Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement

4. Who Am I? What Am I Doing Here?

100 4 Who Am I? What Am I Doing Here? Like many of you reading this, my background has made me a person of privilege , drawn by the hope of making a difference in the larger community and for others. Yet, I recognize that by the standards of identity politics, I have little right to speak on the behalf of a marginalized urban community. Let me be explicit. Where I was born, in Wichita, Kansas, we would occasionally drive through the black section of town—a strange other world where we stayed inside the car and my seven-year-old self wondered why people didn’t take care of their lawns like they did around the small frame houses in my neighborhood. I liked, I was curious about, the little black kids in my first grade, but I played with the white ones after school. Before I reached an age of consciousness about social patterns, we moved to a small town that was a county seat in Iowa. The town was named after an Indian “princess,” Oskaloosa, and the county after her father, Chief Mahaska. There is a fine bronze statue of him in the city square near the bandstand. There were no longer any Indians in Oskaloosa. In my circle of knowledge, Oskaloosa had one black family (poor) and two Jewish families (plump, flamboyant Anita’s father owned the junkyard; good-looking, dark-skinned Lorraine’s father was a doctor). I somehow knew this fit a stereotype; but ethnic identities were not discussed. I made my first black friend in college—a small Midwestern liberal arts college where we went on retreats to discuss difference. I vaguely knew about the confrontations in the South—the Des Moines Register didn’t cover such things in detail in 1958. Relatively innocent of the deep racial politics and history of my own time, I was proud of my sorority when we bucked the dictates of the national organization to pledge (the only) Hispanic girl on campus. But I didn’t know much, except that there was an ethical issue behind racism that called me to acceptance of others, based on a mixture of naïve, potentially Who Am I? What Am I Doing Here? 101 sentimental goodwill and on the tougher stuff of an ethical, religious call to do the right thing. Not much I could contribute. The contrast becomes clear, when I consider my contemporary Franki Williams, who became one of my Pittsburgh friends and speaks at the end of this chapter. In those same turbulent sixties in which I was discovering difference, she and her friends were becoming discouraged with the pace of change in Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision, were reading and listening to Malcolm X, were joining the Movement. A Black Panthers group met at her house (where her mother baked cookies for everyone). Franki and her friends were entering adulthood resisting the consequences of difference and literate in the ways of making one. By the time Wayne Peck drew me to the Community House, I had seen that research in writing and problem solving could make one sort of change; that college students found new power and skill as they began to see themselves as thinkers. And it seemed that if I wanted to make a genuine difference , I could do it best by studying and teaching with the staff and urban teenagers at this inspired inner-city settlement house. I was much more politically informed but personally inexperienced with racial difference. Motivated by good will, an ethical call, and the challenge to make a difference —I had good reasons for making a personal and professional choice. But not much of a foundation for achieving that difference. In some ways I was not that far from my college self or from the majority of white college students who would soon be signing up for the community-literacy course. Committed in the abstract, experienced in little. Literate in theory talk, monolingual on the street. When white, middle-class college students and teachers like me walk into a community organization and become attuned to our status as outsiders, as cultural others, we must face the questions, “Who am I? What am I doing here?” We need to be aware that in walking into an old brick settlement house, the storefront office of a community organization, or a church basement after-school program, we are walking on a path charted...