"Birthing Social Justice" by Elizabeth Hendrix

Note: This paper will be published by Reflections in the summer or fall of 2009.





Introduction



During our first steps and journeys of transformation, at times, we have astonishing individuals who make us rethink our destinies, philosophies, purposes, and ideas of justice. Those individuals (like the “midwives” who control our fates and even whether we live or die) influence our missions and visions in life (not only at the individual level but also at the citizen and change-agent levels). Before I was even born, a “midwife” (in a sense) saves my life in a few moments and in one single act, and with this life-altering event, I have gained deeper insights about issues of social justice and how I give birth to justice and knowledge as an educator. My hope in writing this article is that readers may rethink and gain deeper insights into social issues and the ways in which they render forth knowledge and justice in any helping field as sociologists, educators, psychologists, administrators, managers, nurses, etc. Here I discuss my birth experience, my theoretical framework, and then my practice as an educator.


Narrative


As a child, I was horrified to discover the story of my birth. My two much older brothers informed me that not only was I an “accident” and that I “never should have been born,” but also they caused me to believe that my father did not want me and even tried to “murder” me before I was born. After hearing their versions, I went to my father to assuage my anger and my hurt—expecting him to tell me another tale, but much to my dismay, his story was quite similar. For a long time, even up to the point of his death when I was 20, I never really got over my birth scene and my father’s action then. I never understood the significance of my birth until my graduate work, and I never thought that my birth story was worth telling or that it could be meaningful to someone else either.

In graduate school, I met a childhood friend in the library, and she had four children of her own then. She always loved the story of my birth, and though both of my parents had passed when I was an undergraduate student, my friend kept telling me births were symbolic, and they foreshadowed what would come in a person’s life in so many ways. At the time, I just laughed off her emphasis on births and (dis)missed her interest in them along side her interest in astrology and her eccentric nature. However, the more I reflect and contemplate my actions as a social justice activist and educator now, the more trouble I have separating myself from my birth and what it means to me even now 35 years later.

Apparently, before I was born, my mother was told that she would never get pregnant again because she had problems when my much older brother was born. Supposedly, her tubes were damaged and something was wrong with her womb. She miraculously became pregnant with me nine years after my brother’s birth, and when I was born, my mother had a lot of difficulty with the delivery. She was in her mid thirties then, and she smoked and had several health problems. As a child, she had rheumatic fever, and the fever left her heart enlarged because she was denied antibiotics due to their cost and merely was placed in an ice bath at home. She was never really healthy in any of my memories while growing up, and she had fourteen, dysfunctional brothers and sisters while surviving a grueling childhood in rural Alabama together, facing discrimination because her Cherokee heritage, and overcoming severe poverty. Even now, I admire my mother and continue to be inspired by her. I was born on March 17th, 1973 on a cold Saint Patrick’s Day in Tuscaloosa, Alabama—ironically the same day as my “benevolent” brother nine years earlier. Many of my mother’s relatives actually came to the hospital that day, and it was crowded. According to some, it was difficult to get through the crowd, and my father was so stressed out that he was shaking visibly and smoking up a storm. The White doctor, who referred to my mother as “a good breeder” in front of me until I was six, had informed him that the delivery was so difficult it would take either my mother’s life or mine, and thus, my father was put into the horrible position of choosing who would live that day. Would he choose his wife of approximately 15 years, or would he choose his daughter he never met? Would the baby be healthy after such an arduous labor? Would he, a disabled Veteran, be able to raise a daughter along with two much older sons by himself? Was the White doctor telling the truth to him considering his mixed marriage in the racist South at the time? What was the right decision? My father weighed his decision for a long time in the waiting area, and then, he finally decided (with much reluctance) to save my mother. He signed the paperwork for the doctor and prayed.
Meanwhile, a young, African American nurse was coming on duty, and she could not help but to notice the dramatic scene unfolding around her. According to every account that I have heard, including my brothers’, this nurse went in and moved the White doctor out of the way; some told me “forcibly removed the ‘doctor’.” Then, she shoved her arm into my mother’s womb and proceeded to turn me around since I was a breach baby. Within a few minutes, I was born, but surely, I would have died had it not been for that nurse that day! If it had been up to the White doctor or my White father, I would not be in this world today, and I harbored anger and disappointment for my father’s decision through my childhood and early adulthood as well. I never realized the gravity of the situation and the difficult position he was in then; I just understood that my father really did not want me, and I truly was an “accident” meant to be “murdered” before I was even born.


