đ« All That You Change / Changes You đ«
People who havenât been inside prisons think often think they look like dungeons or scary stone-and-iron cages. In reality, they always remind me of junior high schools: Long hallways lit with fluorescent lights, an oppressively beige color palette, filled with bored people who really donât want to be there.
For the past month, Iâve spent Tuesday mornings as a volunteer tutor in a state prison here in Philadelphia. In the waiting room of the prison are a bunch of lockers, plastic chairs, and a TV that displays mugshots and names of people who have been arrested for smuggling things into prisons.
âThatâs terrible,â says the girl next to me, my ride in the carpool. Weâre both wearing oversize shirts emblazoned with the word âvolunteer.â
âYeah,â I agree. âItâs like an endless loop of Shame TV.â
Eventually, weâre let inside to see the guys we tutor. The one-on-one sessions meet in a classroom thatâs usually used for job skills. Over the roomâs three heavily barred windows, carefully cut-out construction paper letters glued to the cement read: âCover Letterâ âInterviewâ and âFollow Up.â The guys we tutor arenât learning how to do job interviews, but how to speak Englishâtheyâre native Spanish-speakers and weâre supposed to help them learn to read, write, and speak English with the aid of a photocopied workbook geared toward elementary schoolers. The lessons about âJill Hill buys a cake for Miss Kimâ donât have a lot of relevance to their lives amid 1,200 men serving time for drug offenses, but we valiantly try to translate the sentences anyway.
I tutor a man whoâs originally from Mexico. I ask what his goals are for our time together. We have just one hour together a week for eight weeks. He tells me he wants to be able to write a letter to his daughter. She lives across the country and speaks only English, so they canât really communicate. âThatâs a good goal,â I say. âWe can do that.â
I love working with people who are learning English because they always make me see the language in a new way. Nothing challenges my reality quite as swiftly as someone questioning a phrase Iâve spoken forever but never really understood. I think of myself as a competent English-speaker but you can pull the rug out from under me with a simple question like, âWhat is this word ânapâ? Does it have the same meaning in napkin, kidnap, nappy, and nap?â At least once during every class, whoever Iâm trying to teach will shake their head and say, âWow, English is crazy.â It feels like any language takes a lifetime to learn. Even if we get through the third-grade reading workbook, what about slang? What about culture? What about the present perfect tense? What is the deal with ânapâ anyway?
âHow was your session?â the girl I carpool with asks as she drives me home from the prison. I feel glum. âI donât know⊠it feels pointless.â To become a tutor, we had to go through three hours of training, then drive an hour round-trip to and from the prison each week. All that time spent to work with one guy for one hour, hoping that in two months, he can get a handle on an infinite number of verbs and nouns and adjectives. And even if he does master âJill Hill buys a cake for Miss Kim,â heâs still in prison! One of the 2,230,000 people in prison in the United States! The work weâre doing is not even a drop in the bucket. Itâs like an molecule of water in that drop. How is anything ever going to get better?
âI donât know,â my co-tutor says, steering around several crater-size West Philly potholes. âI think weâre just each doing what we can for one person. Who knows what the impact will be?â I thought of the Octavia Butler quote that always comes to mind: âEverything you touch, you change. Everything you change, changes you.â Although itâs really tiny, this one guy learning how to write one letter to his daughter is powerful in some way Iâll never fully understand. Â
âRight,â my co-tutor says. âBut also, obviously, weâve got to systematically dismantle everything that Reagan ever built.â Thatâs when I decided we were friends. Â Â
THIS WEEK'S COMIC
STUFF I MADE
Animated Video - Iâve been hard at work writing and editing scripts for a new season of animated videos from The Nib! These sharp, dark-humored 30 to 90 second videos feature art from a bunch of amazing artists. Check out the first video of the year: âAlly Man or Garbage Can?â
Comic - I interviewed a precocious 11-year-old who draws biting anti-Trump editorial cartoons.
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STUFF I LOVE
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Cute Science Pins - I met artist Christine Liu at the Portland Zine Symposium a few years ago, when I bought a comic she wrote about face blindness (turns out I donât have face blindness, Iâm just very bad at remembering peopleâs names). Now, she sells all kinds of adorable science-themed pins, patches, and zines.
Popaganda with Soleil Ho! I hosted Bitch Media's Popaganda podcast for four years, leaving the show this past September. Now the podcast is back and couldn't have a better new host: Soleil Ho! Soleil and I went to college together and she also hosts the kick-ass podcast Racist Sandwich.
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Queer Eye - I never watched Queer Eye for the Straight Guy when it was initially on TV because it seemed like a judgemental and superficial reality makeover show. But I got sucked into the brand-new Netflix reboot and man, it tugs at the heartstrings. More than a makeover show, it's a "docu-series about queer emotional labor" and the way toxic masculinity makes so many straight, cis men isolated and lonely.
This is Love - A new podcast about love from the all-woman team that makes another one of my favorite podcasts, Criminal. Have I listened to every new episode the moment itâs come out? Yes, yes I have.
Designing for People, Not Cars - This futuristic graphic from the New York Times shows how if you want to design cities most efficiently, make streets so they can move the most people (through public transit, biking, and walking) not move the most cars.
Two Essays by Nicole Chung - Iâll read absolutely anything Nicole writes. This week, I read a moving essay she wrote about finishing her memoir while also grieving the death of her father and came across an article of hers that Iâd missed from last fall about talking to her family about Trump. Read both of them, please!
Liartown - A hilarious book of fabricated objects. Artist/obsessive scrap paper collector Sean Tejaratchi has the gift/curse of photoshopping astounding realistic magazines, calendars, mugs, and historical images that never existed.
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SOMEONE TO KNOW
Maya Dusenbery
Itâs rare that an article can actually shake and change my view of the world. But three years ago, Feministing editor Maya Dusenbery wrote a piece about sexism in medicine that changed the way I see doctors, healthcare, and my own body. Now, after two years of research and writing, Maya just is releasing a whole book about the way gender impacts peopleâs relationship to healthcare. Itâs called Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed and Sick. Â You can read an excerpt of Doing Harm here and preorder it from Powellâs, too!
SOMETHING TO DO
Learn How to Edit Wikipedia
Five years ago, I went to the first Feminism and Art Wikipedia Edit-a-thon in New York with a recorder in hand, just planning to get some quotes for a Popaganda story about feminist approaches to open source technologies. But I wound up creating a Wikipedia entry myself and soon found an amazing new hobby. If youâre often annoyed at how our history is written and who it leaves out, editing Wikipedia is an opportunity to literally add people to the canon and up their visibility to the whole world. During March, there are feminist-focused Wikipedia edit-a-thons happening in pretty much every city (Iâm co-hosting one in Philly!). Learn how to edit Wikipedia and start tinkering away.
Iâll write to you in two weeks! In the meantime, keep in touch on Instagram and Twitter, okay? If this is your first time seeing this newsletter, you can subscribe here.
P.S. If youâre curious about tutoring in prison, the group I volunteer with is The Petey Greene Program. They mostly have undergraduate students volunteer, but theyâre open to even crusty 31-year-olds by myself and operate in seven East Coast states.