week of Feb 21

The structure of the book:

Collection of essays on orphaning

Self-orphaning: education, Whiteness, being a good daughter, marriage

Orphaning others: policy, denial, being outside of relationship

Reciprocity, becoming, the action verbs of living in community

Cutting oneself off from others as reducing harm

Re-engaging with community, finding/forging a family

_The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma_

Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD

Poverty and Trauma

Me to Everyone (1:29 PM)

Brene Brown

The Body Keeps the Score

Telling stories of vulnerability is also telling stories of

Tragedy happening, Joan Didion still writing.  The book she is writing is her cure

Such a deep identity as writer

Journaling

Me to Everyone (1:31 PM)

“I hate myself” don’t want to record/ amplify how shitty I feel in writing.

Don’t want to show it.  Don’t want to know it.

Oh you should—shall

instead

An invitation to allow yourself to explore any of the things you are feeling or thinking

Whatever comes to you, go ahead and write it

Wanting to be found.  Wanting other people to find it for me

Connects to Karen’s sending Kelly music to figure out for me

Outsourcing the most essential work of our lives

Calling your angels to help you to do some of your work

It was a panic response to ask Kelly for help. (because you're related to this problem, you have a responsibility to me). Is it a panic response or a human response when you're going through something unfamiliar.

We're all in different degrees of panic/triggering

And also,

We can figure it out together.  “She’s gonna learn this one part, and I’ll learn this other.” To “we’re both going to learn it all”

asking for help buys time, and also is a call to create something together

...

So yeah, I didn't report the sexual assault.

I didn't see a way forward that looked like a positive outcome.

Other than to reframe what happened into something that didn't happen.  Therefore I would not have to do the thing. [MadMen Peggy "you'll be surprised how many things never happened" in one of the first episodes--setting the tone of how denial works in the ad agency/life]

And also, I had no time.  I was exhausted.  I could not have given the energy to that thing.  I had to compartmentalize, to put it aside.  I needed to get through this thing.  My body kept the score though.  I started having pains, just dull aches.  Chronic.  My DO recommended I work with an Eastern medicine practitioner.  She identified that I had some sexual shame I was hiding.  I was.  

I was also burning out my endocrine system one gland at a time.  Stress.  "You've gotta change your diet and your lifestyle."

So I became vegan.  Eliminated dairy, which was exacerbating thyroid challenges.  Notice what is causing inflammation. If dairy causes inflammation, try eating less of it. Maybe a single scoop of ice cream as a rare treat.  Lifestyle change meant exercise--yep, I can control that.  Started running 10 miles per week.  5Ks. "Managing stress" meant yoga class four days a week and smoking pot to fall asleep.  Ran myself ragged.

The sexual assault also meant I never wanted to be alone with a male colleague in social settings.  I didn't attend any out of state conferences with my doctoral advisor, opportunities where I could have networked in my field.  It may have changed the trajectory of my career.

I'm also thoughtful of the men (like Mike Pence) who avoid being alone with women, who may opt to not mentor a younger female colleague, for example, to avoid any impropriety.  This also impacts a career trajectory.  Sexual assault risk on the one hand, gendered avoidance on the other.

Exactly a decade later, to the day, Feb 7th, I realized I should call it an assault. That I had protected a perpetrator by not saying something.  That he may have had a relationship with a student.  That it was much much easier to pretend nothing happened rather than say something, do something.

"Many of us had much more than one [sexual assault]--so I had to clarify which one you're talking about"

A friend who listened to the podcast called me this week, saying there were things she learned that she hadn't known at the time.  I feel like I keep telling the story in layers.  The dissertation was one high-level, intellectualized layer.  The podcast got more into my personal academic history.  And also, it opened up me going one layer deeper to acknowledge how my experience of sexual assault and denial/coverup/complicity was a coping mechanism for me to get through that trauma.

 I read something this week about how while you are experiencing trauma, you can't heal from it.  It's only later, when you are safe, when you have space to reflect, to recognize.  But in the moment, it's too much.  You just have to survive and deal with the things coming at you that day.

