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Before I address the racism I experienced at Columbia Theological Seminary, I would like to introduce myself to those reading this. My name is DeNoire Henderson, I am a 26-year-old African American woman born and raised outside of Atlanta in two small towns, Stone Mountain and Snellville, GA. I received my B.A. in Communications and Culture from Howard University with a minor in Political Science. Before attending Columbia Theological Seminary, I spent three years teaching at a predominately Black and Hispanic school. My formal education from Howard University, personal experience teaching in the classroom, and my grade school education in a predominately white school district taught me the importance and impact of seeing yourself in the learning materials. There are hundreds of studies on the critical nature of increasing cultural diversity in classroom materials so that students “see themselves.” It is important that students’ cultures are represented, but it is equally, if not more important, how they are represented. During my time at Howard, I wrote a thesis on the indoctrination of inferiority and superiority complexes by television news media. Through my research, I discovered just how much representation impacts personal, social, and cultural identity. The scope of my work was limited to the impact of television news media, specifically, FOX News. However, my experience in education taught me that indoctrination in the classroom is just as powerful, maybe more so. In 2020, the world went through an incredibly difficult year. We were living through a global pandemic and suffering from all of the side effects: fear, trauma, sickness, grief, doubt, lack, depression, etc. Amid this, the world watched a defenseless black embodied man be murdered in broad daylight. We watched cities destroyed in the aftermath and continued to have the event replayed in our hearts, minds, and screens. As a black woman, this trauma ate away at me as I tried to find joy, peace, and community amongst my friends, family, and classmates while in isolation. Due to the nature of the pandemic, I saw my professors and classmates through zoom screens more than I saw my own family and schoolwork became one of the only constants in my life. Amid this, I received a letter from Columbia Theological Seminary in June of 2020 acknowledging their historical contribution to the oppression of those that look like me, stating they would be working to “repair the breach.” While I was proud of my institution for taking the stance of standing with me and those who look like me, I was not foolish enough to believe that the racism embedded in this institution would disappear overnight. However, I did feel safe enough to share my pain and hopeful about the potential healing that could happen in this place. Then, just eight months later, something happened that both shocked and rocked me to my core. In February 2021, during a theology lecture, my professor, Dr. Martha Moore-Keish, uploaded a lecture for the class to watch on the four stories of humanity. “First of all, I wanted to frame this week in terms of how it stands in relationship to the whole course and think about the concept of sin, and why it’s still something that is worth considering. The purpose of thinking about this concept of sin is simply to name as clearly as possible the alienation between ourselves and God. To name the brokenness of the world that has to do with the suffering of our relationship between ourselves and God and has to do with our harm that we do to ourselves, to one another, and to the world.” She then went on to share her screen to display images to help us see the four stories of humanity. This is the image she displayed to illustrate “what it means to be created beings, human beings as creatures created good and in the image of God. Creatures who are made in the image of God, who are also fully embodied. (12th-13th century Mosaic of Adam and Eve, Cathedral of the Assumption, Monreale, Sicily: https://www.christianiconography.info/sicily/originalSinMonreale.html)             This is the image that was used to illustrate “humanity as sinful having turned away from relationship with God therefore alienated from God’s intentions from the world and from our own well-being.” (PowerPoint Slide of Dr. Martha Moore-Keish, public domain source unknown)         This is the image used to illustrate “humanity as redeemed by God and Jesus Christ, drawn back into covenant relationship and made new.” (“The Return of the Prodigal Son” by Rembrandt (ca. 1667-1669): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_the_Prodigal_Son_(Rembrandt))             This is the image used to illustrate “human beings as oriented toward a future hope of perfect communion with God and with one another.” (“The Peaceable Kingdom” by Edward Hicks (1834): https://www.wikiart.org/en/edward-hicks/peaceable-kingdom-1834)             She then ended this portion of the lecture by saying, “So this just visually I hope reminds you of what we’re looking at over the course of the entire semester and to locate this week in the context of those four stories, now. This concept of sin has, I think we need to acknowledge, been harmful at some points to some people in human history, and so we need to acknowledge this.” In light of all that had transpired for me and was still transpiring for me, I saw my theology professor perpetuating the ideologies that made it possible for George Floyd to be murdered in the street. Black bodies represent “humanity as sinful having turned away from relationship with God therefore alienated from God’s intentions from the world and from our own well-being.” In isolation, the use of the black body to represent sin is not really the problem. This image juxtaposed with the other images of white bodies representing good, redeemed, and perfect humanity is the problem. I immediately closed my computer, too upset to finish the assignment. I screen recorded the lecture later that evening and sent it to other colleagues (some at Columbia and others studying and teaching elsewhere). I asked them to tell me what they saw, before telling them what I felt watching it. They all immediately saw the same thing. Some were as upset as I was, some were more upset, and still some more were apathetic, stating that they didn’t expect anything different from white people. “White people are incapable of seeing or being anything but racist.” I, however, refused to accept this as the norm. I was a student at a school committed to “repairing the breach.” I was being educated by professors who used culturally diverse theologians in their lectures, who attended marches, and wrote about decolonizing Christianity and dismantling Christendom. I would be lying if I said that the event did not make me angry. I was furious because my “well-meaning progressive white professor” was so insensitive to my soul embodied in black skin. However, this anger was not without purpose. It fueled a righteous indignation that forced me to speak up and email my professors. They were very receptive, and apologetic; however, Dr. Moore-Keish’s response (and current reflection) revealed that we have so much more work to do. She told me that she was blind to it and had been using the same images for several years. My anger then turned to sorrow for her, for the church, and for humanity. How deeply did racism have to be imbedded in such an educated being for them to miss this? She, the professor, the driver of the vehicle of our theological education, who had driven hundreds of students before us, was blindly leading. As I mentioned earlier, because of my formal education I am keenly aware of the value of my black body. I am keenly aware of the lies present in every level of our education system and society at large that tells me black is bad while white is good. My view of myself was not swayed by this distorted portrayal. However, I hurt for those who, like my professor, have not had their lens corrected and are leading others with blind spots that could be deadly. This situation is so much bigger than me, Dr. Moore-Keish, or Columbia. This zoom session represents a microcosm of a human issue. Dr. Moore-Keish rightly discussed the truth that our sin causes pain. I have reflected upon this for months and realize that while our sin does hurt others, it hurts us more than it ever could hurt others. While I walked away from this situation with more intentionality in how to pray that blind eyes be opened and hearts be changed, Dr. Moore-Keish walked away with shame. As she mentioned, many times, shame paralyzes us. In the following class, Dr. Moore-Keish didn’t even feel that she could pray to lead the class, her guilt and shame were that heavy. However, the sin of racism does not have the final say and neither does the shame that sin brings with it. I prayed to open class, not because I felt lofty and holier than though, but because I could see clearly. In this painful situation, I saw the grace of God and the blood of Jesus. I saw the cross. The heavy cross that looked like defeat to the natural eye but was truly victory. I saw an opportunity for generations coming behind me and everyone connected to those in this grief-stricken virtual classroom to learn the truth because of the cross