#stayed after for 30 min to help this student who was overwhelmed workshop ideas for her event

[whentherewerebicycles]

I can get so *big sigh, eyeroll* at times about a particular type of radical leftist student, and it is in large part because these kids have all the buzzwords at their fingertips but so little compassion, humility, or ability to stop talking for two minutes and listen to anyone else lol. idk tonight I was in a frustrating small peer review group (my fault for letting them self-select into groups) where two kids monopolized all the feedback time lecturing a third student in really condescending ways about her failure to dismantle white supremacist thinking in this very thoughtfully designed project she’s spent so much time working on and getting feedback on from a wide range of people. (for what it’s worth the two students critiquing her were white and asian american respectively, and the student herself is Black. which is not to say people of color can’t reproduce white supremacy in their work! but this student literally researches implicit bias and stereotypes in media and is thinking a lot about the things they were offhandedly lecturing her on.) anyway then we switched to one of the other students’ projects and she gave this looooooooong buzzword-y lecture about the ‘queer politics of care’ and the ‘racialized question of who is deserving of care’ etc, and finally the first student interrupted and was (nicely and earnestly) like, ‘sorry, I don’t really understand what you mean by care. what is queer care? what does care mean/look like?’ and the student could not really give her an answer, because the student didn’t know.

and it was just one of those moments where I was inwardly like agh this is the problem you know? they have these buzzwords about liberation and care and reparation and radical empathy and abolitionist strategies to dismantle white supremacy etc etc and yet at the end of the day they 1) don’t really even understand what any of that means and 2) will consistently pass up (or fail to even recognize) opportunities to behave in caring ways towards the people around them. you know what care looks like in that classroom workshop situation? it looks like putting your phone away and listening deeply, with an open and curious mind, to the person who is sharing something they’ve poured an immense amount of time and energy into. it’s asking questions to understand their perspective & what they’re trying to do more deeply instead of assuming that you know everything about their work already (and better than they ever could). it’s using the space of that interaction to make someone feel like you took them and their ideas seriously—seriously enough to raise points of concern, or to work with them to figure out how to fill gaps or reconceive of the piece of the project that wasn’t working. care is just, simply, listening to people with a focus on what you can learn from them and how you can help them achieve their visions, instead of moving to immediately shut them down or score a point against them.

the empathy vacuum in radical leftist youth politics is so real and it can just be like, searing to touch or feel, you know? and I try (and could try harder sigh) to have empathy for those kids because I know they’re searching too and they are probably using this language or this defiant posture to try to explain things about their own lives or about the injustices they see around them. but those are the kids who make you leave a meeting or a small group feeling exhausted and drained. and it’s amazing how different it feels, physically and emotionally, to spend time with a kid like that vs. the kids who are deep listeners, who might not have all the in-your-face political critiques ready to hand but are compassionate, curious, humble, and grappling with the nuance and messiness of trying to be a good person in an unjust world. that second category of kid I could talk to for hours, and I stay in touch with them because it’s a real genuine joy to listen to how they see/process the world. spending time in that kind of person’s company makes me feel like I just reconnected to the lifesource, yknow? I feel spiritually replenished and calmer/more centered and ready to work hard on the things I care about. idk. this isn’t really going anywhere I just wanted to record the thought because that 75 min peer workshop today was such a ‘wow there it is in a microcosm!’ experience.