Events & Calendars Presidential Scholar Karma Chávez

Transcript of Between You and Me: Thinking Politics and the Self Otherwise

- Hi, good evening. I'm Michael Elliott, president of Amherst College. It's an honor and pleasure to welcome you to the President's Colloquium on Race and Racism, and especially an honor tonight to introduce our speaker Karma Chavez, the Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor and Chair of Mexican American and Latino Latina Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. I know that this evening will be thought provoking and engaging and I'm so delighted that Professor Chavez will be in residence on campus all week as a presidential scholar, offering you many opportunities to continue this evening's dialogue. We will also have time for questions and answers or these questions, I don't if there are answers, being Amherst College at the end of the evening's talk and we have a microphone over here to my left, in your right, and then you're all of course welcome to stay afterwards for refreshment in the lobby. Methodologically rooted in rhetoric and rhetorical studies, Professor Chavez's scholarship is informed by the Queer of Color Theory and Women of Color Feminism. Fundamentally interested in what brings people together, Professor Chavez studies and writes about social movement building, activist rhetoric and coalition politics, evergreen topics that seem somehow even more urgent today. Her first book, "Queer Migration Politics, Activist Rhetoric and Coalition Possibilities" was published in 2013 and examines coalition building at the many intersections of queer and immigration politics in the United States. Her second book, "Palestine on the Air" published in 2019 presents a series of interviews that Professor Chavez conducted related to Palestine while hosting a radio show on Community Radio WORT-FM in Madison, Wisconsin. Most recently, Professor Chavez is the author of the "The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance" published in 2021. This book traces and document strategies of resistance to the alienizing logic by which HIV AIDS was mobilized as an opportunity to further marginalize the already marginalized migrants, Black Americans and others during the 1980s into the early 1990s. Collaboration is not just a scholarly subject for Professor Chavez, it is also something that she practices. She's a co-editor of four different volumes on subjects as diverse as queer and trans migrations, keywords for gender and sexuality, feminist practices and communications and innovations in rhetorical methods. In addition to her academic work, Profess Chavez has a deep interest in audio, which we enjoyed talking about over dinner and is a regular host of two podcasts at the University of Texas, Austin, the Latino Studies Podcast, LatinXperts, and the LGBTQ Studies Podcast, Audio QT. She's also worked closely with community-based organizations on issues surrounding queer, racial, economic, and immigrant justice, and is a co-creator of GRIDS, an initiative at UT Austin designed to foster relationships and solidarity among those working in gender, race, indigeneity, disability, and sexuality studies. For a talk entitled, "Between You and Me: Thinking Politics and the Self Otherwise," please join me in offering a warm welcome to Presidential Scholar Karma Chavez.

- How are y'all doing?

- [Audience] Good.

- Yeah?

- [Audience Member] Excited.

