “traditional” service – scooping food at soup kitchens or singing at nursing homes, and most of us are doing very challenging and important work with very different communities, which only makes me question the tagline even more – why isn’t that part included by “poorest neighborhoods” is? What is the image that CUSP is selling?

I can only speculate why CUSP decided to have such a motto (for funders who have learned a patronizing and missionary view of service? for students who want to relieve their privilege guilt?).

I think there is a lot of value in experiential learning and a lot of good that can come out of this program. Most middle-class liberal students who have progressive ideas have only sheltered views of what it means to be homeless, black, HIV+ and gay. Many students who think working with young people to critically analyze racism and homophobia is really radical and important have never done that before in their lives (like me). So to see it and experience it is transformative and grounding, and I think the program does that part quite well.

Freedom Summer, written by Douglas McAdam, is a fascinating book that I was supposed to read for one of my classes last semester (sorry Dr. Mize). I just finished reading it a week ago (really liked it), and it details the biographies and experiences of privileged Northern white college-students who volunteered to go down South in the summer of 1964 to help register black voters and run the Freedom Schools to teach reading writing and math.

Although our work is hardly comparable to those of the volunteers in Mississippi (who suffered beatings, disappearances, constant threats, and little to no government support), I think the participant-service community dynamic is largely similar, and both CUSP and Freedom Summer emphasizes the value of such experiences for the volunteers. For Freedom Summer Volunteers, their work, the community they built with the southern activists and participants, and the wave of post civil-rights activism they all participated in had changed their entire lives and views in very profound ways, and while they helped the situation in the South, their biggest impact would still be what they brought back to their communities – a more radical political analysis, an understanding of how important community and personal liberation are, and most important of all the tools and strategies of organizing and activism, which has informed generations of activists to this day. Similarly, our biggest impact will be what we learn here and bring back with us to our communities. This summer is just as much about working with (not just serving) marginalized (not just poor) communities (not just neighborhoods) in New York as it is about our personal growth and finding what inspires us that we can bring back to Cornell and our communities to create social justice.

Pictures from TRUCE Block Party

So Harlem Children's Zone's Fitness and Nutrition center did a health fair/block party, and a few of us went to the party. It was very fun and everyone was so friendly and great. And there were some fabulous dancers, intense karate, and moon bounces of every sort.

From NYC 1

@ Project REACH, during three amazing workshops by Don.

From NYC 1

I think this friday's seminar and workshops impacted a lot of people pretty deeply, or at least I learned a lot from it, and learned a lot about my classmates. Don had us do the boat exercise, which is a lot to explain, but after that he had us line up by race, then by class, and we talked about privilege and how important it was for us to each work in our own communities to achieve social justice.

Some things Don said that are very important:
"Quite frankly, as a person of color, we'll live with or without you [privileged white liberals]"

"We cannot be creating a movement out of victims (the oppressed, the poor, etc). We need to be working from where we do have privilege." So Whites must address White communities, males need to address other males, etc.

Later we had a discussion about heterosexism (heterosexism is a system that places value and privilege on heterosexualism).
Don asked us what our immediate reactions would be if our best friend thought we were gay/lesbian, what our reactions would be if our best friends told us they were gay/lesbian, and another question that I can't remember. Overwhelmingly the responses were quite homophobic and negative, though some people in our group thought that responses like "shocked" and "betrayed" were positive.

I think that for us, privileged students going to an ivy-league school, working on progressive issues and pretending we're tolerant or PC or whatever liberals do, Friday's seminar revealed that we've still got a long way to go.

On the eve of the 90 degree Friday

Hi, I'm Ding. Here is some information about myself that I will reveal:

Senior Natural Resources major at Cornell
Working @ Project Reach (www.projectreachnyc.org)

Not nearly as good looking as Spanky the gnome
Slightly better eyesight than man in poster.

Project Reach is located in the Lower East Side, and has been there since 1971. Originally formed as a response to the rise of Chinese gangs, they dealt with mainly the young people in the Asian community. In 1985, they were one of the first youth organizations to open their doors to all races. They specialize in empowering youth through anti-discrimination, so that we can overcome racism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, disability discrimination, classism, militarism, and the list goes on.
Outside of the really amazing workshops they run that raise race/class/sex/gender/orientation/privilege consciousness, they also run a 7-week summer program for young people in the area. This year we may have up to 35 young people from the community working with us. Throughout the summer we will dialogue about the different kinds of discrimination and social injustice, their root causes, how they affect us, and how we can affect change. We'll also be taking trips, going to museums, dance classes, guest lecturers, and doing art projects, flyer campaigns, and murals.
At the end of the summer we'll be out in the Catskills with a coalition of young people from different social justice organizations around the country to engage ourselves at the annual Non-Militaristic Social Justice Boot Camp.

I plan to help them organize the summer program and the boot camp by finding more events/films we can attend and by planning more workshops on empowerment/disempowerment, environmental justice, a people's history of activism, guerrilla art projects. Additionally I will be one of the counselors/mentors for some of the participants, which I can expect to be a very wholesome yet heavy commitment. I can help Project Reach because in a small organization, an extra staff member has a large and measurable effect on the organization. But I feel quite uncomfortable talking about what I can contribute to an organization in a blog. It's too public and self-promoting. Sorry.

-dingbat