My childhood friend loved this story because she always associated it with achieving the impossible and overcoming, and she thought that my beginning represented justice and even me in so many ways. As she introduced me to strangers inevitably who would become new found friends for me, she would somehow weave in this story and then follow it up with a story about how I stole a neighborhood boy’s first pornographic magazine (much to his amazement), how I jumped into a deep drainage ditch that spread through our neighborhood like a strand on a spider web to hide the magazine from him and his fellow, male cohorts down the street, and how I never ceased to surprise her or surmount the “unattainable” according to others. We even made jokes that White men have been trying to kill me since before I was born, and I have been giving them a hard time ever since. Surprisingly, I never really wanted to remember my birth though, and I never felt stronger or more empowered because of it.


Theory


While I never connected this lived experience of mine as a child to theory until graduate school, I meandered through my courses and my life without as much purpose or drive—especially for social justice. I refused to be a boat rocker or change agent, and I complied with the status quo and my perceptions about the status quo in many ways. I never understood what my birth really meant on deeper levels or as an event that would transform my life and views either. In a master’s level education course, however, I read The Apology and Theaetetus and about Socrates’ image of the midwife for the first time. However, it took me several years to connect this image with my birth and even with my philosophy for social justice. In order to explain his thoughts about knowledge and what constitutes true knowledge, Socrates uses two well-known metaphors. One is the gadfly (change agent or leader) stirring up the horse (or state) in order to make the horse or nation stronger in the end, and one is a midwife who judges which infants will survive and which will be left to die. For Socrates, he compared himself to a midwife in order to explain that he had no knowledge or wisdom, but instead, he helped others give birth to their ideas and their theories and to decide which ideas and knowledge should be born in the first place. The nurse who saved my life helped give birth to me literally like a midwife; however on a deeper (more philosophical level out of my lived experience) later in my life, she aided in my theory and knowledge development—especially pertaining to social justice.
Mirroring Socrates’ metaphor but with a feminist, maternal knowledge, Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchey, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule (1986) within Women’s ways of knowing point out the significance of the midwife image and the association with teaching and learning:


In ‘maternal thinking’ Ruddick (1980) says the primary concern is preservation of the vulnerable child. The midwife-teacher’s first concern is to preserve the student’s fragile newborn thoughts, to see that they are born with their truth intact, that they do not turn into acceptable lies. […] Midwife-teachers focus not on their own knowledge (as the lecturer does) but on the students’ knowledge. […] Midwife-teachers help students deliver their words to the world, and they use their own knowledge to put the students into conversation with other voices—past and present—in the culture. Midwife-teachers encourage students to use their knowledge in everyday life. (p. 218-219)

For teaching and learning, the focus must be on the student and the students’ lived experiences to benefit them in their everyday lives, jobs, and community activities, and the teacher and/or activist should be like a midwife in order to help with the birth of knowledge, wisdom, and justice.


Similarly, emphasizing a nurturing knowledge, Madeleine Grumet (1988) within Bitter milk: Women and teaching proffers that knowledge derived from experience and from nurture is significant and should be brought into “[…] intellectual structures of the disciplines and the methods of pedagogy” (p. 99-100). Although in Grumet’s work, she adds “if any” as she describes the role a nurturing knowledge has in contemporary theories of development and self, I believe that this type of knowledge (based on experience and nurturing) has a primary role in knowledge development and even the development of social justice too. My own nurturing knowledge or “maternal thinking” not only has affected me on a personal level, but also it has shaped how I teach, what I teach, and why I teach. Now, I am a “midwife” as a leader, teacher, change catalyst, and activist.


Even with my difficult birth, and despite the fact that an African American nurse saved my life, I did not begin as a midwife or a change agent for social justice. It took a long time for me to realize the significance of my work because I never saw myself as a teacher leader in the beginning of my career just like I never imagined that my birth could have meaning or a lesson for others within it. I also could not see the injustices and inequities at the cultural, institutional, and/or individual levels well when I was younger. Unjust traditions and “norms” pervaded my cultural background in spite of my Cherokee heritage and my parents’ mixed marriage, and it took me a long time to face them much less work on those issues as a change agent. My journey and my passion for social justice really began when I started realizing that I was a leader as a teacher and that all of my student teachers would be leaders (whether or not they wanted to be) in their communities and as advocates for their own students.