- Okay, that's good. I don't know if that's a good thing or hopefully it is. So thank you. No, seriously, for... Thank you for being here. I really appreciate you coming out on this rainy but quite warm evening, so thank you for that 'cause you know I'm a baby coming from Texas, so I appreciate having some nice weather and thank you to everyone who had a hand in making this possible. I know these things are huge undertakings and so I'm really grateful. I'm grateful to lots of people, some in particular Darryl Harper and Beth Bouloukos, and Amanda Huhmann, Rebecca Kennedy, Austin Huot, the other folks who are on the committee to make this happen, those affiliated with CHI, with Amherst College Press, of course President Elliott and all of you for taking the time. I'm grateful. And so, you get to a certain point in your career when you've kinda like, you know, you've done the thing, you've published the books, and then they somehow promote you to full professor and then you get a chance to reflect on what you wanna do next. So I'm at that point, which is nice I have to say. And so what I'm gonna do tonight, I hope you'll humor me as I give you some, some snippets of some essays that I'm working on towards a next book project that is different than some of my scholarly work. It's more in the genre of personal essays and this is the first public reading of any of this and so feel free to throw tomatoes, that's okay. But yeah, so, so you know, we'll see how it goes. But again, thank you for being here. So if you check out any of the many grammar books available to you or any of the grammar guides online, you'll find any number of admonishments against using the second person in formal writing. One of these experts writes that, "Second person is cautioned against because people have a tendency to use something we call the generalized you when they aren't addressing a specific person or group of people but are instead making a general statement." Another laments, "The indefinite and imprecise you is the most troublesome because it is too vague and informal for academic writing," and yet another suggests "The second person point of view is used fairly often in writing, but it's unusual for a story to exclusively rely on it. Just think about it, would you wanna read a 200 page novel that forces you to be active the whole time? Probably not, as such very few novels have ever pulled it off." Now you may very well agree with these critiques. You may not be surprised that the rhetoric professor who authored this talk has made similar suggestions to her students for over two decades. Yet these essays you'll hear, which are personal in nature, are written in second person from start to finish. There is an author here, an I which is me, which is to say these essays are written from my perspective, let me insert her here. I'm not universally opposed to the I, to myself or any other I. In graduate school I had a colleague who had put a giant red X across any student's I in a class paper and she would write in the margins, you do not matter. Although we were earning degrees in human communication, she fashioned herself as a communication scientist and science is objective, replicable, and within such a worldview, the scientist herself does not matter. Anyone with the appropriate methods can do the science regardless of their personal standpoint or biases or at least that's the lie social scientists tell themselves. In graduate school and into the present day, I became a fierce defender of the I, insisting that you do in fact matter, that no one else would do this study in the same way you did regardless of the methods and no one would ever write the report in the same way you did. I believe this to be fact, to be objectively clear, I matter and you matter too no matter the pursuit. If you dig deeper into this conundrum, you'll see that the tendency to overemphasize the I can be a grammatical and a political problem. A Spanish teacher I had years back introduces the class to the concept of yoismo, or the idea that when English speakers use Spanish, they often neglect the cultural norm to drop the pronoun since it's implied by the verb as well as the context of the sentence. Instead we use the Spanish I, yo, in excessive and awkward ways. Her view is that many Spanish speakers saw yoismo not as a language learner's quirk, but as reflective of predominantly white English speaking cultures that tend to overemphasize the importance of the individual in the self over and often against the collective and the other. To me, this rings especially true in what academics would call the neoliberal era. There are a lot of great books written about neoliberalism, but I'll give you the 50 cent version here. Neoliberalism is not merely an economic philosophy that values free trade, deregulation, privatization, and personal responsibility, it is a life philosophy that fits in all too well with the US American myth of meritocracy and the popular belief that if you work hard enough you can pull yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps. You can find one result of neoliberalism in the gutting of social services and community responsibility to your fellow humans, relegating responsibility instead to the individual, your family or your church. Another result has been theorized by several cultural critics that I'll turn into my favorite of them here, the US based queer immigrant writer, Yasmin Nair. Now Nair is concerned with why social movements on the left continue to fail. Across years of writing, she insists that neoliberalism has invaded movements for progressive change to the extent that rather than fighting for systemic changes such as universal healthcare, wealth redistribution, or even a guaranteed universal income, these movements have turned attention to individual issues that place people in a position to help themselves and their immediate families. You could find the best example of this in gay marriage, a movement that many would call a success, but Nair argues that the gay marriage movement privileged the most privileged gay individuals by giving them access to each other's health insurance, estates and powers of attorney without addressing the fact that such benefits might be better doled out without a patriarchal institution that reinforces the privatization of them in the first place, or that leaves out those of you who can't or won't conform to that relational formation. Nair also critiques the ways that progressive movements rely on individual stories to advocate for mere incremental changes. Here, Nair suggests that the dreamer movement of undocumented youth is an exemplary offender. You might recall a push in the early days of the Obama administration for the best and brightest undocumented youth to offer their testimony by coming out of the shadows as undocumented and unafraid. Their stories of triumph and achievement against tremendous odds served as a rationale for passing the DREAM Act, which would've given a select minority of undocumented youth, an arduous path to US citizenship, nevermind the violence of the entire immigration regime. And you can find a similar claim from the Indian American Australian writer Sujatha Fernandes, who argues that the primacy of individual storytelling for political change has been prompted by moneyed elites. The people you call philanthropists who dole out millions to movements with many strings attached. To advocate for structural changes is far less