May 5, 2020

Failing in the time of COVID-19

It's finals week at Georgetown. My students are hurtling towards the end of this semester, or perhaps they are being hurtled. I hear a bit of both in their posts and journal entries. I feel both myself.

I know for sure that I will feel extreme relief after I submit final grades next week (or the week after, let's be real). My students will feel many, many things, relief perhaps being one, but fear and loss and worry and shame likely being others. My students have already expressed all these feelings over the last 6 weeks, and I don't think submitting their finals will relieve them of much. Because some of my students may still fail their classes. Many of them will continue to internalize the message that their severely reduced capacities this semester were their individual responsibility to overcome. Not doing so is failing, as students, as Georgetown students, as the children of their parents' dreams, as people, because they aren't doing "enough." The ableism of right now is both more visible and more metabolized somehow.

A key piece of Open in Emergency is a collection of daughter-to-mother letters. (Wherein both "daughter" and "mother" are vexed, fraught terms explored directly by some of the letter-writers.) I think of these letters now because I'm reminded of how families are often the incubators of social forces, where parenting strategies and family dynamics map onto, or find alignment with, racialized+gendered norms, expectations, and aspirations. I'm thinking about how many of my students, right at the juncture of figuring out who they are, are back living with their families of origin right now, and I worry about the possible toxicity of these situations—the pressure to succeed perhaps more palpable, closer. The weight of filial debt heavier, the stakes of academic success higher. The control of personhood more rigid. 

Perhaps I am worrying unnecessarily, perhaps some of us are learning to care for each other differently, more thoroughly, in this "unprecedented time."

But here's one of the letters from OiE written by a college student, pseudonym Raven Anand—a reminder of the cost of racialized ableism in our families, especially for the children of immigrants in the US, the second generation. The things we do to ourselves and each other in the name of success. Content warning: mentions of sexual violence, body shaming, alcohol abuse. (Text-reader copy here.)

Read, and reflect:  How do you define success? And failure? What does it mean if you succeed, or if you fail? What kind of person do you need to become or perform? Have your ideas about success and failure shifted at all during the last two months? What structures (and people in our lives) perpetuate dominant ideas about success and failure, and how might you intervene in these?

Now, write: If you're feeling up to it, write your own letter to a parent or caregiver. What do you want to say that you haven't been able to? What do you want them to know about you? What questions might you have for them? 

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Thank you to everyone who has followed me on this care journey this last month. As Georgetown's semester comes to a close this week, I'll be taking a little break from these posts (to do my own self-care!) but will be back occasionally as this pandemic goes on to continue sharing thoughts and activities on care.

Take care,

mimi

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