DEBRA BUSMAN

7. SILENCES AND STORIES

Honoring Voice and Agency in the College Classroom

The brilliant Audre Lorde (1980) once admonished, “Your silence will not protect you.” Of course she is right, although, at times, in those small moments of everyday cowardice, it can feel as if it might. Silence. A story. I am a 40-year-old re-entry student at the University of California. In class I am silent. I sit through lectures by those with the many initials after their names, knowing myself to be a total fraud, an imposter who does not belong. Head down, terrified that I will be found out, busted, and kicked out of the university, I am silent. Although now a grown woman and successful business owner, my educational self sits stunted at adolescence, barely having finished junior high school; the bad kid, the trouble-maker—too stupid, surly, and stoned to be wanted in anyone’s classroom. Growing up, I was about the furthest thing from college material as one could get. Yet, here I sit, decades later, a student at a fancy university. Even though I am old, re- entry students are fairly well tolerated. The important thing is that I am white; as long as I stay silent I can pass. As long as I stay silent, because I am white, I am presumed to belong. As long as I stay silent, because I am white, my presence is not questioned. I learn to hide the not-so-middle class markers of my bad teeth, bad education, and bad language, and I ride that silence like a free pass at the boardwalk, paid for by stolen coins. This I know how to do. To steal and to pass. As a wild hooligan child raised in Los Angeles, I’d put on my pink, pressed white girl blouse, comb my unruly hair, and steal stores blind as security ran to follow my young dark-skinned Mexican friends, you know…the dangerous, untrustworthy ones. Now, at the university, I am utterly in love with language and learning, intoxicated with books. Fierce is my hunger and I am eating knowledge like a feral dog at a steakhouse dumpster: gulping, gnawing, stealing away the best bones for later. I am silent, but I am learning. Then, one day, the white male sociology professor with the sparkly good teeth and the many initials after his name is giving a lecture on juvenile delinquency, adolescent drug use, homeless youth, teen sex workers. This is his dissertation topic, his field of expertise. My life. I am on heightened alert, cautious yet curious. But what comes out of his expert mouth is an articulated spew of stunning ignorance, pathologizing young folk’s full humanity into the narrow confines of a “population” of “at-risk youth” with “antisocial behaviors” in need of “intervention” and “tertiary

S. Wiebe et al. (Eds.), Ways of Being in Teaching, 47–54. © 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. D. BUSMAN prevention.” His words are big but his knowing is not. I think about my friends on the streets and then listen to the professor’s words—pompous, patronizing, pitying at best, and I am utterly stunned. He doesn’t know anything about them! This expert is completely ignorant! I know more than he does! There was something terrifying yet exhilarating about that moment, when the veil was pulled from the illusion of academic expertise. I became obsessed with the question of authority—of authorship. Framing these power dynamics in racialized context, Gloria Anzaldúa (1983) writes, “White eyes do not want to know us… Who am I, a poor Chicanita from the sticks, to think I could write?…I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you” (p. 166). Who has the power to tell whose stories, to craft and shape and warp the dominant narrative, to gather initials after their names like little ducklings and assume that their privileged perception is the one, capital “T” truth? In all those warped tellings, whose stories are erased, disappeared, or twisted into some unrecognizable perversion of reality? (Gates, 1991). As social action writers and educators, part of our work is to break silence, challenge the master narrative, insert counter narratives into the dominant domain (Adler, 2009). We must disrupt… and, yes… dismantle. But, at that moment, I was not yet a writer. I was a 40-year-old with the stunted psyche of an adolescent street kid. And when I began to write, which I knew immediately that I must, it was not my academic, authorial voice that came through with its contested analysis. No— what emerged as I put pen to paper were the voices of the kids I hung out with on the streets of L.A. so many decades before, dealing drugs, hustling tourists, shaking down johns, sleeping in cardboard boxes out behind Montgomery Wards. Here is a brief excerpt from the piece that emerged that day, now the title chapter of my novel, like a woman, in which the narrator, an “at-risk youth” herself, claims agency in the telling of her own story, on her own terms (Busman, 2015). The other girls tell me I am going to have to dress “like a woman” if I’m going to make it on the street. “Screw you,” I laugh. “I’ve been fucked all my life and I’ve never had to wear a dress yet.” “Just tryin’ to help you out, girl,” they call out as they walk on down Santa Monica Boulevard, ankles bowed out over wobbly spike heels, popping their gum and adjusting their spaghetti strap bras as if they had something special going on down there. Don’t none of us, ‘cept Lisa have any tits yet and even if I had ‘em I wasn’t about to go dressin’ in no drag shit. For one thing, it costs too much and I’ve got better things to do with my money. And for another thing I can’t hardly walk in that shit, much less run. Or fight. Some girls can, though. I seen one girl whip off those fuck me pumps and bust some motherfucker trying to get something for nothing across the side of his head quicker than I could have cracked his nuts. Said she fucked up his eardrum cuz she got the pointy part right inside his ear hole and see, check out that blood, girl. I think she was just feeling good cuz she got his wallet, messed him up and didn’t even break a heel.

48