Synaptic

We nominated Madeleine’s reflection essay because we were bowled over by her thoughtful synthesis of her experience in the New York Social Justice Program. Weaving together insights from our readings and class discussions, her experience at two internship sites, and her participation in the Pride Parade, Madeleine beautifully describes how her understanding of social justice issues has developed and become more personal as a result of her participation in the summer program.

– Michael Harris and Kimberly Koza

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Before arriving in New York City, I was anxious and not sure what to expect. I soon learned that I did not know nearly as much as I thought about social justice issues, and many of my experiences in New York made issues that were once abstract concepts concrete. I had read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” previously for another class, but throughout my time in New York, I took his views and analyzed other social justice issues with them. In it, he makes the distinction between a “just” law and an “unjust” law while talking about segregation. He writes, “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust” (146). He goes on to talk specifically about how segregation laws are unjust, discussing how segregation “distorts the soul and damages the personality” and “gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority” (146). After reading it again in this class, I believe what he wrote holds true for most social justice issues. The privileged group tends to turn people into “others” that are not deemed worthy of certain rights or privileges. So, a big part of social justice is fighting to get people out of the “other” status they were unjustly placed into in order to reinstate their rights and mental well-being.

I also took note that King was fighting to change systematic, institutionalized injustices in his work, and I feel that that is important to look for and fix. A lot of people in the United States believe that racism is over because the president is black and most people treat people of color with respect. However, there are still many systems in place that favor white people, and many people are not aware of them. Before coming to New York, I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about social justice issues, but after reading “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, I realized that even I was blind to the major housing issues that took place in the past and that are still a huge issue because nobody has bothered to fix the damage that was done. It is not enough for people to see each other on equal terms; we must acknowledge the wrongdoings of the past and dismantle the institutionalized racism that has come out of it to ever come close to a truly just society.

Another huge institutionalized issue is the minimum wage that so many people have to live off of, but that does not amount to a living wage. This is an issue that I knew about and had discussed with my younger brother and brother-in-law back in Iowa before leaving for New York. I was arguing that it is not right for the minimum wage to not be a living wage. They disagreed with me, saying that it is not the government’s job to pay someone a living wage, and a person could always get another job, or better yet, put forth some effort and get a better education in order to land a higher-paying job. Their views display the misconceptions and stereotypes a lot of people have about low-wage workers. I was not able to change their minds on the issue at the time, as I was not as informed on the issue as I could have been, but perhaps the book Nickel and Dimed could. When people confront real people facing problems, like they do in Nickel and Dimed, it makes it a lot harder to blame them for their own misfortunes. As we learned, poverty is extremely difficult to get out of, and low-wage work is not only unpleasant, but some of the most difficult work there is.

Another harmful stereotype that causes a lack of sympathy, and therefore inaction, is the stereotype of a person who is homeless. It’s easy to picture all homeless people as lazy drug addicts/alcoholics that got themselves in their predicament all on their own. As I discovered in Nickel and Dimed, there is a surprisingly large amount of people who are homeless that are actually hard-working, low-wage workers. The co-worker Barbara Ehrenreich mentioned did not seem homeless because she worked hard to keep up her appearances and was lucky enough to have coworkers who let her use their shower.

Even those out on the street are not all drug-addicted and lazy. Throughout my first week in New York, I interned at New Alternatives for LGBT Youth. I got to know many of the clients’ personalities and struggles, and once I actually met them, I could not toss them into the convenient stereotype society places on them. Many clients were coming in and putting forth effort on getting jobs. They had resumes looked over and printed, talked excitedly about work prospects or property (one client came in with a rug he had dumpster-dived for with plans on putting it into his new camper), filled out paperwork to get essentials like new social security cards and birth certificates, and held steady meetings in order to track their progress.

I also learned about the added struggles of homeless youth that belong to the LGBT community. The struggles are particularly rough for individuals who are transgender. When it comes to finding a homeless shelter for the night, trans women, who made up a large portion of the clients at New Alternatives, are not allowed in women’s shelters, and they are not welcome in men’s. Fortunately, there was an LGBT shelter nearby, though it has a tendency to fill up due to the high rate of homelessness in individuals belonging to the LGBT community. Most of the clients were also people of color. So, they had a lot of strikes against them: being homeless, LGB or T, and non-white. Rachel and I sat in on a therapy group where we heard a lot of their struggles which made homelessness issues more real for me. My experience there made me look differently at the homeless individuals I met on the subway and in the street. I would wonder what their daily lives were like and what misfortunes they had gone through.