fundable than to produce a program where the oppressed tell you their individual stories of empowerment in the hopes of achieving modest reforms. If you're persuaded by Nair and Fernandes, and I happen to be, then you can see that the prevalence of the personal story in modern US political culture is not merely the choice of individuals who've determined that this is the best strategy for change. Instead, progressive but capitalist interest in preserving the existing structure has dictated to the oppressed the only acceptable form of public address. Now if you're not persuaded by these concerns, then you're not alone. In her essay, "In Praise of Navel-Gazing," the US writer and professor Melissa Febos insists that the maligning of personal narrative is embedded in a sexist view that you might find familiar, men think, women feel. In this cultural view, women writing stories of themselves are less than, unserious, merely writing in their diaries. Febos goes as far to suggest, "I don't think it's a stretch to wonder if the navel as the locus of all this disdain has something to do with its connection to birth and body in the female." Now my best friend is a performance studies scholar. She's here tonight in fact, and she writes a lot of personal narrative. She sent me Febos' book for my birthday, I think to push me to move from the either/or position on narrative to a both/and. In other words, she's challenging me to accept that Nair and Fernandes might be right, but Febos is too. As someone who has spent a career pushing her students to reside in the complexity of conflicting ideas, I'll grant you that I concede my best friend's point. In this work, I actively work to engage this tension by both writing essays from the perspective of the mixed race, formerly working class Chicana feminist dike professor that I am, and by deploying grammar in such a way as to disrupt the individualism inherent in the first person singular. My viewpoint is my own, mistakes made are mine, but I'm in community with enough people from diverse relationships, from diverse backgrounds and points of view to know that my worldview has been constituted by those relationships and coalitions. And so what I think, feel, and believe is not my own. Moreover, and you might find this a little pollyannaish, but I'm guided by a belief that your life chances and your politics are interwoven with mine and everyone else's and we are all well served to find ways to enact meaningful, collective ways of being and thinking in the world. Now you might be asking yourself, does the second person alleviate the concern with individualism? If only, but I believe that my use of the second person can put you, the listener, into the position of being implicated in my stories and criticisms that when the you feels generalized, it suggests that I directly ask you and others around you to be implicated too. Put differently, I'm asking you to contemplate the ways you already are implicated. The second person invites you to consume these words from a place that challenges the critical distance often enjoyed when listening to someone else's stories. And more than that, my hope is to use the genre of the personal essay to expand the notion of the personal altogether. I don't use the second person simply to be difficult, although some of this listening may be difficult, I invite you to inhabit these experiences and viewpoints for the duration of this talk to risk your own implication. Now, if you think this invitation sounds a little outlandish, you're not alone. As much was suggested to me by my partner, a mixed race Black woman and professor from Philadelphia. Now there are many meanderings of higher education and shared intellectual interest in a one time proximity at big 10 universities that brought us together. See, it makes me nervous to even say I drink water bottles. That's a story for another day, but our lives for the first three or so decades could not have been more different from one another. So to me, Philadelphia, like all large cities on the coasts is fast-paced, elitist space of danger, rats and filth. And to her the place of my birth, Nebraska, well Nebraska wasn't even actually in her vocabulary. She's aggressive and opinionated and frequently laments my Midwestern niceness and conflict avoidance. Early in our relationship, when I was driving home one holiday, I texted her to say I just crossed into Kansas, which though unstated meant that I was only a few short hours from home, in earnest, she told me, "Welcome home." When she got her first job in Minnesota, she had it confused with Michigan. She still refers to the vast majority of the landlocked United States as the middle and it's become our favorite exercise for me to place a US map in front of her and quiz her on the middle states and I think maybe she's about 70% at this point. Now, when I told her that I'd completed a draft of a book of essays and the essays were all written in second person, she balked, "I'm nothing like you. How am I or anyone supposed to relate to that?" After she said it, she paused, realizing it was too late to catch the words that had already exited her mouth. Now it's not that she's wrong. I mean you get where she's coming from, right? 90% of US Americans live in urban areas of the United States and most of those urban areas are not in the middle, but, and she came to this conclusion before I even had a chance to get defensive, there's something powerful about the way that the middle, the bread basket, the heartland, Middle America, constitutes so much about everyone's existence in these United States. The quintessential American in political discourse is so often not the blue blooded white elite in New England or the mixed race kid from Philadelphia or the naturalized citizen of color in New York or Miami or the environmentalist white vegan in California, the quintessential American lives somewhere in the middle, often rural America, the meat and potatoes Christians, the married parents who attend high school football games on Friday nights, the working class plumber or teacher or physician's assistant, "The quintessential American clings to their guns and their religion," as Obama infamously said. The quintessential American, this famed figure of US politics is a white, straight, heterosexual US citizen struggling to provide for their family, takes a single vacation to somewhere in driving distance each summer, and grills hot dogs on the 4th of July. These are the people I grew up around. They were my friend's parents, my teachers, my coaches, my local police officers. These are the people that are the butt of coastie's jokes and whether you like it or not, those that dictate the terms of the US imaginary itself. So what do you think? Are you persuaded? I've written a series of essays from the perspective of one who is not of these people in the sense that I'm not necessarily one of 'em, but I'm from these people. They were all I knew growing up and that fact continues to constitute how I understand the world, no matter how much I have raged against that worldview, no matter how different I am from it now, and no matter how much it is a worldview that hurt me and continues to inflict harm. I think in the polarized political times that we live in, you accepting this invitation to inhabit a worldview that may be very different from your own is not only worthwhile, but I think it's vital to any possibility of a shared future. But to return to one of the