Reflection: January '21📚
I've finally reached the end of my first week of the quarter, and it's been so busy. I missed being busy. Not just busy for busy sake, but I've also been productive. I'll give a quick recap of things I experienced this week, then maybe discuss one that's lingered more heavily on my mind and being.
- I ran 18 miles! A personal best in one week since like October '19.
- I started my first class in Urban Planning and read the first few chapters of Rothstein's The Color of Law.
- I started and finished Ready Player One, a fantastic sci-fi novel that provided an escape from academic responsibilities this week.
- I bought my first plant, still thinking of a name.
- I increased my typing speed up to 75 wpm!
- I met three of my classmates for the first time in person - none of these meetings were planned, though, so they were pretty incredible surprises.
Okay, there were many more things that happened this week, and I don't want to turn this into a complete rundown of every minute detail of my week. So I will jump straight into some more serious reflections this week. Note, for a more live update on the following thoughts, go ahead and follow me on Goodreads! I think I update my thoughts there frequently enough. I'm still building my confidence in sharing these thoughts on Twitter or other social media, but anyways, I'm getting off-topic!
I've spent a lot of time listening to Brene Brown the last few months, and one idea that came up, or at least I associate with her, is specifically on the topic of burnout but more broadly on trauma. Based on Bessel van der Kolk's work detailed in "The Body Keeps Score," our bodies physically remember the stress and traumatic experiences, often manifesting as physiological changes to the body and brain. Not only do I believe that, I think we can extend that to society as a whole. Our society's body keeps score. Our bodies remember the inherited traumas of past generations, and those traumas manifest as intuition and biases in society. One aspect of trauma (okay, I'm not a psychologist) is that we sometimes repress the worst memories. I think slavery and the Jim Crow Era are periods in history we know about but really suppress the worst parts. Slavery and the dehumanization that occurred to black folks, our kinfolk, were unimaginable yet very real. For just a glimpse of this, read Toni Morrison's Beloved, but I want to talk about one aspect that followed slavery, the Jim Crow Era.
As stated earlier, I've been reading The Color of Law, which is about how laws in the US have intentionally been designed to create the segregated world we still live in today. I say today because while segregation has been abolished technically, there are still laws and systems that perpetuate a segregated world. The effects of legal segregation still define our world today. While I read this with great inquisitive zeal, I had to pause after reading the following. Benjamin Tillman was the Red Shirts leader (basically a pre-KKK group) that massacred ~50 people in a majority-black town at the start of the Jim Crow era. He became a member of the Senate afterward, but a hall at Clemson was named after him until 2015! 2015! Y'all. And do you know what the catalyst was for this name change? The massacre of nine black people at Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, SC, by a white man. There are so many aspects to this that hurt, but I will point out that this person (Tillman) became a US Senator afterward. Our innate distrust of the US government and those who hold power is justified. The black community remembers this. Students of all races entered the hall at Clemson University named after a man who massacred black folks. And he was rewarded with a place in our government, in charge of creating laws that govern us. That is traumatic. Our bodies remember. We remember. Yeah. It's been a long week.
Anyway, if you want to discuss this, reach out anytime.