itcoo

Sitting in Rehearsal for In the Company of Others.
I will be reading this:
My name is Ruby-Beth. Ruby was after my mama’s father who quit school in the 8th grade to learn a trade to support his family. He became a jeweler. His name was Rubin but everyone called him Ruby. In retrospect my mama guesses that he was a Spanish Jew and White American but the only memory she has about this was conversations where her mother told him to dress in specific colors so that “he didn’t look so dark.” I feel so connected to him and my name even while feeling disconnected to his history and most of my mama’s early life. Conversations between her parents were often secrets and the family never spoke of their racial history or where they had come from.
My mama’s social awareness was entirely sparked from her own interest and desire. After college my mama found passions that she never let go of. She protested the war in Vietnam and sought ways to live her live that did not support the systems with which she so strongly disagreed. My mama moved to Atlanta on a whim when she needed to make a change and decided to try something new. After I was born my mama wanted nothing more than to move back to farm land in upstate NY where she recently transplanted from. She pictured little me running through snow taller than I was and teaching me about what it means to can food, to split wood to keep warm and to love the solitude of it all. She decided, however, that as a white woman raising me by herself, she needed the support of a multiracial city in raising me. The decisions people make for you before you can make them for yourself dictate so much.
I pretend like my double first name connects me in some way to the south but considering my mother has one also and was raised in Jersey... it’s just wishful thinking. My mama is Beth-Ann. She had me when she was 41, after her first time getting breast cancer and no one except for her has credit for raising me… given these truths I figure she can name me whatever she wants.
She has taken on more that she ever needed to.
When I was 3 and a half my mama took me to what she prefaced as a very important event. We took Marta Atlanta’s public transportation downtown to the Georgia dome to see Nelson Mandela speak. He had recently been released from a 27 year prison sentence in South Africa for fighting the racist system of apartheid. My relationship with the definitions of importance in work and what it means to help people began then. My mama explained to me that there are so many things broken in the world that need fixing and that people like Nelson Mandela spend their entire lives working to fix those things. I was excited to see such a celebrity and told everyone I met about the famous person I had seen for weeks following. Although abstract and concrete notions of activism were always a part of my early life my mama never limited definitions of what activism was supposed to look like. She said The act of survival was for many an activist process and for others change through the government was the only legitimate means.
I took on the task of figuring out for myself why Nelson Mandela was so important to so many people and why he was the type of person to idealize. I spent my childhood happily confused about the state of things in the United States. My mama explained to me that the people that STOLE things from our house were not bad people and that if everyone had the things that they needed in life, society would feel very different. She taught me that everyone has a story to tell. In between childhood memories of Sun tea, hot Atlanta summers, loving school and talking with my mama was this profound daydreaming of a world where people in my neighborhood weren’t experiencing harm and where we had a world with in which people had enough to eat.
When I was young my mama and I would drive two hours north to the mountains in North Georgia and spend time in a cabin that was owned by the Quaker meeting that we attended. It was very rustic and we would have to gather water from the well outside, put wood in the fire to keep warm at night and use an outhouse. I loved it. My mama was able to get her fill of country life and still be home for work and graduate school on Monday. One year we made the drive unpacked our stuff fiddled with the door (typically you have to stop by the meeting house to pick up a key before you head up, but we went so often they made us our own) and we made it inside. I bolted in first excited to see the space again and point out any tiny changes from the last time we were there. I froze. “What is it?!” my mama asked. I pointed to the sink. “RUNNING WATER.” I said, furious. As soon as the shock wore off I came to a conclusion: “lets boycott it.” Not sure if my mama has ever been prouder. Eventually I warmed up to the idea… I think about two hours later when I was thirsty and it was late but the notion stuck. When I saw what I thought was injustice I was going to say something. My mama fueled this energy, encouraging me every step of the way. I loved the idea of envisioning a different world.
In high school I spent time organizing anti-war protests, organizing anti-racism action in my school, reading Fanon, Lorde, Seale, and talking to my friends and teachers about why I believed the things I did. I loved talking to people that I disagreed with so that I might figure out a better way to think my points. My mama was thrilled when I demanded that we drive to DC soon after the war in Iraq started because the march in Atlanta wasn’t going to be big enough for me. My efforts were important to me and my views of the world but as I got older they became more and more urgent.
Alice Walker was interviewed for a magazine a few years ago and was asked to comment on “the state of things in the world” or something painfully vague like that. She said that “we should all feel so blessed and lucky to be alive right now because there is just so much work to be done.” I felt called. Possibly divinely but mostly just I felt like I held a passion worth exploring. Now that I had my plans, my passions, my hopes for revolution, WHERE OH WHERE would I go to college?
The college process was confusing for me. I understood the reality that most people do not get the opportunity to go to college. I understood that college is stereotypically a cesspool of fruitless activism that people throw themselves into for four years and then forgot about for the rest of their lives once they get “real jobs” or have to make ‘real decisions.” These two ideas working simultaneously created college in my mind as a hotbed for elitism and negativity that I was less then excited to resign myself to. Wesleyan is marketed as and prides itself in its active student body. Activism gets thrown around when talking about wes like there’s no tomorrow. I felt confident that a school that valued activism as much as it could was a place I should love to be for four years. When I got here I threw myself into Wesleyan, I joined clubs, I got more e-mails from more list serves than I care to remember. I tried to attend every group meeting many of which were meeting at the same time on opposite ends of campus. I met so many people and I had so much fun. After the initial excitement wore down a bit
I had a difficult time reconciling my desire to be at Wesleyan, to be meeting the people I was meeting, to being so challenged in classes, and holding the experiences dear while simultaneously questioning how my college education could ever help anyone except for me.
If I truly want to commit myself to issues of empowerment and dismantling unequal power structures, isn’t this the best four years to do so?
. I saw college as such an important time in my life to be seeking experiences in my communities to bring about change, to talk about how to shift systems of meaning that we ascribe to things like race and gender, how to respect and acknowledge the human-ness that exists in each of us. All of this is so profoundly important to me and almost as soon as I stepped back and took a breath I wondered if college was the place I should be doing this. Whether or not they take it don’t all of the people around me have the opportunities for these conversations? We can just sign up for classes, what about the fact that so few people go to college? What about the people that are experiencing all of the systems of oppression that I am theorizing about, far more that I ever will. The prison system in Atlanta isn’t going to fix itself while I’m in suburban CT worrying about exams.
It was miserable. I fell into a now-comical spiral of ridiculous existential crisis. I would be in my room listening to Kanye West’s album “College Dropout” on repeat looking out at the snow and fall back on my bed like a scene from a movie putting my hands on my head and wondering out loud “what in the world am I doing here?” My roommate would come in and I would so embarrassed about the clicheness of it all. I would scramble to change the music from a skit about a guy who has tons of degrees to no food, to Talib Kweli or something much more college appropriate.
The only thing that made the situation less painful was that I was not the only one. There a was such a sense of urgency about social issues among some of my classmates that I assumed that even if I never reconciled these what I thought were irreconcilable differences I would at least have someone to complain about it with.