critics above, would you want to read a 200 page novel that forces you to be active the whole time? Despite my justifications, your answer to that may still very well be no. And if that's your final answer, by all means you can leave now. You can trash me on Twitter. You can refuse to buy this book when it comes out and still leave a shitty review on Amazon. But if you've made it this far, I ask that you give it a chance, this experiment in thinking of politics and the self otherwise. All right, so now I'll dig into some snippets from some of the other essays. There's only one place in your hometown to fill up a gallon water filled with filtered water and today that machine is out of order. You hate to grab an extra plastic gallon but you hate the taste of the water at your parents' place more. Water from a too shallow well your dad dug 40 years ago when they moved out here to start a life. So you grab a fresh gallon, a 12 pack of non-alcoholic beer for your pops and head over to the checkout. There are only three checkout lanes in your hometown grocery store and this is the last store remaining. The one you preferred growing up closed down some years after you graduated high school. The building still stands there. The old food pride sign, which covered the Jack and Jill's sign before it both long gone. This grocery store, the one that still remains was always more expensive, probably only pennies more, but those pennies mattered growing up and it's too small there with tight aisles and a tiny selection of everything from fresh produce to laundry detergent to cigarettes. The big bodied white woman who checks you out is named Courtney, according to her name tag. She's pleasant to you, tells you she's sorry about the water machine, that she's not sure what's wrong with it because she just started her shift, might just be out of water. You confirm with her that it's the only place in town to fill a jug. The white man in front of you is buying his dinner for the night, a package of hamburger patties wrapped in plastic, a sack of frozen tater tots, a couple bags of string cheese and a bottle of Sunny Delight. You loved that stuff when you were a kid. Courtney knows him, calls him Jared. He shoots the breeze with her while she drags his items over the scanner and loads them into the flimsy plastic bag. They share pleasantries. He notices the NA beer on the conveyor belt beside you. "That's probably a good idea, isn't it? When it's hot and you want beer, but you really don't need the alcohol?" You're wearing a KN95 mask, one of your dad's camouflage hats and mirrored aviator sunglasses, even though you don't need them inside. You're the only person in a store wearing a mask, the only person you've seen anywhere in rural Nebraska with one on. You're happy to have the disguise because even though you haven't lived in this town for more than 25 years, it's common for someone to recognize you and you're not in the mood to be recognized. In this place, you're always waiting for something to happen, some recognition from a vague acquaintance, a disapproving look at your mask or your hairy legs or a conversation you're just not interested in having. "It is for my old man," you tell him, your Nebraska accent seemingly as thick as it always was, "Says it's the only one of them worth drinking, tastes just like a regular beer." "I wonder how they do that," Jared ponders, "Hopefully don't pack it full of chemicals." Jared is tall and thin probably in his early 30s and he wears a well worn red MAGA hat. You think it's curious that he's concerned about chemicals given the number of chemicals that farmers dump into the ground to get a high yield on their crops? You don't know if he's a farmer, but there's a good possibility that he is in this town. "Hard to say," you offer. Jared grabs his dinner, tells you and Courtney to have a good rest of your day. Courtney asked for your ID to buy the NA beer. "I know it doesn't have alcohol in it, but I still have to check." "Oh, there's a little bit in it," you tell her and she looks at you like that makes no sense, but she doesn't protest. You thank her. Grab your items and head for the door. You pass the mother of one of your sister's best friends from high school. As you leave, she greets you like she'd greet anyone else, but thankfully your disguise works and you avoid further pleasantries. As you walk to your car, you realize that you haven't actually seen anyone wearing a MAGA hat unless they've been on TV or part of an anti-abortion protest outside the Plant Parenthood in Austin. You know it's not unusual here in rural Nebraska, but you're still sort of taken aback by the boldness of it all amid the ongoing hearings to lay out a case against Donald Trump for the January 6th, 2021 attacks on the capitol. But then you remember guys like Jared think the whole thing is just a witch hunt, part of the big steel, in any way, they're not airing the hearings on Fox News. You decide to go across the street for gas at the Fill and Chill station, which used to be called Uncle Neil's. Your first job was at the Uncle Neil's Deli when you were 14, you had to arrive at 6:00 AM to start the deep fat fryers for the gizzards and burritos and french fries people would start ordering mid-morning and pull the pre-made packages of breakfast items for the early rush. You made just over $3 an hour at that job and you'd leave every day stinking of grease. You liked the lady who ran the cash register, Stephanie, the mother of one of your classmates who also worked the deli and who walked with a limp after her older brother accidentally shot her with one of his dad's guns left unlocked. This place smells exactly the same way it did 30 years ago. The layout is more or less the same too except the aisles that used to hold the movie rentals had been replaced with some booths for people who eat at the taco joint that replaced the deli. You wonder if you're trying too hard when you think that this store is a metaphor for the town. When you go to pay for the gas, you think about telling the new cashier that you used the work here as a kid and that the place smells just the same, but when you get to the counter, she looks at you with mild hostility, steps away from you like you're contagious. So you just tell her the pump number and she rings you up with no further words exchanged. You spent the morning sitting outside with your parents surround the fire pit your pops carved from an old propane tank beneath the thick umbrella of deep green trees by their house. You're trying to get your mom to walk with you, just a short walk up and back on the long gravel lane. Her body is failing her, a hip and a knee replacement last year. Now bursitis in the other hips, some sciatic on her lower back. She's got rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis to boot. She's in a lot of pain. You try to tend to her and give her the kind of attention it seems your father isn't capable of. It's not that he doesn't care for her or tend to her because he does, but he does it without any compassion. Like the pain in her aging body is an afterthought to the menial chores her condition requires him to perform, but he thinks of himself as the epitome of compassion. You haven't tried to give him the compassion talk on this trip home because you've tried several times before and he just insists in that way he does by talking faster and louder than you, that he is the most compassionate person he knows. Old