that we came to in February 2021. Thank God for Jesus and the freedom of the cross that has the power to turn shame into surrender and surrender into sanctification. It is nothing but the redemptive power of Jesus that created the opportunity for us to write together about this event for the sake of helping and freeing others. The Bible says, “Confess your sins one to another and pray for each other so that you may be healed.” We are forgiven in Jesus but healed in community. A few verses before this text says, “And the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick. The Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven” (James 5:15). So, we must confess, speak about the event, and pray for one another. Yet, there is another scripture that speaks about the activity of faith. “Faith without works is dead.” We can pray for racial reconciliation and the dismantling of racism until we are blue in the face, but we also must work to discern and avoid perpetuating systems that we are blincaud to. The work cannot stop with this reflection. Reflection must be continual and communal. It must be transparent to be transformative. It must be vulnerable to be valuable. It must be consistent to be effective. All of this would be in vain if this reflection is the only result. Education must continue, but not unchanged, unchecked, or unchallenged. Checkpoints must be implemented. Curriculum must be reviewed and revised, and not just in the imagery, but in the texts assigned, the examples used, etc. Is that more work for professors? Absolutely. But it is also more work for the disadvantaged. I type this paper after a long day of work, during my summer break, not because I want to add to the shame of my professor or pump my pride. It would’ve been easier for me to decline to speak about the event again. However, I have sight and feel obligated to walk alongside blind people who are trying to see because there are nations and generations following behind us that shouldn’t have to fall into the same pits we have. This moment was not about pictures any more than the crucifixion was about trees. The tree made the wood out of which the cross was constructed upon which my Lord was crucified. The cross was a mirror that showed the world its sickness and shame which the Lord died to redeem. Many saw a naked savior and felt defeat: Jesus felt the pain he bore but knew of the coming victory. He did not focus on the cross but made his focus the coming redemption. He did not become angry with the ignorant who nailed him to it but rather prayed, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” So, I won’t make this about the racist pictures we encountered upon the hill of theological education, because Jesus did not make his crucifixion about the cross. Instead, I will focus on the coming redemption and pray, “Father, forgive Martha, for she knew not what she did.” I will then accept and magnify the redemptive power of Jesus that was offered up when Christ arose from the dead as we rise from this. Sin was not eradicated when Christ rose, but the paralyzing power of the shame it brings was. *Read the accompanied blog by Dr. Martha Moore-Keish HERE

One photograph: a luminous dark body curved in upon itself, hands pressed to head. One photograph, chosen in haste and shown as part of a recorded lecture in theology class this spring. That’s all it took to bring me face to face with my own racism, and to trigger a torrent of shame. I offer the following reflections not to focus attention on myself, but to explore one particular experience of shame as a clue to what white privileged people might need to learn, in our bodies, about what it means to be human. I offer this as a testimony to what I am learning, dimly, in fragments, in my own body, about the pain we have inflicted on the bodies of others. I offer this as a snapshot of how shame might be an opening to the healing of racism. For the past 17 years, I have co-taught the two-semester introductory course in theology at Columbia Theological Seminary. Every time I teach on theological anthropology, I draw on a conceptual framework that I picked up long ago from Serene Jones to talk about the complexity of the human condition. There are four basic stories of humanity, I say to students, and all four are simultaneously true: we are created good in the image of God we are distorted (individually and collectively) by sin we are forgiven and redeemed we are drawn toward the future in hope for a day when all creation will be made new When we ponder the mystery of what it means to be human, it is vital to attend to all these dimensions to avoid major pitfalls in dealing with other humans. If we do not affirm that all are made good, in God’s image, we can invent division and hierarchy among different groups of humans, some imagined as more valuable than others. If we affirm that we are all made in the image of God but fail to grapple with the reality of sin, we do not tell the truth about the way that we wound each other, ourselves, and the world that God so loves. If we confront the reality of sin but do not also proclaim God’s forgiveness and transforming grace, then we have no hope. If we affirm that we are forgiven now but do not also announce the eschatological promise that God is not done yet, then we can lapse into complacency. We are complicated, fragile, wondrous, beloved, and unfinished creatures. Our theological anthropology needs to say at least this much. This is what I sought to remind students back in February, as we approached the week on the doctrine of sin. In my introductory recorded video, I repeated these four dimensions of humanity, each with an associated image to provoke reflection: an early mosaic of Adam and Eve in the garden (creation) a photograph of a (male) human being curved in upon himself (sin) a painting of the prodigal son welcomed home (forgiveness) a painting of the peaceable kingdom (eschatological hope) As you read this, you may already suspect the problem that emerged. But I did not. Not yet. Friday night, I recorded and posted the video, so that all the materials for the coming week would be available for students working ahead over the weekend. Tuesday morning, as soon as I turned on my computer, I discovered an email from a student naming the obvious racism in the images I had chosen as they were associated with the four stories of humanity: the images of Adam and Eve, the prodigal son and his father, and the little child in the peaceable kingdom all were portrayed as white. The only human being of color in the set of images was in the portrayal of sin. I had presented to my students the lie that white people represent goodness and forgiveness, while a Black person represents sin. Sick to my stomach, I could only shake my head in horror at my own blindness—my own sin. The student raised other concerns about the class as well, but it was the juxtaposition of images that was the trigger for their rightful pain and anger. That day and the days immediately following were a blur of conversations, confessions, and attempts to begin the long work of repair for the damage done. Nights did not bring much sleep. Over and over I replayed what I had done.             Why did I choose these images?             Why did I not see the implications?             I have used these same pictures before, and no one said anything . . .             Imposter. After careful consultation with colleagues, I posted a public apology and promised to try to do better. I listened as students described their pain. I tried, and failed, to focus attention on the harm I had done, rather than fixating on what I was feeling. Yet could it be that what I was feeling was itself an important clue to the harm I had done? The next day was Ash Wednesday. Lent came right on time. Almost immediately, I named for myself what I was experiencing with one word, in capital letters: SHAME. How could I have done this? How could I not have seen what my student saw? My grandfather spent a night in jail in 1930 to protect a Black woman from being lynched after she killed my five-year old aunt in a hit-and-run accident. My father worked in Selma in 1965 to register Black citizens to vote in the days following “Bloody Sunday.” My parents enrolled me in the first racially integrated preschool in the city of Tallahassee. I had been raised to protest all forms of racial discrimination. I knew better. I knew better. My knowing did not go deep enough. As I wrestled with shame, I sought wisdom from Brené Brown, who has spent years doing research on this emotion. Brown says that shame has two big tapes: “You are never good enough” and “Who do you think you are?” These are common tapes in my mental rotation, as I think they are for many women, including those in Black, AAPI, Latinx, and white communities.[1] These refrains reinforce my deeply held fear that in spite of the fact that I am trying my best, someone is going to find out that I am really inadequate to the task. I know these messages are harmful to me and they contradict my own theological teaching — that I am also good, made in God’s image, and am forgiven, justified, and free. The day I was confronted with my own racism, the Shame Tapes were all I could hear. I curved in upon myself, like the image I had chosen to represent sin. Never good enough. Who do you think you are? These loops stand in stark contrast to what scholars like Kerry Connelly describe as the story that many white Americans tell ourselves: that we are basically “good” people.