Disparate thoughts on the Biology regents exam, Gaza, and conflict
It’s been a while. I’ve gone back and forth on restarting this blog. I’ve been wanting, but not wanting, to write. It’s hard to be a witness to these times; you become unmotivated to bear witness to the conflict in you, fearful to approach the feelings that the process of writing will image, disentangle, and force you to make sense of. I’ll leave you with these disparate thoughts that, perhaps, will motivate introspection and dialogue.
The Biology Regents exam was a disaster because teachers were unsupported, and in NYC, we were restricted to teaching a poorly aligned curriculum. We as a union should’ve—and should still—resist these kinds of curriculum mandates.
The AFT is apologizing for, and thus contributing to, Israel’s genocide on the Palestinian people. It’s good that the AFT—no doubt due to pressure by groups like AFT for Palestine—has finally set up a Gaza relief fund that everyone should donate to. But missing in the AFT’s announcement of this fund (which was, suspiciously, not published on the AFT website) is any mention of Israel’s responsibility for manufacturing this crisis. When Israel can count on American leaders such as AFT President Randi Weingarten to minimize its collective punishment of the Palestinian people—in Gaza, in the West Bank, in apartheid Israel itself—then Israel can proceed its generations-long project of minimizing the Palestinian people numerically.
The Unity caucus swept the UFT election for a variety of reasons. There’s the crucial question of the degree to which a divided reform movement should accept their political and strategic differences in order to unite. But there are more. Something long missing has been a union reform movement that is interracial. The obvious home for such a force, the self-described social justice caucus of the union, is white-dominated. Perhaps a better descriptor is that it’s non-Black; they couldn’t even run a Black officer in the last election, and it’s unclear to me if the number of active Black leaders in the caucus has risen to a number above to what I can count on a single hand. I don’t think the white-dominance is by accident, but manufactured by a culture that conflates conflict with harm, a culture that simultaneously overstates disagreement as abuse and responds—in a racialized pattern—to real instances of abuse harmfully: allegations of harm are either dismissed or stonewalled, or they are weaponized. Neither approach is a genuine process of repair, where dialogue occurs that produces the information for comrades to embrace accountability, to learn, change, and re-integrate into what should be a growing movement. The UFT will not change without a reform movement that can negotiate difference, distinguish between conflict and abuse, and elevate repair over punishment. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that kind of movement exists. Yet.
Solidarity,