dog, new tricks, it's a thing with him. And anyway, this family, as much as it's changing with each passing year is completely entrenched, not only in not speaking the truth to one another's face, but to insist that doing so is a bad thing. It's better to keep the peace, which just means talking shit behind everyone else's back. Your dad puts it to you in the form of a critique, something he's never been shy about with you despite it rarely if ever giving it to the others. Your problem is you don't have a filter and that this is why your younger sister has not only not spoken to you in almost a year, but she's apparently blocked to you on her phone. You're careful not to get heated with him when he tells you this because that just feeds into his narrative of you that you're hotheaded and elitist and you don't have kids and you live 800 miles away so you don't understand and you just need to learn to keep your mouth shut. You recount to him precisely the conversation that led to your sister's behavior that in one of her anxiety ridden moments about the environment, you told her the truth that having kids is the worst thing you can do for the environment. Now both of your parents surely feeling defensive of their choice to have five kids take her side. I mean you get that telling her the truth that having kids is the worst thing for the environment was a bit insensitive, especially since she was pregnant with her fourth child at the time. But you've since apologized several times. "It's ridiculous and immature," you tell your parents, "If you can't speak the truth during a conversation about something you both care about in a strong relationship, then that's no relationship, that's bullshit." You get your hardheadedness from your dad and you used to get your conflict avoidance from your mom. You're growing out of that though and you moved away and what used to seem so normal now just seems pathological. You can tell the conversation is going nowhere so you add a last point letting them know that you have talked at length with your siblings who are mental health professionals and they both agree that this mode of communication is a problem. So your dad changes the subject, you let him do it as your mom shifts awkwardly on her sore hip. Your parents' old farmhouse has three modest bedrooms upstairs. Your childhood bedroom, which became your youngest sister's bedroom after you left home is now the toy room for all the grandkids. The larger bedroom was the sister who's not talking to you's bedroom and now has a window air conditioner and the world's most uncomfortable bed. When you come home to visit, you used to stay at one of your sister's houses, but neither have spare rooms any longer and well, one is not talking to you, so for the first time in a long time you're sleeping over at mom and dad's in the room with the the uncomfortable bed. The room is full of ghosts or bad energy, something that keeps you awake. That first night you're sweating intensely because for some reason you've never been able to sleep upstairs without the covers over your head. You've always been scared of the upstairs. You know rationally that this is because of what happened in the third bedroom. Your parents got this house for free from your mom's first cousin shortly after his wife blew her head off in there. He was gonna burn it to the ground, but your parents needed a home. When they moved it on the back of a semi-truck trailer, the two miles from his homestead to the bear ground where your parents will build theirs, you remember seeing it travel slowly down the gravel road. It was a big event and you were four. You knew she killed herself in the house even if most everyone in the family said it was a drunken accident committed by this expert Mark's woman the night after you'd all spent Thanksgiving together. Your parents didn't believe it was accidental. You don't know what the truth is and you hardly knew her or remember her now. But either way, having a childhood bedroom across the hall from where a woman killed herself is probably scary for most kids and you had a tendency toward fear the way it was. Your parents swore you to secrecy as your other siblings came along so you would be the only one to carry the secret until your youngest sister was about to graduate high school. What you didn't know until the secret was fully revealed was that when your young mother opened the door to that room in a house that was now hers, her cousin hadn't cleaned up the mess at all, blood stained the walls and empty mattress from the tragedy months earlier. You're still not sure how mom managed to clean that mess with a bucket and rags without you noticing, but she did as she was 29 then. So you've always been unnerved by the upstairs and now as an adult alone and plagued by your own ghost, you can't sleep worth a shit. The first night, every moment of REM sleep you're able to muster is terrorized by dreams of your ex. The next night you try again and you have a nightmare so real that you sleep the rest of the week on the couch in the fully lit living room beside your snoring mother who sleeps in her recliner. In the dream, you're startled awake by something that shakes the bed. In the dream you jolt up and everything appears just as it should, but you look to the door and see from the crack beneath it that the light has been turned off. You never turn the hall light off. You're instantly terrified and angry with your father, assuming he cut the light, you race from the room and fly down the stairs with a lightning speed you'd perfected as a kid always too eager to get back downstairs. You run into your parents' bedroom on the first floor and slam yourself on the bed waking your father, chastising him for shutting off the light. He tells you it wasn't him. It's at this point in the dream that you are startled awake for real. You jolt up just as you had in the dream but more disoriented in waking life. You look to the door and see from the crack beneath it that the light is on. You're not exactly relieved as you realize it was just a dream, but it is better than the alternative. You lie back down, cover your head and toss and turn to the remaining hours of the night. When you go downstairs in the morning, your dad asks you how you slept. You tell him the truth. Say that upstairs needs . The whole house needs one though they don't like to talk about it. Over the years when your dad has been in the basement refilling shells for as many guns in the man cave, he hears someone walking slowly around the kitchen above. When he hears this, he's learned not to check whether your mom is there because she never is. Guns are a way of life in your family. They always have been. Your dad had a BB gun in your hand before any other tool. You never took to it as much as your brothers did though, the only living thing you ever shot was a toad and you felt so badly watching the blood beat up on its head that you were distraught and lost interest in any possibility of a hunting trip with dad. But you've never lived anywhere in your adult life without a gun. Your dad is inclined to be a more or less single issue, Second Amendment voter. But outside of voting for Bush over Gore, an act no one has ever let him live down, when he gets to the ballot box, he always votes for Democrats even though he is worried they're gonna steal his guns. His analysis is relatively simple. If the military and police have guns, then the citizenry must have the right to