"Can't the wounds just be gone?  Healed enough with a scar so you can just move on"

We create a scar tissue so we don't feel.  And yet, today calls for us to become listeners, feelers, recognize ourselves and each other.  Establish/re-establish connections, to be in relation with people who do see us, do recognize our boundaries.  And perhaps staunch bleeding of relationships that do not not honor us--keep kin at a distance if it causes harm.

What responsibility do I have to stop a perpetrator?  What responsibility do others have? Does the perp?

Reframing a person "taking advantage of me" as assault is a loving act.  To say out loud, to complain, that being taken advantage of is violence, is seen as violence by those who identify with those who have taken advantage of others.  It is gendered--there are expectations that males grab the bull by the horns, take what's theirs, dominate the conversation, compete with others for scarce resources.  Women are to be taken from, to give freely, to smile while they do it. Women are fertility, where the seed is planted, and from whom the fruit is seized (oh man, also had conversations this week about US healthcare system and women's health/ pregnancy--the legal liability focus on the delivery of the child while leaving women (especially women of color) to bleed to death internally, to walk out of the hospital without support for her needs immediately after birth and in the weeks and months which follow).

To name taking advantage as violence, to name indifference as violence, points a finger at those who don't want a finger pointed at them.  It implies responsibility.  It demands accountability. An explanation. A justification.  It takes work to defend a position.  It's much easier to just silent the complainer.  Make her disappear.

(Taking advantage of as violence--there are crimes which recognize the perpetrator and crimes which do not.  That wealthy famous people can evade responsibility, can commit crimes in broad daylight without consequence--when this phenomena exists and we cannot call it out, cannot bring it to justice, it means there are some who may commit violence without it being seen as violence.  Whether it is murder or harassment or discrimination or dereliction or plagiarism/idea theft, taking credit when not earned, if a person isn't held accountable for it, it is as if it never happened.  There are some people who will always be recognizable as suspicious--can't take their word for it if they accuse one of these impunists.  Impunity: getting away without punishment. Accuser: suspicious party.)

And speaking of disappearing: Another layer beyond the sexual assault layer is the disappearing of women  in the San Luis Valley.  Women's bones found in a burn barrel.  The young woman who brought her toddler into her Mom's house went back out to the car and was never seen again.  The cult(s) in Crestone who leave people to die in the desert night.  The night I spent in my pickup near Crestone, hearing a truck rattle down the dirt road in the middle of the night, an hour later driving back--my imagination saying there was something wrong about that.  I noted the strange truck without lights in a secured area between 3:30 am and 5 am in this blog entry.

Also, this tweet: https://twitter.com/HC_Richardson/status/1365290952131248130

Heather Cox Richardson: "One of the ways authoritarians maintain loyalty is by raising up mediocrities who know they are only in power because of the leader, and would fall back to unimportance without his favor." She was writing in response to people who crave recognition but are unable to achieve it through merit who gain power by allegiance to an authoritarian.

And so, now I'm thinking about all the other organizations which taut "meritocracy" but actually are authoritarian structures who reward obedience with budgetary discretion, decision-making authority, (tenure haha), higher salaries. Thinking about how people who ask tough questions, who display creative genius, who name the structures of power and their reproduction, are a THREAT to the authoritarian control of the organization ("without us there'd be chaos!" defining orderly bureaucracy as a higher good than say serving the mission of the organization)

Week of Feb 14, week 2

 This week is two weeks long apparently.  The madness of this impeachment trial--why isn't he in custody?

Danny's podcast and my new notes as I relisten:

Reading Sara Ahmed's writing on apology, deflection

Connecting my dots

If orgs wanted to fix problems, they would have.  It's demoralizing to read Ahmed's latest blog post describing so many complaints which lead to performative apologies but ultimately protect perpetrators.