Though I changed internships, I was still able to help out homeless individuals through Middle Church’s Butterfly Project which made and handed out meals to those in need in nearby parks. I had given out food through Foods Not Bombs in Des Moines before; but the Butterfly Project was much bigger, and I was able to help out a lot of people that afternoon. I realized that while I tend to spend much of my focus on institutionalized discrimination and mistreatment, meeting peoples’ immediate needs is important as well. Like the worksheet from class that had different forms of social justice activism listed, it is important to incorporate many different forms rather than to focus on one and ignore all the others. If someone is fighting to better the lives of individuals who are homeless but not helping them meet their basic needs, that someone is not doing as much as they could be.

Just as forms of activism tend to be interwoven, so are social justice issues. At New Alternatives, there were clients up against two, three, even four issues. During my internship with Middle, I learned that they combated many issues as well and recognized that many of them overlap. The Collegiate Churches, which Middle is a part of, has a program called Intersections where they focus on the crossing over of issues as well as helping people with differences find a common ground and celebrate each other.

Jackie, a pastor at Middle Church, talked about “rewriting the story”. I liked that idea right away. Stories determine our culture, and our culture dictates our views and behavior. So, change the story and problematic views and behaviors will change into positive ones. Middle Church is trying to rewrite the story with the Freedom School project that the other interns and I spent most of our time working on. The aim is to get youth aware and interested in social justice issues at a young age through art. By doing this, they are “rewriting” the way children are raised to see the world in order to bring about positive change in the world as the children grow up and hopefully become invested in fighting for social justice in ways big and small. While Middle is working on a huge project to bring about change, parents can do the same on a small scale with the way they raise their children. It can be as easy as reading them social-justice related books that get them thinking about the issues in an entertaining way that will stick with them the way cherished children’s books tend to. My dad bought me some children’s books explaining vegan values and why they’re important so that I can raise my (potential) future children in a slightly more moral way than I was raised. I have not gone out and purchased any other social-justice-related books since I do not plan on having a child any time soon, but I plan to purchase inclusive and social-justice related books because it is important to instill positive values at a young age. I recall the LGBT conversation we had in class where classmates talked about how much they struggled with the values they were raised with even though they knew they were not right, which goes to show how well those early values can stick.

I was fortunate enough to be raised to accept LGBT individuals. I had even attended many Pride parades prior to the one I marched with in New York. The parade in NYC was a more moving experience, however, because it was much larger. I was actually participating in the march; I marched where the original march had taken place, and I had researched into the Stonewall Inn and the history of the Pride parade which gave me a better appreciation for the parade and what it stood for. The Pride parade stems from the riots that happened in 1969 at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar that faced frequent police raids. A year later, the victory over the police was celebrated with the “Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day” march. The march was a big deal since being “out” was dangerous back then, and the march has morphed into the parades that now take place across the country (Wythe). The movement spread nationwide in just ten years and succeeded in taking homosexuality off the Psychiatric Association’s DSM-II. The parades have been turned into an event called Pridefest (Today). The parades are important because they are a safe place for members of the LGBT community to be themselves, and without the fearless members of the first initial marches and those who retaliated during Stonewall, they may not have a place to show off their pride.

Before coming to New York, I had abstract views on a lot of social justice issues. They were abstract because I never really ran into many of them or into people who were directly suffering from them. Because of that, I was also able to avoid thinking about them. In my predominately white Christian town, where homelessness is not seen and race issues are slim-to-none due to the lack of another race to interact with, most of the issues in the world can be easily ignored or unknown. I would make a point to partially educate myself on the issues and was more active in combatting them than a lot of people in my community (I would not have come to New York if I was not concerned with the social justice). However, upon experiencing New York and coming face-to-face with diversity and the issues that came out with it, the issues have become more important to me now that they are concrete and personal. What I loved about Middle Church was how active they were. They not only preached social justice, but they practiced it too. They seemed to see it as the Christian thing to do, if not a Christian duty, to protect the well-being and rights of all God’s children. It seems like a lot of people “preach” without practicing, and I have realized that I have not been doing nearly as much practicing as I could be. When I get a car, I would like to get re-involved with Foods Not Bombs. I would also like to look for other things I can do to combat some of the issues that are not so close to me.

Works Cited

“Today, as the Struggle for Gay Rights Continues.” NYC Pride. Heritage of Pride, Inc., n.d. Web. 14 July 2014.

Wythe, Bianca. “How the Pride Parade Became Tradition.” PBS. PBS, 9 June 2011. Web. 14 July 2014.