[2] “Good people” do not intend to harm others. They mean well. More insidiously, as Connelly describes it, good people are “nice and never disruptive, and they value peace and comfort and the status quo.”[3] This tape, too, is well played in my head; though I rarely if ever describe myself as a “good person,” I often say it about others, to highlight their positive intentions even if a particular behavior was harmful. “They’re good people,” I might say, “They did not mean any harm.” This monolithic insistence on the goodness of the race one identifies with is obviously problematic, for many reasons. It reduces “goodness” to “niceness,” which has gotten twisted into “whiteness.” It confuses fundamental human value with nondisruptive human behavior that conforms to the status quo. In addition, it fundamentally masks the complexity of who we are as human beings—yes, created good in God’s image, but also deeply warped into patterns of behavior that harm ourselves, one another, and the earth. Despite Connelly’s focus on the tendency to see myself as “good,” on that day in February, and on the days following, it was hard for me to see any kind of “goodness” in myself. Instead, it was the shame refrain: “I am bad.” This is where Brené Brown focuses attention in her own research on shame. She points out that shame says, “I am bad,” while guilt says, “I did something bad.” Shame becomes a totalizing narrative enclosing a person in an identity as “bad,” while guilt focuses on a particular action as bad. Brown urges people to move from shame, which immobilizes, to guilt, which can motivate a person to change and do better. Brown has much wisdom here, rooted in years of research with people whose narratives of shame have prevented them from thriving as healthy human beings. Shame can be debilitating, even deadly. Too often, shame is connected with sexuality, particularly women’s sexuality. Young women are particularly vulnerable to being “shamed” for the way they dress or for engaging in sexual behavior. Shame in this sphere of life is surely problematic, reinforcing unhealthy views of gender and sexuality that need to be healed. Shame is also destructive in the world of addiction. My friend Jenn Carlier effectively documents the power of shame in her work on addiction and atonement theory. “The paradox of having some sense of agency and yet feeling compelled to keep drinking creates a space for the tremendous shame and self-loathing that perpetuate [drug] use. [One writer] says of her behavior, ‘I’m sick. I’m responsible.’ It is this combination of being sick and yet feeling the shame of moral failure that makes it so difficult for those struggling with addiction to get help.”[4] In the case of people suffering from addiction disorders, the experience of shame often becomes the driver for continuing to abuse substances, and the continuing abuse then feeds the cycle of shame. The constant reminder of being “never good enough” keeps people mired in patterns of self-destruction, preventing them from seeking help. Shame can clearly be destructive, especially when it is imposed by an external community that repeats the messages, “You are not good enough. You are a failure. Who do you think you are?” When these are the only messages that we hear, we hide from others. We curve in on ourselves, refusing to admit our need for help. It is especially problematic among marginalized communities, who often internalize messages of shame for “failing” to live up to societal expectations of financial success, behavior, physical appearance, or ability. This kind of shaming is not what I want to endorse. Yet I am convinced that the shame I experienced taught me something vital about myself, and about race and racism. While Brené Brown advocates moving from shame to guilt, I think that at least in some cases, and especially for those of us who carry privilege, shame is what we must face. Shame as a deep-seated, embodied encounter with my own failing is still the best word I can summon to describe what I experienced, and it revealed something I need to know. To call this simply “guilt” would be to reduce the problem to a single incident, an example of an action that I needed to confess, make amends for, and move on from. “Shame,” on the other hand, signals the depth and endurance of a problem in which I am implicated, for which I am partially responsible, and from which I cannot completely extricate myself. In this case, shame welled up as I confronted my own racist entanglement. It is precisely shame that reveals an important truth about who I am—and who we are. Wrestling with painful shame offered me a dim awareness of the horrific pain endured by members of the Black community—including the real pain of my own student, which I had exacerbated by my thoughtlessness thoughtlessness.[5] Further, shame does not have to immobilize us. A recent Rabbis for Human Rights essay offers this insight into the positive side of shame: “A remarkable teaching in the Babylonian Talmud (Nedarim 20a) reads: a person who has no shame, such a person’s ancestors did not stand at Sinai. I don’t read this as genealogical research, but as ethical teaching. To be heirs of those who stood at Sinai, to stand ourselves at the foot of the mountain, means not only to affirm identity. It means to take responsibility.”[6] Shame then, rather than immobilizing us, can ignite responsibility. I am starting to think that “shame” is another way of naming what some Christians have called a deep awareness of original sin: the truth that human beings are infected by inexplicable tendencies to harm ourselves, others, and the world around us, to turn away from the holy and loving Mystery we call “God.” In my case, shame shocked me into recognition of my own complicity in the sin of racism, as well as offering a tiny hint of the destructive kind of shame experienced by Black people and other marginalized persons. Shame, in at least this case, can be an engine for empathy and change. Of course, this is not the end of the story, but just a beginning. Much as I hate to admit it, I fully expect to run up against shame again, to be faced with my failings again and again, to feel that sickness in the pit of my stomach. I hope, however, that having named it this spring, I will be better equipped to acknowledge it for the revelation it is, and to hear the Shame Tape not as a single voice in my head, but as one truthful voice among others that I need to hear. The real danger is not the experience of shame itself, but the experience of shame by itself, as the only story of who we are. Just as it is problematic to tell a single story of “goodness” without the truth of sin, so too it can be deadly to experience shame without also being told “you are forgiven. You are still beloved.” The courageous student who wrote to me back in February to call out my racism in the classroom has shown remarkable patience and grace in our ongoing interactions. In spite of exhaustion and pain in the wake of that week’s presentation, the student continued to show up to class discussions, alert and engaged, ready to discuss the readings and offer insights. They also offered forgiveness (accompanied by an appropriate call to accountability). In so doing, this student enabled me to see myself not as locked into the narrative of shame, but as someone who might be transformed by grace. Mine is not a simple story of sin moving to redemption. Instead, my experience this spring has deepened my understanding of the complexity of what it means to be human. I am not just one story. Rather than telling a single story about ourselves, or simply moving from one story to another (with the corresponding risk of premature closure), I think it is more appropriate to recognize that we are complex creatures, living multiple stories. We are AT ONCE beloved and corrupted, forgiven and unfinished. Several years ago, one of my daughters shared with me the work of Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie, who gave a now-famous TED Talk in 2009 on “the danger of the single story.”