Interestingly enough, though, when I became a midwife for teaching and learning as well as for justice, I made a peace with my father and his choice to save my mother and not me, and I even had a catharsis about his dilemma too. I would have made the same choice—given all the information that he had at the time and given the horrible position that day, my “birthday.” I could finally have the “double consciousness” W.E.B. Dubois espoused and the “critical consciousness” Paulo Freire posited, and I could even foresee how we need a multiple consciousness as teachers and leaders today—which is what I try to have my pre-service teachers develop in my courses. Paulo Freire (1969, 2002) revealed, “Critical consciousness is integrated with reality; naïve consciousness superimposes itself on reality; and fanatical consciousness, whose pathological naïveté leads to the irrational, adapts to reality. […] Critical understanding leads to critical action” (p. 44).


Practice


As a teacher leader, now I have my students work on their critical consciousness, and I have them edify their sensitivity to injustices and inequities by connecting their own lived experiences and personal histories with their work in my courses. For the last part of one of their projects, the students construct their own mnemonic devices to demonstrate their sensitivity to seven “isms” (racism, sexism, classism, ethnocentrism, “ableism,” heterosexism, and religious fundamentalism). Some students create a traditional mnemonic device, such as “RESPECT” with the “R” representing something and so on or King Phillip Came Over for Good Spaghetti for kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, and species from science, to help them remember how and why they should deal with the injustice in their schools and/or classrooms. However, by far for the mnemonic devices, most students write about an injustice that they or someone they know faced and how this story/situation has made an everlasting impact on them and how it made them sensitive to the injustice. Connecting their lessons with their own nurturing knowledge and consciousnesses (birthing knowledge and social justice as a midwife) has helped me reach more of my students and has helped me get to a deeper level of understanding with them as well. I agree with Joanne Phillion, Ming Fang He, and F. Michael Connelly (2005) who argue for transforming education through experiences focusing on diversity and who also explore the untapped and uncultivated potential of experiential and narrative methods in the field of multicultural education within their work Narrative and experience in multicultural education.
I would encourage teachers, administrators, managers, counselors, social workers, and anyone who educates and/or is concerned with issues of justice to contemplate being midwives—to reconsider how they give birth to justice and knowledge. In addition, I would espouse grounding the students’ development in their own lived experiences—in their own type of nurturing knowledge. Now, I am thankful that I have a much more critical and multiple consciousness, and I am so glad that I have transformed into a midwife for knowledge and justice and that I was saved on my birthday when I was supposed to die. You choose your actions and inactions, and these choices shape the culture, institutions, and individuals in our society whether on a small or large level—consciously or unconsciously. Thus, what or who will you save? What or who is worth saving? What will you do for justice in an unjust world? What will you give birth to now, and what will that birth give birth to in the future?

References

Belenky, M, Clinchy, B., Goldberger, N., & Tarule, J. (1986). Women’s ways of knowing:
The development of self, voice, and mind. New York: Basic Books, Inc.
Freire, P. (2002). Education for critical consciousness. New York: Continuum.
Grumet, M. (1988). Bitter milk: Women and teaching. Amherst: The University of
Massachusetts Press.
Phillion, J., Fang He, M., and Connelly, F.M. (2005). Narrative & experience in
multicultural education. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

I was born...

"What's in a name?"

"What's in a name"
By Elizabeth Hendrix


On a cold, 1973, Saint Patrick's day in Druid City Hospital, my mother and father argued over my name. My mother wanted to name me "Leila Patricia" after my father's mother and his sister-in-law who had college degrees and were well educated according to my mother (who never went to college). However, my father could not stand her idea. Although my grandmother did have a college degree when women did not dare to have a "higher education," she (as well as my grandfather) objected to my father and mother's marriage. My mother was part Cherokee and came from an impoverished, large family, and they judged my mother based on her family and her relatives' behaviors and attitudes instead of her own.

In order to reach a compromise with my mother, who almost lost her life and mine in childbirth, my father told my mother to choose any other names, and he would be happy. She did; she chose "Mary Elizabeth." In 1973, unbeknownst to my mother, "Elizabeth" was the thirteenth most popular name for female babies, and interestingly, "Mary" was ranked fourteenth that same year. Over many years, I have met many females with both names.

Thus, today, I am "Mary Elizabeth Hendrix." I also like that much better than "Leila Patricia"--especially after discovering the stories and real histories behind the names. As of 2007, I even graduated with a Ph.D., so you do not have to be a "Leila" or a "Patricia" to have a university-level degree.