Shootings

On April 4, 1968, I was in Chicago on my spring break from college. Staying with friends on the Southside near the University. It was already dark as I walked that night from the train to m my friends' apartment. The streets buzzed with groups of people shouting, cars full of people driving around and around. "What's going on?" I asked someone. "Martin Luther King Jr has been assassinated," the man said.

At that moment, I felt the same stabbing pain in the chest and dizziness I had felt only a few years before, on hearing of the Kennedy assassination. Someone told me that news on November 22, 1963 in an elevator and I almost fainted then, too.

Thankfully assassinations are still not commonplace; the word itself feels alien in my mouth. One dictionary definition reads, "to murder (a prominent person) by surprise attack, as for political reasons." JFK, Martin, Robert. Those of us who lived through these horrible shootings remember exactly where we were when we heard the news.

But are assassinations as rare as we think? We don't call drive-by shootings assassinations. We tally our homicides here in Oakland and compare them to the tallies in comparable large cities. The recent shooting of Representative Giffords reminded us how easy it is to get a gun and of the travesty of the "background check." My own high school students have scoffed at the idea. "Anyone can get a gun any time," they said. In fact, some schools have metal detectors at the front door and now we have body scans to detect plastic guns or explosives at airports. We don't use the word assassination for these murders - the aspects of prominence and politics, are missing. But in a way homicides on our streets are political, and shouldn't we view each human life as "prominently" valuable? Street shootings and violent crimes link to poverty and social injustice, which are political. Altars of flowers and teddy bears on street corners testify to the prominence of another young person gunned down.

When I first started teaching high school drama, I was shocked to learn of the frequency of gun violence in students' lives. We were playing a warm up exercise I called "the community game," in which we stepped into the center of our circle to identify common ground. Towards the end of the warm up I asked, "Step to the center if you've ever lost a friend or relative through gun violence," ALL OF US stepped into the circle. Slowly over the years I became accustomed to my students' need to talk about neighborhood violence, to write skits about it, to mourn.

Martin Luther King Jr, who exemplified peace making and was aware of the threats against his life, showed us the way we should live. I am grateful he has his own holiday for us to reflect on his dream and his reality. May both come to pass.

Equity

Thinking today of Martin Luther King Jr’s Dream of justice, non violence, equity. Where are we, in the light of the Haiti disaster, the state of education in the U.S., global poverty, ongoing wars? I firmly subscribe to his statement, "let us not wallow in the valley of despair." I too, dream and have seen dreams come true. But the reality is that equity is not apparent to even the casual observer in the Oakland public schools. I teach in both Berkeley and Oakland, and the difference can be painful.

It's no secret that many, or perhaps most, Oakland schools in low income neighborhoods do not have the resources of those in wealthier areas. The reasons for this are very complex, including parents who are active versus parents who are too exhausted to help out or to insist that the school function well. I'm concerned about the growing trend to "reward success" with more money while penalizing students, teachers and schools with poorer scores. It's the opposite of what is needed. Way more attention needs to be paid to each individual student who is dealing with death of a close family member, overwhelmed parent, lack of nutrition, lack of money etc. This kind of intervention takes time, staff and money.

Of course there are resilient students who rise way above impossible circumstances, and many students do well. But it takes time (and money) to sit down with students who appear to not care a fig about school.