Silence Hurts More
My community partner is made up of people who inspire me every time I see them. These young mothers have come a long way from who they were in their teenage years. They are growing into these inspirational mothers with all of them working and doing their best to take care of their kids. One story that has stuck with me is Jennifer’s story. She went through so much in her middle school and high school years and now has turned her life around. All of the moms, I assume, have come from the same financial background, and to know that Jennifer has been able to keep up with her financial responsibilities at the age of 24, is very inspiring to me. Also, her daughter, Cassandra, is very smart and it makes me feel like everything will work out for them because Cassandra is doing really well in school and that I can say that school seems to be a priority. This has contributed to my own critical consciousness about systemic inequality by thinking about education inequality. Although Cassandra is doing well in school, I know some of the other kids are having a tough time. Which brings me to compare Jennifer and Cassandra’s story to Wendy and Wesley’s. Wendy just asked me to tutor Wesley because he hasn’t been doing well with reading and writing and her and her husband cannot provide the proper help he deserves. The school Wesley goes to does not provide the extra help he needs and they expect him to have the same academic abilities as everyone else. It makes me think about how capitalism should not change the amount of time a child needs to do well. However, sometimes money is what it comes down to. Thankfully, Wendy is willing to do whatever it takes to make sure someone is able to tutor him and keep him at the academic level he should be at. I relate to Glass when he states, “critical consciousness emerges from the effort to grasp that the given limits are not fated realities but obstacles and boundaries created in the course of human events” (338).
“Silence is the residue of fear.” Clint Smith states this in his TED talk. Smith talks about how we need to stop paying less attention to what people are saying and more about what they are not. For example, when a lady told him that she admires him for teaching the poor students, he doesn’t say anything because he needs the funding from her for the school. But, what she doesn’t know is that these kids are not just “poor students”, they are intelligent, learning to be critically conscious and to tell their truth. Smith realizes that he needed to abide by his four rules as well, “read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth.” He realized that he had not been doing what he was trying to teach. In the face of injustice, Smith had been silent. He used to put his hands in his pocket, look down, and keep walking. Now, he has learned that he must speak the truth by providing insight into these situations. “Sometimes all people need is a little affirmation” is what Smith said in regards to a situation where his friend was getting bullied for being gay, when he walked right past the homeless man, or when another woman told him about his own students that wasn’t all true.
Silence is something I will no longer live by. Remaining silent when I know someone is being wronged is something I have learned can have great impact on people. I’d like to tell the truth about that impact popular discourse has on the moms at my community partner. These moms at YMM are seen as the moms one sees on the MTV show Teen Mom. The show glorifies and horrifies their lives. We do not get to see what is always going on in these women’s lives, all we do see is the one hour that comes on TV after being edited. Also, the moms at YMM are stereotyped and marginalized as being unfit teen moms, and this mainly has to do with race. If a white person were to get pregnant people would not treat her the way they treat a Hispanic young mom. Over this course I was able to learn how to be critically conscious and to use this consciousness and be more aware of my surroundings. These “unfit and irresponsible moms”, as a lot of society sees them as, are trying to improve and live like everyone else in the community. They work very hard to provide their children with everything they want. They try to make sure their child is not missing out on anything. What people don’t know or fully understand is that these moms are trying to get out from under the labels everyone else put them under. “We work together to fill those spaces, to recognize them, to name them. To understand they do not have to be sources of shame” (Smith). We need to work together to read about what is going on and then to put it into action, otherwise it will remain a theory when we could be using the theory.
This course has taught me how to be critically conscious. I didn’t realize how much critical consciousness was required for my service learning prior to this course. This helped me learn more about why things are the way they are and to try to take action by completely understanding it from the sociopolitical view. I’ve wanted to change the perspective of “they are the way they are because they always have been”. For example, one of the big theories was systemic racism and inequity. Through my experiences at YMM I learned how to dig deeper. I was able to thoroughly understand why the moms were treated differently from other moms. Of course we see discrimination all of the time in the world, however, I was never able to understand why. After learning to dig deeper and into the root causes, it was easier to understand. This knowledge will inform my next small steps by allowing me to stand up for someone else because I have a lot more information on how to shut it down. If I am able to find the root cause of different topics, I believe I would be able to stand up for someone and protect their right to be here as it is anyone’s right to be here.