bear arms in equal force. When you tell him that even his AR is no match for a missile or a tank, he tells you that you're going to the extreme. But then he says your example is even more evidence for why the ordinary man must have access to whatever weapons he deems necessary for self-protection. "This is especially the case for people of color," he says. It's on this last point where you find convergence because you're against the military and the police. And since the state doesn't do its job for the people, especially people of color, you can hardly think of a good reason for the state as we know it to exist. It's on this premise that as a feminist, a woman of color, you've always kept your shooting skills sharp and never disavowed the right to bear arms in its entirety. Because you drove home this trip, you could carry all three of your handguns with you to shoot them with your dad and have him clean them for you afterwards. He loves it when you bring your weapons home and before you even arrive, he's decided which other guns you'll shoot and has target set at 25 yards for most of the arsenal and 100 yards for the AR. Although you don't admit this to most people, shooting an assault rifle is thrilling. You feel a thrill when you shoot any gun, a thrill tempered only by your fear of what the weapon can do and your commitment to absolute gun safety. Absolute except for the fact that at your house you can't go out back to shoot at your makeshift range without a beer in hand. No one's drunk when you shoot or even slightly buzzed, but shooting an array of guns while sipping a beer is the tradition. It's the only exception to absolute gun safety. Dad starts every shooting session with a reminder of the three rules for handling a weapon. Treat every gun as if it's loaded, never point a gun at anyone, and do not touch the trigger until you're ready to fire. At 25 yards, whether it's with your 22 revolver, your 357 snub nose revolver, or your semiautomatic nine millimeter Luger, you only hit the target about 50% of the time. When you walk up to 10 yards, what your dad calls the actual range for which you need accuracy to protect yourself in a home invasion, you hit the target better than 90% of the time. Even the times you miss the paper circle, you still hit the box it's taped to. You're a decent shot. At 100 yards, peering through the AR scope down to the fence line where the target is taped to a box in front of a large pile of old tires to stop the speeding bullets, you're precise as long as you shoot slowly. If you fire rapidly, your aim falters. And unless you're truly an expert, everyone's aim does. You're more invested in accuracy than the thrill of rapid fire. But you always take the opportunity to fire a couple rounds off and fast succession. The first time you shot an AR, it was the gun of your uncle, the felon. He shouldn't have an AR, any gun, but he has several and you don't ask how. His felony comes from drug trafficking in his 20s or so you've been told, and he's been free of being found out for his law violations ever since, protected by his whiteness, his dad's money and his good guy personality. Your uncle's AR has a nicer setup than your dad's, which you learn on this trip dad occasionally uses for deer hunting. Your uncle's AR has a fancy scope and it rests on a tripod attached near the thin barrel. This allows you to steady the weapon and hit the target with precision. You've shot guns that jerk and that quality is especially true of many rifles. The AR hardly jerks at all despite its power. You secure the butt tightly into your shoulder and when you pull the trigger, the butt pushes into you like a strong hug. Nothing more. You get why people like shooting it. You shoot for more than an hour with your dad stopping between sets to check out the targets and analyze whether a particular gun is shooting too high or too low. Your dad can do this for hours on end. It's not lost on you that you are almost late for a Zoom meeting at your university about how to support those who survived the Uvalde shooting because you were out back shooting with your dad. You ran up to your computer for the meeting, hands still stinking of gun powder and with tiny flux of black residue still stuck to your sweaty cheeks. You feel like an asshole. There's no other way to feel in this moment, but you also know that shooting with your dad and debating with him about gun control while doing it, it is one of the only times throughout your life when you genuinely feel close to your dad. These are the times when you don't fight him. Instead letting his expertise guide you and you truly learn from him things you would never know on your own. It's intimacy with him at its purest level and you refuse to give it up. Some dick murdered 19 kids and two teachers in a small Texas town called Uvalde. It's 82% Latino with a $41,000 annual median income. This on the heels of 10 Black folks murdered by some dick in a buffalo grocery store on the heels of, on the heels of, on the heels of, it never ends. Only your friend Jesus Valles, a poet and artist who sees more keenly than anyone else has anything poignant to say. Near the end of the lament on his Facebook page he wrote, "This morning, I looked at the sweet faces of some of the now gone. They're teachers and I needed this world to end. Here's the fine line I live with. There are those of us who want an apocalypse, a revelation, an uncovering that will end the world as we know it so another is possible, a new knowing that would make a way to more life. Then there are those who would want an Armageddon, a great suffering, calamitous and made of fire and bursting flesh because they have been assured this is how their God will free them from people they see as aberrations." You wish you disagreed with him, that things weren't so stark, but you don't, and they are. His diagnosis is dizzying, enraging and you don't know what to do with it. But even your anger feels contrived, manufactured, as if it too has gotten stuck in supply chain bottlenecks. It shouldn't be sadder when 10 year old kids die, but you guess it is for you. Some narrative you bought into against your better judgment that youth is innocent and precious and unjaded. And you can remember being 10, what it was like in fourth grade. Your teachers were white. I mean all the teachers were white, but that year you liked them all very much. You had Mrs. H who was pigeon toed and snorted when she laughed at her own jokes. Mrs. B, your good friend's stoic mom who seemed to find you mildly charming, and Mrs. R, who is gray haired and widowed, who took your intelligence seriously, lived in a condo near school and is now long dead. In your school, fourth grade was the first year in C.L. Jones Middle School, the first year out of East Elementary, the first year in proximity to the teenagers in eighth grade. It was the first year you felt a little grown up. The tiger beat posters of that soon-to-be Christian fanatic Kirk Cameron covering your bedroom walls, your bedroom you'd only recently started sleeping in alone through the nights, at least mostly. It was the time when you still thought maybe you wanted to be an astronaut when you grew up, when you thought that the nine year gap between you and Mike Seaver, Kirk's character on "Growing Pains" was not that big. You don't actually remember much about fourth grade. Your understanding of politics was limited to the fact that you lost student council to a boy named