[7] I’ve been thinking about this, too, in light of what happened this spring. Adichie reflects on her own experience of growing up reading British and American children’s books, which led her to assume that there was only one story of what books are, and what childhood is like. When she discovered African literature, she realized that there were other stories that could be told—stories that included people who looked like her and lived like her. Later, when she came to college in America, her roommate was shocked by Adichie’s elegant English because the roommate had a single story of Africa that shaped her perception of what all African people must be like. On her first visit to Mexico, Adichie confronted the danger of the single story in herself. “I was overwhelmed with shame,” she says, when she realized that she had assumed that all Mexicans were one thing: “the abject immigrant.” “I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.” If we tell a single story about other people, it narrows our understandings of others into stereotypical assumptions, usually based on stories told by those in power. Adichie illumines this point powerfully. And she has helped me to see the further point that we need multiple stories not only of other people, but also of ourselves. I have taught this before, but shame has shown me the truth of it in a new way. If I do not affirm that all people are made good, in God’s image, I invent division and hierarchy among different groups of humans, some imagined as more valuable than others. That is what my image choices conveyed. If I affirm that we are all made in the image of God but fail to grapple with the reality of sin, I do not tell the truth about the way that we wound each other, ourselves, and the world that God so loves. That is the truth that shame is teaching me. If I confront the reality of sin but do not also proclaim God’s forgiveness and transforming grace, then I have no hope. That is the possibility of transformation that my student and my colleagues are offering me. If I affirm that we are forgiven now but do not also announce the eschatological promise that God is not done yet, then I can lapse into complacency. This is where my work lies. We are, all of us, complicated, fragile, wondrous, beloved, and unfinished creatures. Thanks to the student who called me out, I am learning more deeply the truth of what it means to be human.   *Read the accompanied blog by DeNoire Henderson HERE   [1] Recent psychological and sociological research is exploring how shame functions in distinctive ways in different cultural communities, but with similar messages of not being worthy or good enough. [2] See Kerry Connelly, Good White Racist? Confronting Your Role in Racial Injustice (Westminster John Knox, 2020). [3] Ibid., 11. [4] Jennifer Carlier, Finding God in the Basement: Addiction and Metaphors for Salvation, PhD dissertation (Emory University, 2021), 37. [5] Psychotherapist Joseph Burgo helpfully distinguishes between productive shame and toxic shame in a way that resembles my own hunch: https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/4/18/18308346/shame-toxic-productive. In addition, many of the essays in On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency edited by Suzana Milevska (2016) are also working along these lines: https://mitpress.mit.edu/contributors/suzana-milevska. [6] Michael Marmur, Rabbis for Human Rights email newsletter, 5/13/2021. [7] https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en#t-10322.

In my early Caribbean childhood of the 1960s and 1970s after leaving England, the country of my birth, stories surrounded us. Often, they were whispered and overheard in partial, redacted fragments, or they were spit out into the air with force, the words ricocheting off the walls and buildings of our individual and collective histories and rebounding in fragments to listeners in myriad shapes and patterns. At other times, the stories were gently ladled—soft, soothing, and nourishing in the recollections of elder women and men who chose their words with care, deboning the sharp bits while maintaining the flesh of the experience for young listeners. As children, my brother and I were often reminded never to eat fried fish while simultaneously carrying on a vigorous conversation because the slipperiness and sharpness of the fish bones made them more likely to shift from between our teeth and lodge sharply somewhere between the first bite and the swallowing of piquant deliciousness. Fairytale horror always got our attention. I regard the silence of eating fried fish as one of the crucial lessons of conversation because it taught us how to listen carefully. Now while fish bones were discarded, the bones of chicken and other meat were often ground to a powdery mass—“down to the marrow”—the chewing of which was an enjoyment of the meal. In this way, eating bones were both cautionary as well as savoured metaphors about speech, listening, and enjoyment. We grew up with grandparents, people born at the turn of the last century, descendants of the enslaved, on small islands of the Eastern Caribbean in what was then a far-flung shore of Britain’s imperial project. At one time in the late eighteenth century, Admiral Horatio Nelson and his soldiers were stationed there in Antigua, at the naval dockyard built by enslaved folks on the south coast looking over the waves at Guadaloupe. Sitting on the front stone steps of our grandparents’ home, too young for school, we too were sentinels who drank in salt air. There were a few cars and trucks, but mostly we watched people; they embodied the world beyond garden gates, doors, and louvres (windows). We saw children in their freshly pressed uniforms going to and from school and grown folk walking by and calling out their greetings, selling their wares with snatches of song, including fish, ice wrapped in burlap, and salt peanuts. And if there were praises and curses belonging to dramas that began long before they walked by, we heard those, too. My brother and I traveled through the centuries, daily. We walked by structures, including the Anglican cathedral that we visited each Sunday, built and rebuilt over the last few centuries. Nothing was designated a historical site. I do not recall any plaques or markers. There were gravestones and cannons and cannon balls, material evidence from a colonial past. A woman selling fruit around the corner from our house greeted my grandfather in his mother tongue, Antillean French Creole, every day as he took his constitutional walk after lunch. I imagine her saying “Sa kap fet?” (How’s it going?). The scales on which she and other market women confirmed the price of her goods, accurately pre-weighed by her touch, were heavy dark metal forged before our time. When we returned to the house with longer shadows in tow perhaps my uncle would be there, his car parked outside and the gentle tick tock of his wristwatch marking modern time. We learned to move between these various eras. We were travelers seated on the front steps of the house, books and words and stories for fuel, hurtling through the atmosphere from which we took deep garden-perfumed gulps, sunglasses a barrier protecting our eyes from some alternate sun. After flying to Canada in the early 1970s in a giant version of the red plastic plane from the cereal box, we felt the shift and change, jarringly, in the unaccustomed motion of escalators and elevators and trains and buses and another English language. But the stories, we remembered the stories, and we learned to chew and spit and talk and write them. In my teaching and design of Caribbean and African Diaspora religious and cultural studies courses, these storying practices contribute to imaginative pedagogies. They are especially useful when engaging students in the study of topics which are potentially difficult and traumatic. Storying as a teaching method has the capacity to both disrupt and challenge as well as to protect. Storying invites multiple vantage points and critical assessment. Finding the story bones is a process of meaningful engagement with the past and holds the potential to connect our various worlds of being as teachers, scholars, and learners.   Photo by British Library on Unsplash Enslaved people cutting the sugar cane on the Island of Antigua, 1823. Download this photo by British Library on Unsplash unsplash.com

In striving to craft a trauma-informed pedagogy while teaching about social justice, my reflections have often circled around a central question: When is it appropriate to use tragic and traumatic current events as examples of injustice in the classroom? I’ve been pondering this question for the last few years, while teaching undergraduate courses at a predominately White, Catholic institute. The majority of students take my classes to fulfill a General Education requirement. Most students are from Christian denominations at varying levels of personal faith commitments, and few might elect to take a theology class if it was not required. On the one hand, making connections between course content and the world in which students live is effective. Tethering discussion to an event that every person in the classroom knows about (e.g., the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021) is an attention-grabber. When a well-known event, like the Atlanta spa shootings, affects a particular community more significantly than others—in this case, the AAPI community—discussing it in class signals to students that I take the trauma seriously and care about how they’ve been impacted by it. It can also be time during which my White-identifying students—especially those from predominately White communities—may be more open to learn a much-needed lesson about the reality of White supremacy and White privilege. On the other hand, I worry about retraumatizing students from communities affected by the event. I’ll never forget how a few years ago, after a 2-week unit on racism in my theology and social justice course, a Black male student told me: “I have to think about racism almost every minute in my life. I always have a target on my back. I drive to school with my wallet on the dashboard, just in case I get pulled over. When I get to your classroom, I want a break. I just want to talk about Jesus.” This student did not need me to cater to White students, in trying to