Roe Rage

(Or: Preliminary Thoughts on Politics in the Classroom)

Last week, the US Supreme Court declared my body to be the property of others in thirteen US states (and counting). For some of us, born after 1973 (and without other contributing factors of identity that have continued to rouse the obstruction of bodily rights across the half-century that followed the landmark decision of Roe v. Wade) this is the first time. For some of us, this is a historical rewind, unwelcome dèjá vu after so much activism to force the personal into the political sphere in the 60s and early 70s. For some of us, this is an old, tired story, written deep into the contours of our DNA after generations of enslavement (physical, medical, existential, corporate). This is not my country’s first tangle with embodied politics, and we knew it was coming. This is a blow of scope, as remnants of erased histories and dystopian fiction have come to roost once again, in the flesh of millions. 

Literally. In the flesh. 

This essay is about the fall of Roe. But it’s not just about Roe. It’s about a senate hearing for political violence and sedition at the highest levels of government, a hearing that was boycotted by all but two Republican senators, a hearing that was browned out by Fox News. It’s about the now-disgraced Supreme Court striking down long-standing New York State gun laws while the country still mourns the loss of nineteen children and two teachers in the latest in an intolerable trajectory of school shootings. It’s about wildfires and floods wiping out entire centuries-old communities and poisoning our air and water supplies, while many in power push for environmental policy deregulation. It’s about Black Lives Matter signs on every street corner in Philadelphia, because so much of our national legislation continues to imply that they don’t. It’s about children trapped in cages and asylum seekers being denied entry at the southern border, as US health law continues to differentiate those who do and do not retain the right to safety, security, and bodily autonomy. It’s about food deserts on indigenous reservations and in resource-challenged areas of major cities. It’s about the fact that last week I saw “T**mp 2024” banners flying in upstate New York, despite what the mirror of that egregious presidency has already shown us about who we are when we refuse to engage the better angels of our nature. 

There are so many ways that the holy trinity of religious fundamentalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy threaten the body. The fall of Roe is a touchstone moment, a point of clarity that may help us see how deeply and stealthily new ideologies of totalitarianism have metastasized in our political landscape and continue to imperil our health, our agency, our livelihood, and, for some, our very existence.

This particular blow, one of many we have endured across our theme of embodied politics, carries the added disgrace of threatening so many other precedents that we have relied upon in our pursuit of life: the right to contraception, the right to marry, the right to walk safely in our grocery stores and on our streets, the right to bring our bodies, and those of our babies, to school without fear. 

Each new (or newly-branded) political assault generates a short-lived wave of action. We despair, we shout, we cry, we rally, we belabor the point on social media. We set up recurring donations, we create community funds, we call our representatives, we offer to drive strangers to abortion clinics two states away, we organize phone banks, we march in the streets. We engage, for a little while, with each cause of the moment, until the next outrage sweeps the country and we move on, collectively, to the next opportunity for performative solidarity in a deluge of community catastrophes that we can’t fully comprehend. 

Notwithstanding the cultural hyperactivity of our social movements, moments of action are noble and necessary in times of struggle, and many of us have been working diligently over time on the issues closest to us. However, we seem to be paralyzed in our liberal paradox in exactly the place that holds the greatest potential for long-term, deep, systemic change: the classroom. The classroom, the place where the seeds of a common humanity and an equitable society germinate collectively, demands an embodied politics of democracy. It demands that we fully engage the war zones of fact and opinion, the responsibilities that come with living in a diverse and changing social landscape, the nuances of where the individual body ends and the community begins. 

Teaching, in a country that purports to be a democracy, is a public service that works in part to cultivate and sustain that democracy. Now, more than ever, we need to march our protests straight into the classroom. We need to say the word “abortion” out loud, with the medical legitimacy it requires in a free society, and allow that the moral quandaries surrounding it belong in private discussions. We need to help our students differentiate between personal morality and public responsibility. We need to support our students in defining their identities with intentionality and understanding of the spaces between individuality and belonging, the spaces between universality and difference. We need to interrogate our disciplines for hidden agendas, consider whether our canons are weighted toward unspoken neocolonial and corporate values, and reckon with the ways our methods of evaluation sustain inequities. We need to interrogate our practices, and confront the ways our classroom architecture and school timetables are contributing to passive disengagement and disembodied abstraction. We need to teach our students to interrogate systems, even when it means challenging the very systems we have created for them, so that they are prepared to do the same as engaged and fully embodied citizens in a political framework desperate for challenge and reinvention. 

The classroom is an inherently political space, but one that is so often unexamined that many of us experience it as neutral, unconsciously working to sustain a status quo that is no longer (and likely never was) serving us well. We claim to model respect for multiple perspectives and diversity in our attempts to “keep politics out of the classroom,” but in reality, some perspectives are antithetical to democracy. Political neutrality, when it supports anti-democratic values, is incompatible with the tenets of a work-in-progress democracy. When anti-democratic sentiments are rising, overtly and insidiously, neutrality gives voice to burgeoning totalitarianism. Neutrality accommodates violence, even as it claims to rise above it. 

In the flesh, we feel the effects of that violence. 

In the flesh, we must rise. 

In the classroom, the space where flesh and history merge into a complex calculus of shared becoming, we have an opportunity to renegotiate the limiting paradigms bequeathed to us. Democracy requires an educated and engaged population, a population of citizens who are challenged as they grow to look beyond the confines of the ideas they have inherited and consider their unique role in the synthesis of a better world for all. 

Silence is not honorable, when the stakes are this high. If we don’t model political action with intention, honesty, and democratic integrity in our classrooms, we will struggle to successfully cultivate a politically-engaged ethos in our students. If we don’t make the personal political, again, we lose ourselves in overgeneralization and whataboutism. And in the absence of our continued, embodied attention, the metaverse will cultivate the boundaries of political action for us, and the narratives that our students carry with them into the future will follow the dystopian bread crumbs that have been so carefully laid out for them. We have so much work to do.

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Copyright 2022, Melinda Russial