I have a black skin. But it is not a thick skin despite what some white folks entering medical professions believe deeply melanated skin to be. We all bleed red. When we talk about race in class there will always be a student who says that. Even though it’s not that simple, it’s that simple. We all bleed. That’s even simpler. We all hurt. We feel pain and sometimes it hurts so bad it leads us to hurt ourselves or others. That’s the part that’s complicated. This is a post about a Black lady’s tears. They’re real. And when I read and watch the news, I can’t stop crying because we all bleed red and I know what it’s like when a mother loses a child. I also know what it feels like to struggle for decades to give birth to myself. My writing self and somehow I feel the two are related.
“We need to read more of you,” a lovely person I met last spring who had somehow found this blog and had read my greatest hit essay Thoughts on Teaching as a Practice of Love said to me. He probably didn’t know that by saying that he would unleash an internal torrent of tears. The great lake of disappointment of my adult life is the fact that I have published so little. I want to be read. I want to be heard and yet I fear those things more than anything. I do not believe that I am a person of low self-esteem; I love myself; I know I am lovable. I believe in my enlightened nature, and I am vain. If you know me you might know that I sometimes lack confidence. But self-love and self-confidence though closely allied are not one and the same, at least not for me. It’s because I love myself that I protect myself from those who might not love me. For those who might hurt me. I’ve thought about this a lot over the years and though it may seem simplistic, I believe my skin is thin because people laughed at me when I cried.
Pedagogy as Poetry 