convince them that Black lives really do matter. And it clearly added to his trauma when I did. This question of how often to bring traumatic current events into the classroom came to a head while I was teaching about theology and justice this spring, in an undergraduate class entitled “Just Theology.” My class is constructed around several modules, each analyzing a theme of injustice prevalent in US society, through a theological lens. Modules center around topics like poverty, war and weapons, global warming, sexism and patriarchy, racism, immigration, and homophobia and transphobia. My students were predominately White (around 10 to 15 percent BIPOC-identifying) and fairly gender balanced. In my 24-student undergraduate classes usually no more than one student (if that) openly identifies as trans or non-binary. In some classes, I’ve had up to 30 percent disclose to me in written work that they identify as LGBTQ+, but not all are open on campus. This last semester (Spring 2021), I had no shortage of options for bringing current events into our classroom discussions. But I was also deeply aware of how my students were living in a permanent state of instability and uncertainty, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Capitol attack, the US-Mexico border crisis, ongoing police brutality and murders, record high unemployment rates, and frequent mass shootings. Introducing students to disorienting dilemmas with conflicting theories and positions, as I usually tried to do in other semesters, almost seemed insensitive in a context already so unstable and polarized over these same issues. After chatting with some colleagues about this struggle, I came to articulate and adopt a pedagogical principle: discussing traumatic events in the classroom, in such an unstable time, necessitates a stabilizing scaffold to frame the events, that is, a theory or intellectual framework that is responsible to course content and objectives.[1] Remembering my former student’s words about wanting to “just talk about Jesus” in my class, I decided to include in my syllabus a piece by Kelly Brown Douglas which makes connections between the stand-your-ground murder of Trayvon Martin and the crucifying murder of Jesus.[2] Of course, in requiring reading like this, appropriate trigger warnings and alternative assignments need to be offered to students, especially during traumatic times. But the reading assignment seemed to help several students connect my class to the world around them in a personal way. By reading, discussing, and writing about Douglas’s connection between Jesus and Trayvon, most of my White students, who needed to, gained some awareness of White supremacy and White privilege. Some of my students of color commented on how they had never been introduced to a liberating reading of Jesus and appreciated this one that connected deeply to their current everyday struggles. The piece provided nearly all of the students a concept to evaluate—a stabilizing intellectual scaffold around which to consider disorienting and nonsensical tragedies and traumas. Teaching through 2020 and 2021 has been difficult, to be sure, but my students helped me to see how many of them necessitate and yearn for critical thought even more during times of tragedy, uncertainty, and trauma. [1] I am particularly grateful to my colleague and conversation partner, Dr. Kristi Law, Director of the Bachelor of Social Work program and Associate Professor at St. Ambrose University, for helping me think through this idea. [2] Kelly Brown Douglas, “Jesus and Trayvon: The Justice of God,” in Stand your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2015), 171-203.  

One of the realities that the pandemics of the past eighteen months have brought home is how the different life situations of students change the impact of collective trauma on their bandwidth for learning. For some of our students, when the world ground to a halt, they found themselves with more space to focus, to engage with what they were learning, to connect with others. For many of our students, caregiving for children and sick relatives, loss of income and economic stability including access to safe housing, increased incidences of domestic violence, threats of racialized violence in public spaces, life-and-death struggles with mental health conditions, or the high rates of infection and death in their communities made focusing on learning nearly impossible. The dominant model of education that we work with in the United States is a factory model of schooling, developed within the shift to industrialization when we moved from a tutor/pupil dyad to a mass-produced improvement of worker skill. We put many bodies into a classroom with one teacher for efficiency, assume they all go through the same exposure to materials and activities for learning, and then grade the outcome on how well it measures up to some ideals set before we ever met the people who would enter our classroom. We started grading students at the same time we started grading meat and eggs, as products for consumption by the outside world. Those who don’t measure up are blamed for their lack of inherent ability or effort and failing them out is the responsible communication to the outside world of their individual deficiencies. It seems banal to have to name it, but this is a profoundly anti-relational and unjust mode of schooling. Again and again in working with early career faculty throughout the last year, we reminded each other of some basic realities: we had to focus on what is most important in learning; we had to respect where are students are in the moment and what they are capable of engaging given their lived realities; we had to remember that care for students as complex humans and getting through this season is as important as whatever we felt we owed some discipline, administration, or future employer in terms of measurable skill or knowledge outcomes. I have been reading Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ poetic marvel of a book, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020). The collection originated as a series of online posts relating insights she had gained from learning about the colonizing classification and decimation of marine mammals in their encounter with white Western culture. She committed to becoming an apprentice to their wisdom in survival, adaptation, collaboration, and movement through the dangerous currents in which they found themselves. In a piece thinking about schools alongside marine mammals, Gumbs defines schools as “organizational structures for learning, nurturance, and survival, both intergenerationally and within generations” (55). When Gumbs reflects on the schooling behaviors of striped dolphins as they faced the decimation of a disease outbreak in the Mediterranean Sea in the early 1990s, she notes: What if school, as we used it on a daily basis, signaled not the name of a process or institution through which we could be indoctrinated, not a structure through which social capital was grasped and policed, but something more organic, like a scale of care. What if school was the scale at which we could care for each other and move together. In my view, at this moment in history, that is really what we need to learn most urgently. (55-56) I heard the community of scholars gathered in the Wabash early career digital salon asking similar questions. What if we turned this factory model on its head and instead asked how we could care for each other in the classroom and move together so that at the end of term people knew more about what was critical to know than they did at the start of the term, but did so in a way that honored the scale of care in the midst of a culture experiencing the concurring pandemics of novel coronavirus and not-so-novel systemic racism and wealth inequality? We learned a little bit about what it meant to “school” as a community committed to the survival and thriving of generations during a season of marked crisis. I don’t mean to romanticize this moment. Of course we did so in the midst of cultural calls for students to “go back to school” even as teachers at all levels were working tirelessly month after month to continue schooling despite enormous obstacles to learning. This public invisibility and cultural diminishment repudiated the ongoing schooling that was creating a “scale of care” for “learning, nurturance, and survival” from kindergarten to doctoral seminar. And, unlike Gumbs, whose work seeks to nurture emergent networks of activist belonging and communal resistance across and outside of institutions, in institutions of higher education faculty are embedded in late capitalist economies of exchange where investment and return, tuition and degrees, educational debt and faculty salaries are painfully and inextricably linked. To challenge the production models of social and economic capital in higher education for an organic model of caring for each other and moving together to adapt to existential threats is ironically to risk being called unprofessional, lightweight, irresponsible. However, developing such oceanic schooling may also be a revolutionary and adaptive response for survival in the midst of forces threatening to overwhelm the human species to extinction, from climate collapse to racism to economic inequality.

