Tracing intellectual roots; hope as a discipline; reproductive justice
Dear friends,
I hope you'll bear with me for a longer-than-usual message. (And do join us next week, July 5, for our next discussion if you can. Details here.)
Last week I celebrated a milestone birthday and found myself reflecting on my intellectual journey, how I came to think the way that I do. I don’t tend to talk a lot about my undergraduate experience; my college was a complicated place, and I never quite landed on an easy way to talk about it. It was a small liberal arts college, academically rigorous, with the beautiful brick buildings and grassy green quad that we often picture as the quintessential college experience in the US (even though it is far from the norm). It was also an extremely conservative, Evangelical Christian school, with mandatory chapel three days a week and an honor code so strict people often don’t believe me when I describe it.
I got an amazing education there, and worked with dedicated, brilliant, caring professors. I also learned how toxic that kind of moral/religious environment was for me. For a long time, it was hard for me to find ways to talk about both things being true. After graduating, I went straight to grad school at the University of Colorado, a large, liberal, public institution that bore little resemblance to the place I had just spent four years. I tend to be good at noticing and mirroring the language and postures around me, and as a result I learned not to talk much about the religious part of my college experience—even though it was deeply woven into the ways I was taught and my own emerging scholarship.
Recently, after a long conversation with a friend about that experience, I dug into an old folder that I have somehow held onto for the last 18 (!!) years. The folder is packed with copies of the Clarion—an alternative weekly student newspaper that a few friends and I started out of deep frustration. We were angry at the things that became focal points among some students and administrators. We were tired of hearing debate after debate about strict gender roles. Tired of seeing people focus their righteous energy on shaming women for wearing "revealing" clothing, for “tempting” their brothers in Christ. Frustrated with internal morality policing when so much was happening in the world that seemed to go unnoticed, or at least undiscussed. And so we wrote. We wrote about about policy and environment and globalization. We wrote with urgency, imploring our fellow students to pay attention, to take action. We cobbled together money to print as many copies as we could and distributed them week after week to anyone who would take one.
We wrote through an explicitly Christian lens, using language that no longer feels like my own—about the role of the Church, about the radical teachings of Jesus, about faith and God and the Spirit. And I think, for that reason, it has been hard for me to go back to this writing, to notice how fundamental this project was to the way I think and work today. As a grad student at CU Boulder, and later working at the CUNY, I was constantly impressed and inspired by powerful organizing work that so many students engaged in. I did not connect the dots to my own organizing efforts, because they didn’t look the same, and something about the religious lens felt naive to me, distant from (and lesser than) the progressive efforts I’m closer to today. But looking back I see a lot of courage in creating this paper. We were working in a serious, thoughtful way, a way we hoped would be compelling rather than alienating—but it was also deeply countercultural to the particular culture in which we found ourselves. I am proud of us.
I understand now—maybe especially now that I’m working outside of a single institution?—that my fellow students and I saw ourselves as working within the realities and constraints of where we were, while also pushing against them. It is the kind of work I still find myself drawn to today. We weren’t people who were eager to burn it all down; that wasn’t our mode of protest. We took seriously the parameters of the institution, the baseline, the common denominator, and worked from there. I tend to talk about this now as knowing when to work within institutional constraints, and when to push against them. I didn’t remember the ways I had started in this work, almost two decades ago.
One of the issues of the Clarion on which I took lead was about what was often referred to in Christian circles as "the sanctity of life"—code for anti-abortion politics. Even then, I felt deeply betrayed that so many Christians meant only one thing by that phrase. What a narrow-sighted understanding of how holy and miraculous life really is! It seemed so clear to me that any logically consistent view that truly upheld the sanctity of life would also have to oppose the death penalty, oppose war, support human wellbeing through health care and other welfare supports—but as we know all too well, the only issue that seems to galvanize people is abortion.
My vocabulary has changed so much since we first produced that newspaper in 2003. My politics have evolved, as have my beliefs and my involvement with organized religion. But I look back and see the same hope and rage that animates me now. The same sense that surely, deep down, people want to do the right thing, the caring thing. That surely if people only understood how much pain these policies caused, if they understood other people’s perspectives and experiences, they would change their minds. The same urge to weep with frustration and powerlessness. All of it, all at once.
It’s a hard time to be hopeful. And yet, as I look back at these earnest words from my younger self, I am moved and grateful. Grateful for the energy that people continue to put into the fight for justice, for the refusal to give into disillusionment and despair. I will continue to focus on hope—not as a feeling, but as a discipline.
Support reproductive justice organizations, with monthly donations if you can:
Sister Song https://www.sistersong.net/
SPARK Reproductive Justice http://www.sparkrj.org/about/
Access Reproductive Care Southeast https://www.arc-southeast.org/
National Network of Abortion Funds nnaf.org/investinabortionfunds
Local organizations in your area
