A gathering of the three r’s: Resistance, refusal, and refuge

Abstract

A gathering of the three r’s: Resistance, refusal, and refuge Leigh Patel1 I recall several times when my parents were headed out to have dinner or join a catered dinner party at one of father’s colleagues’ homes. I was most mesmerized and confused by my mother’s actions of ‘getting ready.’ She often wore a still-elegant silk ivory pant-suit with black polka dots. She would be ‘ready’ early and would paint her nails, always cut short because that would only get in the way of her sizeable labor in our home. She would blow on her freshly painted nails softly because there were just a few moments in which she was preparing to step across a door path, not just our home’s, but more significantly, across the threshold into of the all-white middle and upper middle class hosts and their guests. She would not speak to them of the work she might have done earlier in the day, including cooking for a family of five and keeping the household running to financially stable and navigating the bureaucracy to sponsor many relatives for resident visas in the United States. On the few occasions in which I had seen my mother at “company picnics,” I saw her veer towards the quiet side. The popular culture references abounded, but only a few made sense to her in such a way that she might recognize the tone. Those just-painted nails did the job just fine as she sat, for the most part, with her hands folded, and speaking almost exclusively at the welcome and thanking the hosts for the dinner party. Her painted nails were enough action for her to take; she did not seek to be part of the dinner party banter. I first encountered fugitivity, as so many others have, in my own home, in my own community. There was a dominant culture and language to be performed and articulated so that allegedly, our brown skin would through the myth of meritocracy upend the project of coloniality (Wynter, 2003). Who held these hopes and who would not be so attached to those hopes became the small moments in life where I witnessed, quite clearly, the subtle yet distinct ways of being with and at once agentively outside a dominant code and culture. The mythology of meritocracy conjoins with individualism to communicate that validation cannot be attempted without rendering other as lesser, good-trying, well-kept, but not of that culture. While so many migrants traverse this terrain in anything but a straight line, it remains territory to be traveling. Accent, phenotype, clothing some desiring a whiteness that will not include them and others desiring just enough whiteness so that they still know themselves and their children in their home codes of love and values. In the collection of articles in this volume of The High School Journal, we are offered three different yet connected articles of not just what it means but also how it feels to engage in learning and teaching that is engaged in fugitivity, in refusal, and in relation out of necessity. [End Page 137] In one of the articles, Player, Coles and Gonzalez Ybarra, connect to the long-standing practices of literacy as fugitive practice. In the United States, Black and Indigenous peoples’ languages were systematically destroyed, while migrants joined these populations in being told that how they pronounced words was an indication of lack of intelligence. As Player, Cole, and Gonzalez Ybarra point out, the Black feminist analysis in Combahee River Collective’s statement addressing intersectionality is named appropriately out of reverence for Harriet Tubman. In 1719, Tubman led a two-pronged attack via the Combahee River not to shed blood but to provide passage from bondage for over 800 enslaved Black peoples. Tubman, who had suffered traumatic brain injury as a young person, made a way, through sound and rhythm to convince justifiably reluctant enslaved people to board ships with Union soldiers. She would, throughout her life, share with people that her wound from an anvil being thrown at her head provided both difficulties and trances in which she saw herself come into being as a militant freedom...