Beginning With An End. | A Celebration of JustMaybeCo.
It is about perfection, about striving, about ambition and youth, about years when your purpose in life is to learn everything you can learn, understand everything you can understand, do everything you can do: travel, read, study literature, art, philosophy, language, absorb it all in an attempt to figure out who you are and who you might become. To try out smart-aleckness and arrogance, downright silliness and ingenuousness, wild ambition and all kinds of dreams and delusions, to discover love and sex and all their terrific and terrible implications including disappointment and betrayal, power and glory. Who you are in the eyes of Mothers and who you are in the eyes of a loved one and in your own eyes as against who you are assumed to be in the eyes of the society you live in and the outside world. All this while standing on a ledge, overlooking a chasm, looking for pride and identity, in a careless and indifferent, prejudiced, cruel world, obedient to your upbringing and confident that you will see it through. Barbara Chase-Riboud
Last month, I celebrated the anniversary of JustMaybeCo., my education startup gone-rogue, gone-silent, gone-subterranean. What I’ve learned throughout the process is that the best of education startups are about unique answers while the best of education is all about collective questions. The search for better questions inspired me more than finding answers and made for awkward and often frustrating conversations with other entrepreneurs and advisors. To their credit, they wanted to see results, outcomes, concrete steps. I have always been more interested in the potentialities, the unanswered, the grander picture. I never could focus on the return on investment; I was investing my energies into an elsewhere to where there was no return. In the midst of it, I was called to receive an On The Rise award for my efforts. What should have inspired a renewed business model, inspired poetry. As I accepted the award, I wanted to pull the audience into the whirlwind of what my life was like. Before traveling up on the train, I printed the poem and slipped it into my pocket. It was never read that night. Never published in its entirety. A version made it to the JustMaybeCo website. Here it is as it sits on my Google Drive:
on the rise, for margaret walker and my people.
For the advisors who led “chris, you need to ask yourself tonight, whether you are building a mission or a business. you will have to choose.” and “you know you can advocate for people in various ways?” as if schools and communities weren’t segregated after the housing act of ‘49. or after brown v. board in ‘54. or that no child left behind in ’02 meant that we actually didn’t leave whole zip codes behind and told them it was their fault. or that any policy could ever reflect transformative teaching and learning. this is for always remembering that for-profit education companies have siphoned billions of dollars while millions of us suffered through substandard learning experiences. For everyone who thinks they are innocent in that. For everyone who thinks “we tried” is an appropriate answer when you been paid already and a family’s hopes and dreams represent the cost of goods sold. For everyone who thinks I wrote this to be poetic.
For everyone who thought they knew what teaching and learning was between seven fifteen and the closing bell, then rushed home because of “those kids” and “that neighborhood” and how it would never change. for they made enough money or sacrificed enough money to make sure that their loved ones would never have to live in such a neighborhood, or attend such a school, or even think and know their own students as peers, even before ever a friend.
For the college deposit that michael brown left, forgetting that the prerequisite for success is that when they, police officers and teachers and administrators and politicians and any white person, find anger with you, the last thing you should do is lash out back at them. they’ll destroy you. they can’t stand disrespect for authority, even if they never loved you, because they never did and most think they never will. black and brown children pick up those credits on the corner.
For tamir rice, whom was taught in social studies all the amazing feats of righteous violence with weapons that America has engaged in throughout the annals of history. in two seconds, he learned everything that America teaches us socially about gun control. he never got to turn in his homework the next day.
For my cousin Blaze, may he rest in peace, for when they ask what was he doing in them streets?, I call out: can you tell me what other opportunities or outlets does a young man at 20 with a high school diploma and juvenile record have? And for everyone who thought he only wanted a high school diploma. For everyone who thinks college is affordable or easy. For everyone who thinks a juvenile record reflects anything other than self-defense. For everyone who thinks we don’t have to defend our humanity every day we wake up.
For my Aunt Brenda at rest, mother to my cousin Dontae-born hours before me in the same hospital. For 30 years, she made a home for 5, and couldn’t even find work to pay the bills, or when she did find work to pay half a bill, they would threaten to take her other half away. For that time when all over America, homes were being foreclosed, yet it wasn’t the property owner who lived in them, and it wasn’t their responsibility to find out what their tenants would do. For the legal document they sent to her house, which I read for her after dinner, and the lawyer we could never afford. For finally having an answer to her “what we gon do?”
For an act of desperation in an America that fails to live up to its promises.
For those who would like to be reminded of that.
For those who would like NOT to be reminded of that.
And finally for those who don’t know, JustMaybeCo. is here and now.
This is still the best thing I ever wrote.