Mark by one vote. It was the only year you lost student council and you lost because your best friend and campaign manager who made posters for you that said Vote for Karma, she's a farmer, a slogan that could have worked in Central Nebraska, voted for Mark instead of you. You remember hearing that the stock market crashed that year of this thing called the Iran-Contra affair, and Oliver North and John Poindexter being all over the news. But to you, Poindexter was the genius nephew to the professor in one of your favorite cartoons, "Felix the Cat." Fourth grade was a glorious time before too many boy crazy hormones consumed your friends, before boobs and team sports, before middle school band and term papers and algebra. It was still squarely in the time when you got to be a kid. When Judy Blume's "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing" seemed to encapsulate your woe so perfectly. Another of Blume's books, "Just as Long as We're Together" about middle school girl friendships and their challenges had just come out. You loved that book so much, you still have a copy. All things considered, you were lucky in fourth grade even though your family was on food stamps and you got free lunches, you had a home and a car good enough to get your mom around town and these were still the days when because of his lack of seniority, your dad worked on the road during the nice parts of each year before being laid off for the winter, which meant that nine out of 12 months were just mom and you kids at home. Dad had a temper, so it was better that way. You could still crash storytime with your little brothers before bed. You were the only Mexican American kid in your class. But in fourth grade, the others' racism wasn't yet fully formed. And since your pops was never around with his black hair and brown skid, you were just a tan kid that the others envied in the winter months when they'd grown pasty. And no one had yet learned the epithets, beaner, wet back, and spic, that would haunt you in later years. Yeah, fourth grade was in your memory anyway, quite idyllic. Your little sister was born that year. Ronald Reagan was president. And while you knew from listening to your parents that he was bad for poor people, you didn't know why. You hadn't even heard of AIDS then, you had no sense of the Israeli occupation or that the Palestinians launched their first Intifada that year. Even though your friends now joke that your generation is the one that made it okay to seek treatment for your mental health, you had no idea that the FDA approved Prozac for the market during your fourth grade year. The closest you'd come to losing your innocence or being depressed was watching The Challenger explode on an elementary classroom TV in 1986. You drew a lot of space shuttles after that, but you didn't get the magnitude of it or that that teacher Krista McCullough wasn't coming back. You fashioned yourself as a girl version of Alex P. Keaton from the show "Family Ties," not realizing then that he was a piece of shit character meant to indoctrinate the youth with his bromance with Reagan. You just liked his confidence. That was the year you decided it was cool to use your middle initial as part of your official name just like him. And you've carried the R ever since. You wonder what hair-brained ideas about their identities, those now dead kids in Uvalde had about themselves, what careers they thought they might like to try. What heart throbs they Scotch-taped to their walls or their 21st century versions of trapper keepers. Your mom was 33 when you were in fourth grade, her Jesus year, which means nothing really except that it's a point in time to compare your fledgling adult accomplishments to his and feel bad about your immaturity and lack of ambition. Your mom seemed to lack neither at the time, though you're sure she felt she lacked a little of both. You keep looking at the faces of those dead kids and you can't imagine from your adult vantage point what their parents must be experiencing. How your mom would've crumbled beneath the weight of losing her fourth grader, even if she somehow would've had to keep it together for her other three little kids. You read a story about the husband and one of the dead teachers, a father of four who died two days after she did from a heart attack. School shootings weren't a thing you heard about when you were in fourth grade. The movie "Heathers," which glorified young white male angst turned high school violence in which you still secretly love wasn't even out yet. You vaguely remember the Paducah Kentucky school shooting. You remembered it happening when you were in high school, but you were already in college. Columbine was when you were in college too. You knew a couple kids who went to that high school and recall watching the coverage with them on the TV in your dorm lobby, but you didn't even get it then and you were 21. You're of the generation that was too young for classroom cold war drills and too old for the school shooter ones. You experience all of this at a distance without the palpable knowledge of that fear. So all you have to reckon with this shit is some angered about gun control despite the loaded handgun you keep in your nightstand, a steadfast analysis of white supremacy even as your friend, the cultural critic, says that analysis has grown unequipped, and the raw human emotion you try desperately not to grow numb from, which is watching massacres happen to unsuspecting people living ordinary lives over and over and over and over again. You're among those who want an apocalypse, a revelation, an end to this world so that another one is possible. You fear that those who prefer Armageddon, the side of a final battle between good and evil fought with the tools of their Second Amendment rights are larger or at least louder. You think about how Kirk Cameron, your fourth grade crush and a young atheist turned evangelical Christian, transitioned from "Growing Pains" to "Left Behind," a series of mediocre films based on mediocre books about the biblical apocalypse from the Book of Revelation and the resulting arm struggles we might think of as Armageddon. You think about how he's become a fringe zealot to you and a patriotic warrior to others. How just weeks before the Uvalde massacre, Kirk announced his new documentary, "The Homeschool Awakening," which declares public schools as public enemy number one. You think about the intertwining of these ideologies, pro-gun and anti-public ideologies that a fourth grader can't begin to grasp. And yet that culminate not just in a murderous classroom but in explanations premised in good and evil and calls to reduce the safety of children to arm teachers and school guards or the homes of their mothers. When you were in fourth grade, almost every night your legs throbbed from growing pains. You'd ride on the couch as one of your parents slathered your shins and knees in Bengay to soothe the ache, assuring you that you'd grow out of this. Well, there's no growing out of this collective pain. No soothing balm, no height you'll reach causing the ache to subside. I mean, we can't even agree on the source, let alone the solve. You are among the aberrations that those seeking an Armageddon hope to eradicate. You too want an end to this world, to this pain so that something else is possible. But what is possible when their hope includes no future for you and you're not sure what future you can imagine for them? Thanks.