On March 30, 2020, Daniel Prude, a 41-year-old Black man, died a week after being pinned to the ground by police officers in Rochester, New York, where our school is located. This incident sparked protests, with some former and current students serving as public street chaplains, providing prayers and spiritual support and calling for police reform. When students expand and act out what they have learned in the classroom, should I pretend nothing happened in the community and the world? Although the professor tries to take an apolitical position, students do not separate their learning from reading the world and living in the world. In a group addressing “Things they didn’t teach in Seminary,” a few former students asked practical questions such as how to respond to parishioners who resist sermons explicitly addressing or supporting social movements like #BLM. While types of activism vary—from hashtag activism to solidarity activism on the ground—and even if we do not use the term “activism,” our teaching necessarily involves our perspectives on social justice and our political positions and actions. Paulo Freire argues that because education functions to reproduce dominant ideologies, it can never be politically neutral.[1] Teaching involves “reading the world” beyond the boundary of the classroom. Teaching the biblical text and its cultural and geographical world is not limited to the historical past but addresses highly politicized territory where people still suffer from wars and occupation. Some may be concerned when teachers impose their political perspective or ideology upon students because teachers have power, but when we find our former, current, and future students acting as civic agents for change and religious leaders in social movements, our activism as teachers does not force them to believe or act according to our convictions. Instead, as Freire teaches, students have the right to challenge or reject the teacher’s perspective and the ability to form their own views and speak and act out their opinions. Many activists in the present time understand that what is critical in social movements is not charismatic leaders but the community. The student community has had to grieve and reflect on what they have learned, engaging the world. The pedagogical potential of performative grieving in times of state violence, argued for by scholars in education, came to the fore in my online teaching during the pandemic. I often had students who broke down because of losses—losses of persons, jobs, health—and because of the confusion that systemic racism brought during the pandemic. I was able to say to them, “It’s okay to say it’s not okay” or “It’s okay to cry,” not because I was stronger than my students, but because we needed such collective grieving. For me, building a community of mourning in the classroom was a gesture of activism.  However, as Angela Davis said, if “freedom is a constant struggle,”[2] how long should we perform grief in our teaching? Teacher-activists have become exhausted, particularly in the past years. Critically-minded professors are wrung out by bringing social justice issues into our teaching, one after another (racism, gender inequality, heterosexism, economic injustice, colonialism, climate change, etc.). I create and teach courses like Global Read of the Bible, Feminist and Womanist Interpretation of the Bible, and Migration, Immigration, and Diaspora. Teaching such courses requires continuous engagement with and activism for social justice, as well as a breadth of knowledge. Such continued social challenges and grief causes emotional exhaustion. This is why we need to find communities of mourning and moments of contemplation. As I offered space for students in my classes to mourn, the Pacific Asian North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry community (PANAAWTM) offered me a space for mourning when anti-Asian racism was climactic in the Atlanta mass shootings on March 17, 2021. Wo/men professors, students, and activists of Asian heritage gathered online to grieve, reflect, and pray together. A few sang Asian traditional songs and offered prayers of our ancestors. Through these practices, I gained spiritual strength, intellectual courage, and a clearer sense of commitment to teaching for social justice.  I am grateful for another opportunity that the Wabash Center is giving four Asian and Asian American female professors in New Testament through a Peer Mentoring Clusters grant next year. I am sure that reflecting on teaching—even such seemingly objective courses as Hebrew and Introduction to New Testament, which two of my colleagues are teaching this summer—will lead us to grieve and be “contemplative in action,” because our teaching is not an individual act, but is always situated in the particular contexts where we struggle against oppressions and injustices on the institutional and social level.  [1] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998). [2] Angela Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016). Photo: Justine Murphy (@CitizenMurphy), "Brown," Twitter, September 16, 2020

In a seminary setting with a daily rule of prayer, students and professors can easily fall into a trap of distinguishing between teaching students how to advocate for justice in the “real world” and the “in-church” liturgy of prayer and worship of seminary life. At times, the liturgical rhythms might even appear to be an intellectual or temporal straitjacket: hindering the work of classroom learning or service to the community and work for justice. However, in my own experience teaching in both Roman Catholic and Episcopal/Anglican seminaries, where the traditional Christian liturgy of the hours determines the structures and rhythms of the students’ lives and learning, I have found that teaching social justice in synergy rather than opposition to the liturgical tide has provided opportunity for teaching social justice rather than a hinderance. In fact, this immersion in the liturgy can transform teaching social justice into an act of recollection and connection building, rather than creating an oppositional dynamic. This “calling to mind” in beginning to teach social justice which immersion in liturgy permits has two crucial components. First, the daily liturgy of the Roman Catholic and Anglican tradition provides substantial content for beginning to discuss and understand the need for social justice and its objects. While there are calls to pursue justice throughout the scripture, the liturgy of the hours or of Morning and Evening Prayer, creates a special focus on the book of Psalms. In these liturgies, students will generally read in unison throughout the entire book every month, and then turn around and do it again. This means that students begin and end almost every day with the cries to instantiate God’s justice which fill the Psalms in their mouths and in their minds. Beginning a pedagogical engagement with social justice in the Christian tradition therefore begins with an acknowledgement of the Word which is already in their mouth, and then broadens to seeking to understand that word in the context of the present day. This grounding of the classroom discussion of social justice in the liturgy is, of course, far from novel, but stretches back through the Christian tradition. Explaining this tradition and explicitly linking it to their own immersion liturgy then prepares students for the task of analogical translation into their own world, of the ways in which Christians, from John Chrysostom through abolitionists to the Oxford Movement to Oscar Romero, have seen the liturgy as the point of departure out into the world to