Also read blog post about Indigenous Studies scholar being fucked by her institution which promised her all sorts of things that she built big multi-year expensive plans on, that she turned down a counter offer from a prestigious competitor for, then they re-negged on her, canceling funding for the things they promised.  She had a stress-induced vision problem (just thinking about another academic suffering from a stress-induced vision problem).

Indifferent Impregnators

Sexual Assault: my grandmother, my mother, and me.  Men behaving badly and not only not getting consequences for it but being better off.  My grandmother--I'll never know what happened during the conception event which led to my father's birth.  She thought they were in love, that they would marry, but instead she was ghosted.  I don't know what word to use for it--it's a violence against both her and the child for a man to be an indifferent impregnator.  A longer slower assault:  a separation of parent and child,   withholding not only affection and recognition but "legitimacy" and a sense of belonging.  Intentionally creating orphans, with no consequence and no remorse.  Surely that is a kind of violence.

Reckoning the use of "assault" in relation to "harassment".  A continuum?  Or a way to reframe to deflect responsibility and diminish perceived impact--"it was only *harassment*, it's not like he assaulted her."  It's not like he "struck" her--right?  Because we can all agree that being struck is an act of assault, right?

Can a person be "struck" by systematic violence?  Of course.  And Grandma Dorothy was struck by casual misogyny.  An encouraged sense of entitlement--the boys are back from the war, they saved the world!  Whadya say girls, should we show them our appreciation? [And of course, anti-black racism, Christian supremacy, Homophobic tolerance of hate crimes, US military, Jim Crow]

The sailor and the nurse photo--he literally assaulted her.  She was not a paid model.  He literally walked up to a woman, grabbed her and kissed her.  "But did she have bruises, though?"

self-Orphaning within higher ed, within one's own mind, as a way to "achieve"

Dear Mom,

Perhaps I should have stopped having contact with you years ago.  It might be difficult for you to understand how angry I am at you.

Watching the insurrection footage, I see a confederate flag.  I remember that you bought a fucking confederate flag for your asshole son-in-law.

When I hear Trump's voice, I hear yours.  The same cadence, the same jokey tough-guy tone.  Perhaps it makes you feel powerful to ally yourself with him.

In November, Veterans Day, instead of listening to me, a veteran, about what I think about Trump's support of Veterans, you said you'd prefer the version presented by your media.  From some people who aren't veterans.  Fuck that.  Fuck you for not caring about what I have to say.

My inheritance from my mother:  after her death I get to reach out to the person put away for her gruesome assault to let him know that DNA evidence exonerated him more than a decade ago.  She doesn't have the capacity to say these words, and I get that.  It was an awful rape trial, meaning essentially SHE was put on trial for accusing a man of breaking into her appartment and raping her at knife point.  "What was she wearing?" etc.  As a seventy-four year old she still sleeps with a knife under her pillow.  I inherit this constant anxiety about assault.  When I told her a young person in my life is transitioning from female to male, her first question was if he'd get his uterus removed so he can't get pregnant if raped.  That is her perpetual mindset.

She's also deeply Christian. White evangelical Christian, to be specific, which is to say more or less a political movement based on White Christian Supremacy which happens to be exempted from tax obligation.

Being a bad daughter because I am not checking in with her during this awfulness in Texas.

Dear Facebook,

I'm addressing this to my mother in particular, but all of you may bear witness.  

If you believe Donald Trump was/is a good man, that the capitol siege is a hoax, I cannot just see it as a difference of opinion.

I see it as a break in reality.  We cannot both inhabit that same reality because I cannot come forward one more step in "compromise" or whatnot towards your view of reality.  It is too far for me.

It is a schism which means you live in that world, and I live in this world and we do not have enough in common to recognize each other.  It is my boundary.

I don't want to exchange holiday greetings with you.  I don't want any inheritance or blessing or anything you could give me. I no longer recognize you as being a serious person.

I've debated for years if your political and religious views were related to declining cognition, something that I should feel sorry for you about, that I ought to listen to your rambling stories with a compassionate ear.

Then I realize you're just an asshole.  You cannot reciprocate socially with me, and I have no obligation to continue a one-sided relationship with you.  And you were an asshole before all of this Trump stuff.