I started to notice, that my racial theory classes talked about racial formation and talked about how things got to be the way they are. I noticed that my professors often spoke with as much urgency as my classmates felt.


I noticed that I could raise my hand and say “… yeah but what does that means practically.” And people didn’t think it was funny. This was my outlet. It still seemed bougie but I was figuring out ways to strategize about changing myself to figure out how to be more open to ideas, how to be a better listener, about how to understand where people are coming from, to really understand the histories and nuances of movements I thought I new so much about already. What an opportunity. What an incredible gift. I became so thankful and felt so lucky. At the end of each year there is an open house for each major on campus. Professors offer information about the major and answer questions for people who are considering declaring.
At the end of the year I walked into the African American studies major open house. I sat down among familiar faces and listened to Professor Romano talk about the major. She talked about the requirements the professors, the building and sat back. She looked to her colleagues and asked if she for got anything. Oh! She said sitting up. “This is an activist major. This major only exists because a group of students demanded that the school create it and hire faculty. That’s where we come from and that’s important to all of us.” Instead of butterflies in my stomach I had champagne bottles popping. I was thrilled and relieved. The African American Studies major has challenged me to rethink and rearticulate how I approach activism. I have much fuller understanding of social movement and of what I mean when I say I want certain things for my communities. I am given this phenomenal education that supports my ideas while always pushing me further. This is what I am supposed to be doing here. I don’t need to listen to Kanye although his harder better remix is really hot. Maybe its not anti-racist activism, maybe its writing, or classics, or music, or generally learning. I hope you find it here but make it yours. Wesleyan academics and Wesleyan cultural is anything but not stagnant. Please don’t assume that because something doesn’t exist it shouldn’t.
This is how I have come to be happy I am here. I am so glad you are here.