seek justice and serve the poor. Just as important as starting a discussion on what God’s justice might demand of them is helping them understand how their formation in the liturgy has better prepared them to work for social justice in the world. By its very nature, formation in liturgical worship demolishes the temptation to autonomy and the urge to seek the spotlight, and rather trains students to be communal, listen to others, and be patient with the small steps and slowly developing processes. For example, when students are taught how to chant the Psalms in choir, they learn that the goal is never to declaim, to take up the most space, to push their own voices forward. Rather, they are taught to listen to the tones and pitches of others, to join in the one communal sound, and to use their breath to sustain rather than project. In another example, students come to realize that the liturgy is only made possible by the invisible labor of the sacristans, who ensure that everything needed for the Eucharist celebration is clean, prepared, and its place, but who are never at the front or receive praise or applause. This approach is the exact opposite of what Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to in a famous homily a few months before his death as the “drum major instinct”: the urge to assume that you are better than other people because you are out in front and people notice you first (https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/drum-major-instinct-sermon-delivered-ebenezer-baptist-church). Rather than surrendering to this instinct, King urged his listeners to walk in the steps of Jesus Christ, who disdained the drum major position in order to be faithful in the unacknowledged work of bringing about God’s justice in the world: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting those in prison, rather than focusing on their own success or prominence in the eyes of those around them.       Oriented properly, students formed in the liturgy have already developed the virtues and praxis which make this type of service which Dr. King describes possible. They are ready to pursue the slow work of justice, neither demanding the spotlight nor seeking to drown out fellow laborers with their own voices or opinions. Rather, they are already equipped for service, and the task of the teacher simply becomes how best to show them the way. *Blog Originally published October 21, 2020

At Nashotah House Theological Seminary, a crucial element of our participation in the seminary’s Anglo-Catholic tradition is the student body and faculty’s regular presence at morning prayer, mass, and sung even-song. In the seminary’s beautiful chapel, surrounded by stained glass and hand-carved wooden statues, we sit in the antique wooden choir stalls lining the chancel and join together in worship. As a junior faculty member, I quickly learned a Nashotah House tradition: your choir stall is not yours to determine. The seats are assigned based on seniority, and priority is zealously guarded. Where you sit matters. This tradition of established place carries its own ethical challenges and requires its own ethical interrogation. What assumptions regarding hierarchy and privilege in our tradition and amongst our student body and faculty does it underwrite? To provide one example, our tradition has come into conflict with our commitment to ensuring that students with mobility challenges have equal opportunity to participate in worship, requiring questioning and ultimately changes to our tradition. Teaching social justice in a tradition requires inviting students to engage in a similar (although broader) excavation of that tradition. Of course, a crucial part of this teaching involves learning alongside my students how to step outside the tradition to critically confront the moral and ethical failure of Anglicans, such as the use of Anglican theology at times to support slavery and colonialism. This critical engagement requires accepting that our seats often are gained at the expense of others, and may require change and even surrender on our parts. These moral failures have been well documented and extensively explored, so excavating the resources for critique has been fairly straightforward. An unexpected joy of this type of excavation, however, has been how many good and constructive resources for social justice remain to be uncovered in the tradition. The Oxford Movement which launched Anglo-Catholicism accompanied liturgical revision with a serious theologically-grounded commitment to working for social justice, spanning generations of the movement and manifested in many different forms. Excavating these resources provides the opportunity to invite students into a different form of engagement with the tradition. Students have become imaginatively engaged in questioning their own social assumptions and career aspirations by reading about the so-called “slum priests,” for example, whose commitment to “ritualism” was equaled by their commitment to working to challenge the economic, social, and political structures which created and justified the appalling living conditions suffered by the poor of British manufacturing cities. Students have learned how to connect social critique and advocacy for justice to Anglican theology through reading the works of the great reforming Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple. Of course, exposure to works of Anglicans such as Pauli Murray and Bishop Desmond Tutu have expanded their conceptions of Anglicanism’s work for social justice beyond Anglo-Catholicism and the British Isles. One of the most fruitful resources I have found for retrieval within the tradition are the editions of the British Critic—the journal edited by John Henry Newman in the early days of the Tractarian controversies. Along with discussion of history, doctrine, and liturgy, the pages of this Christian socialist leaning journal are filled with essays of social critique and challenge. One of the essays, written in 1842, which has engaged and challenged my students the most is a long theological critique of the practice then common in British parishes of renting pews to the social elite. The author describes how the poor, walking in and seeing the great boxed pews lined along the front of the parish church, are confronted with an image of the priority of wealth and privilege which runs exactly opposite to Jesus’s message of the priority of the poor in the gospel. Rather than encountering “the image and pattern of heaven” in the church, they see “the world, the flesh, and the devil apparently in full possession.” As part of the Anglo-Catholic liturgical revival, the author calls for the removal of these pews and the restoration of the parish to the poor and needy whom Christ intends to possess it. Through this image, students begin to encounter the connection between the Anglo-Catholic tradition of beautiful worship and architecture with the beauty of justice and service. Over my time at Nashotah, I have realized that our tradition of choir stall seating incorporates not only seniority, but also service. At every service, one of the sacristans (the student-leaders with the most authority in worship) always forgoes sitting in choir to sit by the back door of the chapel—he or she is placed there by the tradition to greet, care for, and assist any guests who might join in the service. My hope for my students is that they leave our seminary having learned that Anglo Catholicism not only provides choir stalls, but also provides models and methods to emulate, just like the sacristans sitting at the back of the church ready to serve and care for others. Where you sit matters.