A good daughter would endure caring for her mother.  But you didn't with your own mother.  You were distant with her for the last years of her life, certainly not shuttling her to doctors appointments and pharmacies or changing adult diapers.  I have no obligation to be a good daughter.

I don't want to be a good daughter.

I didn't do well as a good wife.  Feared I wouldn't be able to support a child "well enough" to be considered a good mom.  And so far it looks like being a good daughter is gonna be a raw deal for me.

Looks a lot easier to be a good son, frankly.  Watching a young person transition from female to male makes me wonder if he saw what lies ahead and was like, fuck this, I wanna be treated like a man instead.

And I get it--it's a raw deal to be a son--having to navigate toxic masculinity too and all that.  But fuck.  I'm watching Texas basically implode and wondering how much responsibility I have to take care of a person who hung up on me when I said the insurgency was White supremacist Trump supporters.  "The media has been so unfair to Trump who's done so much for the American people!" yes, well, then choose those ideas over me then.  I'm fantasizing about your tea party nursing home options where people will fuck your feelings for you.  My brother, who is more politically aligned with you, can certainly support your needs better than a feminazi libtard like me.

Fucking Texas: my mom and step-Dad are proud of the Texas GOP while gobbling up all the welfare they qualify for, hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical procedures.  They're entitled to these things you see.  When Gov Abbott says Texans would rather die than be regulated--well, let's see how committed to that idea these literal "die-hards" are.  Are they all hat and no cattle?  

I wish I weren't obsessing about their welfare--that's the tricky good daughter shit that is so deeply socialized in me.  I wish I were as carefree as she appears to be about the suffering of others. That's my aspiration now.  I'm becoming the monster, the indifferent asshole, like a mommie mini-me.

She was hoping to visit me this spring.  She hung up on me in mid-January and hasn't spoken to me since.  Now I'm wondering if they'll be showing up to wait out the mess of FEMA claims and general chaos in a few weeks.  She's already living in my mind rent-free.

I have wanted her to be comfortable, to get her inoculation, to get to her medical appointments.

I have listened to her rambling stories, cried over truly awful things which have happened in her life.  Pitied her as doing the best she can under her circumstances.

But that best includes being an asshole.  I just have to admit that my efforts to comfort her, to be there for her are one-sided.  

She likes ideas about me--she likes that I am a veteran, for example, because she gets to brag to her church ladies and have them send me a Veterans Day card.  But she doesn't care to hear my opinions about the military, or how Trump's policies affect veterans, what I hear other veterans saying.  She'd rather hear about what Fox "News" tells her that veterans say about Trump.

(putting "News" in quotes since the legal settlement which acknowledges their goal of entertaining rather than informing their audience with truthful representations)

She likes that I got my doctorate but I'm not sure she's going to keep reading my dissertation now that she's to the chapter talking about Whiteness and education being used to reproduce privilege.  Social Justice Warrior, right?  "White supremacy is bad" is too much for her.

WatchingAdams.org podcast

 Danny Ledonne interviewed me for his podcast:

https://watchingadams.org/podcasts/

We talk about my time working at Adams State University from 2006 through 2015, my research on power structures in higher education which reproduce inherited privilege, neoliberalism, White Christian Supremacy, federal agriculture policy, NCAA football, the settler colonial state, the so-called Western Canon, people ignoring bad behavior, impunity, getting out of bad relationships, accountability, reciprocity, Valkyries and Karen's dreams of building the new education structures we need.  

I'll add citations here for research I mentioned in the podcast, most of which are discussed in detail in my dissertation.

I'm still synthesizing ideas from the dissertation into elements for the book I am writing.  One of my 2021 writing goals is to use this weird blog to barf out ideas weekly, get feedback from my cult members, and make it make sense towards a coherent draft by December.

Sara Ahmed: On Being Included, Living a Feminist Life, Complaint, The Promise of Happiness

https://www.saranahmed.com

https://feministkilljoys.com

Achille Mbembe: Necropolitics. 