- [Audience Member] No tomatoes.

- Thank you, I appreciate that.

- Thank you. We forgot the tomatoes.

- That's good. I appreciate that.

- Thank you for that. It's powerful, it's great. It's beautiful. I'm working on a similar project, so it was very inspiring to listen to that. I didn't expect it. The moment that most impacted me, and I know with we were looking at each other is the the gun moment, right? Because it's probably the least, the thing I least expected from you.

- Yeah.

- And yet and yet, yes right. And then it makes sense and it's beautiful to be able through that literary style, expose our contradictions in ways that make them human and understandable and I don't wanna say normalize them, but just makes them grounded in daily experiences because it would be so difficult to explain the same thing in a theoretical book, right?

- Totally.

- So thank you for that, for exposing yourself and for giving space for all of us to expose this how we are on the two sides when there are binaries, when there are goods and bads. And to go back to the end of your chapter, we cannot exist for them and we cannot see what future they can have. And then we go back to, you go back to that divide, right? The end of that chapter, which you keep crossing throughout the book. So it's just a comment as people gather their thoughts.

- Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you. I identified hopefully what I'm trying to do, but yeah, the gun stuff is like super awkward, especially to an audience like you all in Massachusetts, I assume that's not most of your experience but I've tried to get at, I mean, my parents are very liberal in their way, my mom's white, my dad's Mexican American, so they're mixed race in rural Nebraska, which is very, Nebraska as you might imagine it. But I think there's, what I'm trying to do is just kind of that like use that place to push out some of these tensions, see if there's ways we can connect with each other better. So yeah, thank you for your comments. Everyone wants cider.

- You talk more about the 1980s as a historical moment that you were reflecting on there. And I was thinking about it in relationship to where the frame, the prologue where we were talking about neoliberalism. The 1980s are such a key moment for the growth of neoliberalism and all of the economic and political movements that come out of it. And you reflect on that in some ways obliquely in the second half of the piece. And I'm just curious, do you think of yourself as a scholar kind of born of the '80s?

- Yeah, I mean, I think of myself as like a baby gen Xer. You know, I'm still born in the late '70s so I think I still get to count it, unlike you people born in their '80s. Yeah. So I mean that's I think where a lot of my cultural references come from and I think it's interesting to, I have a lot of cognitive memories of the '80s, so, unlike the '70s, which I don't remember at all. And so I think it is interesting to kind of think of the innocence of those experiences, but actually what was being formed culturally and I think like have gone back and watched old episodes of "Family Ties" and it's like, what was I thinking? Like how did I think Alex P. Keaton was like this cool dude, but that was his total point, right? Was to, you know, get kids to relate to him and like he, you know, he had like a picture of Ronald Reagan, I think on his nightstand. Is that right? So just like, but it was, you know, he was like this relatable character. And so I think thinking through those things that seemed kind of ordinary, but how they were just planting seeds culturally in that we really see come to fruition in the '90s is interesting. So yeah, '80s are an interesting time to think about. I've been thinking about them in my scholarship in a much different way in writing about the AIDS pandemic. So this is a little bit lighter in some ways and not in others. Yeah.

- I don't know whether I'm gonna put this together. So while there's so much in this that resonated with me, and I want to just thank you for the opportunity to sit and kind of be in the space of the narrative that you shared. I think that as you were using the you, it really was interesting to me as a listener because you're saying your mom was white, your dad's Mexican American. So I'm white, my husband's Mexican American and my son was a mall's major in your department. So thinking about the way in which I think one of the challenges and there are many things in family, right? And in being a parent or being a child. But I think one of the ways in which what you shared really connected me and expanded the way I think about things is the way in which it evoked the complexity of parenting or parenting or being a child in this complex place that is America across those boundaries, right? Which are very policed and very set. So even though I'm in a different position within that triad, I'm the white mom of the Chicano kid, I don't know, that really meant a lot to me. I don't know if I have a question. It just, I think that it took me a minute as I'm not a, you know, rhetoric person, so it took me at the beginning I think that the you and the I, I was trying to figure my way through, but I feel like it did something different, right? Like it just was sort of unexpected. I'm not entirely sure what it did, but for me it did open up those ways of seeing in a way that I think living within that complexity for now two decades, it takes time to do that, right? To think back to others' experience. So I really appreciate the you in that. So, so thank you.

- Thank you so much for your comments and thank you for wearing your longhorn gear. I appreciate that. I feel, no, I did feel home right away when I saw that you had that on. So, and I'm glad that your kid was a mall's major as well. I hope it served them well, but yeah, it'd be fun to talk more thinking about like the different relationships to that complexity. I mean, I talk to my mom about this stuff all the time and like, what did you do mom, when we were dealing with racism and like, you're the white mom coming into the school and how would that shift things? But she's working class and so it's complicated. Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, we should talk more. Thank you.

- Hi Karma, I'm Sheila. Thank you so much. That was really incredible to listen to. And I have a lot of residences because I grew up in Nebraska too.

- My condolences.

- I was born in 1970. I am a real gen, not a baby Gen Xer. I remember the Jack and Jill in Lincoln and my dad is Indian, my mom is white. And I think to your point, or at some point my mom asked me if I identify as a person of color, which is an interesting thing to have a, you know, that's the way we grew up in a very white setting. So I think, I'm not sure exactly what my question is, except that I always have so much just admiration and astonishment for people who are progressive and live in Nebraska still and stand up for what they believe in. And I remember I had an English teacher who put a black teardrop on his shirt that he wore every day when Ronald Reagan was elected. And I think he kind of saw the writing on the wall of what this was going to lead to. And the rest of us, we were juniors in high school and we were like, "Oh, what is that?" But I just think about there's something about existing in the middle and being invested in the middle and still being your full self and not retreating to the coasts. And yeah, I think we have a lot to learn from those people who are there doing it as well as from having some relationship and some more openness or finding ways to be in conversation with the people who can't imagine us in their future and we don't know what to do with them in our future.

- So thank you.

- Yeah, thank you for sharing your experience. I'd also love to talk to you more about it. But yeah, I mean I've actually, that's one of the things I've been doing right now is just kind of reading a lot of memoirs from the Midwest just to see how other people are thinking through it, what their experiences were. And there's not a lot of like, it's mostly like white queer stuff, predominantly, some Indigenous stuff. And so, yeah, I do think there's something there. I haven't quite worked it all out yet, but I think there's something there. So thank you.

- Well, let's leave here thanking Professor Chavez.

- Thank you.