I teach a course on the ethics of world religions which takes a narrative approach. Rather than just focusing on the text and tenets of religions in relationship to ethics, the course also highlights the life stories of “exemplars” from various religious perspectives. These have included civil rights activist Malcolm X, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and Liberian Nobel Prize winner Leymah Gbowee. The advantage of using this approach is that it gives flesh to sometimes abstract principles, demonstrating that all ethics are situational and depend on one’s positionality. These are complete human beings, so they show both human potentiality and human frailty. One particularly thorny exemplar we focus on in the course is Mohandas Gandhi. Students study his life, from his early years to his education in Britain, work in South Africa, and finally his years of leading the movement for Indian independence. They also read selections from his writing, delving into his views on ahimsa or non-killing, satyagraha or “truth force,” the caste system, and his tactics of nonviolent noncooperation. Gandhi’s negative views of Black South Africans when he lived there are an issue in his history that cannot be ignored. Invariably the question arises, was Gandhi a racist? Throughout the course, I emphasize the value of dialogue over debate when discussing religious perspectives; I wanted to create a forum where students could engage this question in a way that developed their ability to give careful attention to others’ perspectives—a space where dialogue around these differences could lead to greater understanding. The process I use to accomplish this learning strategy begins with dividing the students into pairs and providing them with two short newspaper articles on the subject. While these are not opinion pieces, each article has a particular bias—one towards naming Gandhi as a racist and the other towards seeing him as evolving on issues of race over his lifetime. Each student in the pair is asked to read one of these articles, and to identify the “slant” of the author and the particular points that support the author’s perspective. Each student in the pair then presents this view to their partner as if the view was their own. In other words, one student presents the view that Gandhi had racist views and should be held accountable for them while the other student argues that his views on race evolved and he remains of role-model for social change. We then move to a large group discussion where I pose the following questions to the class: How did you feel about the position to which you were assigned? How did it impact your reading of the articles? Did any point made by your partner make you think differently about the topic? Every time I lead this activity, students are able to name various points made by their partners that provide fresh insights into the controversy. Finally, I create a continuum in the classroom, with one end being “Gandhi was racist” and the other end being “Gandhi is a role-model.” I invite students to stand up and place themselves somewhere on the continuum and share the reason they have placed themselves at that point. I use the continuum because it permits students to nuance their opinion, to move away from binary, either/or thinking on the issue. This past fall, the activity took on added significance given that our campus is only a few miles from the site of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police. Since the student population of Augsburg University is nearly 60 percent BIPOC, questions of race and racial justice are not merely academic ones. This activity provided students with a space to explore the mixed history of religions on racial oppression in a manner that neither excuses that history nor uses it to dismiss the positive impact of religions on social justice movements. In the final analysis, students may not change their views about Gandhi’s legacy around race, but their views often become more nuanced and they increase their ability to recognize complexity and ambiguity around these issues. The ability to embrace complexity, ambiguity, and the humanity of all is important for understanding religions as well as for our current fraught and polarized political environment.   Photo by Claude Piché on Unsplash

I am consumed by grief. At home in Brazil, the situation is horrendous and bodies are piling up,  as it was here in the US last year.  We will soon surpass 3 million deaths around the world due to COVID-19. People who lived their lives in so many ways. So many people have been taken from us, dear friends that left us before their time. Just this week, the mother of a dear friend, Rosevarte, left us. His pain and mourning are raging rivers whose strength he does not yet fully understand. And David, who lost his entire family one by one, just like that. First it was his mother, then his sister, and then another sister. All in less than two weeks. His grief silenced him and today he struggles to find words that might stubbornly bring him back to life in the midst of death. We are a world mourning because of a virus. But more than that, we are a world mourning governments that deliberately seek out, create, and cause death. A world whose governance takes the form of genocide and whose ruler is the primary cause of death. We are a world mourning because of a virus. But more than that, for many the virus is just another wave of well-known histories of colonization. Everywhere, we hear about the death of poor people, everywhere. While we feel like this pandemic is subsiding in the US, it’s not the same around the world. I hear 85 countries don’t have access to vaccines or money to buy them. This is a third of the world and at least half of the world’s population! Unless the whole world is vaccinated, we will continue to wrestle with an endemic situation. In Latin America there are estimated 231 million people living in poverty due to COVID, without access to clean water or food security, who will become refugees in the coming winter. We are a world in mourning because of a virus. But more than that, we have lived fully into many forms of dominium over people, the earth, animals, and oceans. Dominium brought us COVID. Our mourning is our perpetual banishment and our historic undoing. In our grief we learn that we are not what we thought we were and know that we will not be what we want to be. Our desires are trapped in our interdictions and are sabotaged by stories that we did not want to read, an economic system that both alienates us and intensifies our desires until they’re impotent. We destroy the earth with myriad forms of extractivism depleting so many forms of life, while financial markets skyrocket. No coincidence: the growth of financial markets demands extinguishing jobs, exploitation of people, erasure of social welfare, extinction of animals, mountains, and human lives. Grief is undoing our social fabric of relationality, solidarity, and mutual sustenance. COVID-19 has taken away our rituals of death and mourning. We feel more alone, feeling that there’s no one else to see us, hear us, or feel our pain. Our cry is simultaneously trapped in our throats and also released, like the sound of a cannon inside our chest, metastasizing our spirit, causing necrosis of life tissues that used to animate us. With each daily announcement of the number of deaths we need a defibrillator to start feeling life pulsing in us again. When we teach, we are drenched by many forms of grief. The loss is too much. How do we keep our heads up? So many people have lost their jobs, universities and colleges cutting positions by the thousands, tenured positions dismantled, and adjunct faculty teach eight classes a semester to survive.  How can we not worry about losing jobs? How can we support our students when we ourselves are eroding inside? How can we have necessary discussions in the classroom when the world is falling apart and our students’ worlds are discretely crumbling? Capitalism has made us think individually, just as Social Darwinism made us think our cells were essentially selfish, fighting to survive. However, as we now know, our cells work together to sustain the whole body. If we could think and act like them, we could care for each other, instead of feeding a culture of merit and rank. Perhaps we could start thinking how absurd it is for a president of any school to get so much more money than teachers. Or for tenured teachers to get more money than adjuncts. I just heard from an adjunct professor who on top of teaching sells his blood every week to make ends meet. I am reminded of how my school, Union, once thought differently and its faculty donated 10 percent of their salaries to support an unknown scholar from Germany named Paul Tillich.  To think like this today is absurd. We are taught to fend for only ourselves: I care for me and you care for you! Perhaps I have COVID-19 and it is affecting my brain. In the same way that our mourning is a political act of resistance, as Judith Butler told us, our living together in mutual care could also be a collective act of political resistance. Our mourning is a gesture of continuity in the war against death in the midst of death itself! Our mourning is the refusal to accept what the governments want: that we forget about our dead, and our social structures. On the contrary, our mourning is a constant reminder, an announcement that, once and for all, we will not surrender to death and the neglect and normalization of sick and dying people! It is a reminder that we must care for each other somewhat somehow. It is good to say out loud that death will not kill us! At least not all of us! As my beloved Mercedes Sosa sings in Como la Cigarra So many times, they killed me So many times, I died And yet here I am coming back to life Thank you for your disgrace And your fisted hand Because you killed me so heartlessly   And I kept singing Singing in the sun like the cicada After a year under the earth Just like survivor What a war  As we walk around dead bodies, may we make mourning the death of our people our most subversive act!  Even in our teaching! For we fight for ourselves and also for our dead. If we lose, they lose too!