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/39984/pdf

Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine, Neoliberalism & Crisis 

https://naomiklein.org/the-shock-doctrine/

Organized Crime

Content Warning:  sexual assault and gaslighting to protect perpetrators, structures which protect reputation and brand at the expense of victims.

[Overall structure: Kittens/consent, handsy

Higher ed story of alienation

Story of whiteness

Coming in from an orphaning

Creating the beloved community]

From concept analysis of cult to organized crime.  Thinking about organizations within which I have worked which may have members who committed crimes.  And what structures are in place to protect perpetrators and to silence people questioning what happened and how.  Thinking about complaint.  (Sara Ahmed) Squelching complaint.

How is higher education like organized crime?  How is K-12 ed organized in such a way as to protect criminals?  How is orphaning related to how decisions were made....Do you think that orphaning can be used as a metaphor for how people were treated, funds were used, for the benefit of those making the decisions rather than for the students?  Looking at how these students were treated in the context of my search for adoption story.  Sense of alienation, loneliness have given me a lens to understand those experiences of higher education, specifically starting with Lawrence.  Personal history of education.

Karen's parallel stories of pursuing higher ed career and also researching adoption merged in 2018 as I was finishing dissertation and getting a match with the DNA test results which led to finding grandfather.

Cult of higher ed, cult of traditional family

Gangsters, mobsters

the higher up you get, the more power people have but more distant from those who are supposed to benefit from those services. 

State administrators make decisions made on wrong assumptions,

focus on outcome rather than process to get there

(metrics, neoliberalism)

the ease with which you can make decisions and NOT BE accountable to them

Setting aside $$$ putting into pocket without kids/families seeing

Principal in trouble, academic/finac probation, clean up their books so they won't be put in jail.

Some were ignorant, some were shifty/knew, some put their trust in the wrong people, shifty characters.

"I don't know what to do--put him in jail?"

"Have him pay back, fire him" because you don't want people to think you're an incompetent administrator.

Trust--because of all the alienating/orphaning structures, we have to "trust" people who are untrustworthy based on a story (based on a brand--relationship-based decisions/accountability versus reliance on a brand story to establish meaning)

(Or what I think are traits of org crime)

1. Funneling tax dollars into pet projects. With baked-in paternalistic mindsets, some IHEs have a small number of decision-makers --often people from privileged positions such as BOT and executive board-level administrators (how does one become a member of the president's board of advisors?  Are VPs included or merely updated on status of projects?  Are faculty in any way meaningfully connected to the decision-making?--these are questions which evolved from my research questions in my dissertation in 2019) Sometimes decision-makers are literally related to people receiving contracts for construction, etc.  Remembering how an institution re-hired an awful contractor who underbid the competitors yet had a history of expensive construction cost overruns.  Very difficult to understand how he was the best candidate for the contract without an explanation including personal loyalties.

2. Having very little oversight: a person could issue checks to themselves or relatives via supplemental contracts, with few eyes which might notice, especially if the contract is legitimated through existing processes/programs.  Potential for corruption.  Giving a spouse or other relative supplemental contracts for work

3. Self-policing:  Having a built-in motive to protect the institution's brand, any bad news is considered a PR problem to be managed rather than corrected.  Assumptions about academic administrators/processes being best to police academic problems leads to complete inaction to correct people who display openly racist, sexist, homophobic, and other bigoted behaviors.  As Sara Ahmed (https://www.dukeupress.edu/living-a-feminist-life) writes, the complaint becomes the problem.  People who commit sexual assault or harassment protected even by the victims due to not wanting to embarrass.  Amendment to reporting sexual assaults--put the victim on public forum, where he/she has to explain what the suspect did, makes the situation embarrassing to victim, doesn't want to go the adjudication process.  Law conveys the opposite of what the law intended.  Law was meant to enable the suspect to wiggle out of situation by public discourse/dialogue, put weight on the victim instead.  My mother's sexual assault story, trial, cross examination.  My own sexual assault story and participation in cover up. Compartmentalizing bad experiences until we feel safe enough to unpack and process, reinterpret, reassess what actually happened to make sense of what happened.

4. Predatory delay:  remembering stories of students and fac/staff who were waiting on checks from payroll, or reimbursements, which were MONTHS late.  I knew of one student who left for the summer without their check because they couldn't get it resolved.  Awful.

5. Enforcing policies that don't exist/not enforcing existing policies:  Athletic students not even applying to the university, no test scores, so I couldn't place them.  And also ACT score minimum--used only if you want to exclude some people from the opportunity of accessing higher ed.

6. Structural Opportunities for exploitation and coercion which align with unspoken assumptions about race, gender, class.  The structures behind the structures, like White Christian Supremacy, which foster their own allegiances/loyalties, in-group/outgroup dynamics, and which undercut democratic processes because people default to these unexamined structures behind the acknowledged "official" structures, decision thresholds.

7. Teachers and power trips: we teachers sure like the power of being at the front of the room, the expert, recognition, prestige, accolades for our contribution to society.  They make us put up with inordinate amounts of bullshit, exploitation of ourselves and also create the conditions for us to be co-conspirators in these crimes via looking the other way on bad behavior, protecting the perpetrators of said behavior.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/02/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-republican-accountability-capitol-attack

While her disclosure of sexual assault with doubtless garner much of the media attention, the real purpose of AOC’s broadcast was to call for accountability for the Republican members of Congress who incited and may have aided the Capitol attack. “Accountability is about creating safety,” she said. It was their actions that caused the trauma inflicted on her and others; their actions that had incited the violence and ultimately, indirectly, led to several deaths. “The violence needed someone to tell the lie,” AOC said, referring to the false claims, made by Trump and stoked by Republicans. “They knew that these violent people needed the lie. Because it would be advantageous to them, they chose to tell the lie.”

What does higher ed produce? compliance, dependence

how others minimize your trauma

trivialize

Marilyn Manson as accused of violence and abuse

there are some forms of entertainment based on the suffering  of others

football, transgressive art 

music film genre pantheon of male artists who celebrate/depict rape

so many apologists

coup cult republican party

book is leading to a pathway of activism...this week pulled back into thinking about reconciling thoughts about work in higher education, my career , my developing of expertise

two committee members who ushered me through the dissertation--called out to me

tentacle trigger...fuck you all the way across the street. I don't have anything in common with people who are in higher education

i cannot work in this industry

i think it's a sham  pyramid scheme

awful to work at a university with a football team--so self righteous about it-working it out

music teachers as perpetrators to sexual harrassment

I had an affair with a music professor which was kicked off by a sexual assault from drinking too much and me trying to figure out why i was there. he

s asking me what i was going to do about it...

sense that something went wrong

instead of going in the direction of you assaulted me i continued to have a relationship with this guy for 3 years

i really beat myself up a lot bc of the affair part of it

ashamed

every time they had sex, why?

how do I get out of it?

there is something tied up in education that causes us to keep secrets

what causes us not to question

Why didn't people call me out on things

students have stayed over, same bed

i think i was above the board

drop out music school student-food/farming conference

I was sleeping in my truck bc i wasn't going to pay for a hotel room.

we both slept in the back of my truck together  she identifies as lesbian

you're sleeping with a former student in the back of your vehicle?--other person asked

it was the first time anyone had ever question

i had the status--impunity

no one questions...

all of the times i saw something discrimatory happen, i didn't have the position or courage to stand up

now i'm not in the system anymore, do i have a responsibility to write about it?

I'm describing structures where bad things can happen

boys will be boys

good ol boys attitude

lawsuit david and goliath well meaning white women thinking about how local food should be done, bucking convention

he played football with the judge who ruled on the case he bribed them 20,000

HOW DARE YOU???

when you complain, you are met with indignance

Getting a send-off--retirement parties versus having to basically sue to get back payment after being laid off

Obligation