Post a video, article, poem, visual, podcast, original art (drawings, photographs, poems, etc.) that relates to the readings and conversation from Monday’s reading assignments.

Part 1: You Post. By 1pm MST on that Wednesday 3/3, write a post where you include your chosen rhetorical act (video, article, etc.) with a brief summary (1 paragraph, 3-4 sentences). Then write 1-2 paragraphs about why this rhetorical act made you “wind it back” and reflect deeper on the conversation from Monday. What did the act remind you of from our conversation? How did seeing this rhetorical act help you understand the content and/or context more? How does the piece relate (or not relate) to your personal experiences? What questions came up for you that you want to continue dialogically talking about? You can post anytime after our Monday class, but please do not wait until Wednesday morning to post Part 1. That is when it’s due, but try to turn this in while Monday’s class is still fresh.

Part 2: You Respond to 2 Other Posts. Take a moment and respond to two rhetorical acts by Friday 3/12. In your response, use dialogue as a way to engage with what your peers wrote by writing a 1-2 paragraph response of how their rhetorical act (and your classmate’s response to it) made you think about the topic differently. You can also share how this rhetorical act impacted you personally, and/or how themes mentioned relate to your personal lived experiences.

Other post 1:

Link:

https://www.wuwm.com/post/living-undocumented-wisconsin-mothers-story#stream/0 (链接到外部网站。)

For my WIBW post, I decided to do more research into the illegal immigrant status in Wisconsin. I dug into a three-piece documentary WUWM did about living undocumented in Wisconsin. The section I linked above is a story about Monica Ayala Gonzalez, her husband, and son Daniel. She shares about her and her husband’s experience getting across the border, working for two years straight to earn enough money to get their son Daniel across the board, and the struggles with being an illegal immigrant but compares them to being in Mexico. 

The part that really drew me into this documentary was when Monica was talking to her sister. Her sister was saying how she regrets not trying to make it to the United States but Monica responds “you do not imagine what is the United States,”. The United States for a long time has had this “ideal” imagine. But Monica is right, it’s not as cracked up as it uses to be or looks like to the outside world. Another aspect of this story that was interesting was her son’s Daniels process. It’s hard to believe how much the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program has control over his life. 

Questions:

What has been you’re experienced with DACA?

I learned that over 86,000 illegal immigrants live in Wisconsin, are you aware of that knowledge in your state?

Other post 2: 

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/black-to-the-future/immigration-and-blackness/ (链接到外部网站。)

This article from the American Bar Association describes the intersection of immigration policy and racial prejudice, specifically towards immigrants of African descent. In examining this topic, the author aims to demonstrate “how the law can amplify social norms and create a system that perpetuates tiered personhood—and how permitting discriminatory anti-immigrant laws and policies reinforces dangerous and divisive systems of oppression.”

For this week’s WIBW, in reflecting on our discussion from Monday, I thought about our family friends who live with us, Ruth and Julianne. They are economic refugees that fled South Africa in the wake of Apartheid and the ensuing financial crisis. They have lived in the US for years with green cards, however were finally able to obtain citizenship this past fall. In thinking about our conversations, I was reminded of them, and the intersection of race and immigration issues. They are both white women, and although their immigration process was not easy, they didn’t experience the level of prejudice faced by many. I can’t help but wonder if their identity as white South African’s helped them obtain documentation to stay, or at the very least diminished their risk of deportation comparatively to non-white African immigrants. This lead me to an article published by the American Bar Association titled, Immigration and Blackness: What’s Race Got to Do With It?.

I particularly enjoyed this piece because of the way it defined the issue, provided a history of the intersection of race and immigration policy, and then a comprehensive history of legal proceedings on this issue which occurred during the Trump administration. One quote from the author states, “Immigration laws have operated in a manner to maintain homogeneity to the exclusion of immigrants of color. Immigration laws throughout America’s history have traditionally utilized fear and exclusion to define what America should look like and have privileged some immigrant’s over others.” I loved the way this piece framed the topic, and by providing a multitude of examples of racial prejudice in immigration policy, it is clear to see how extensive this problem is. The ways in which our immigration system prioritizes white immigrants over immigrants of color is detrimental not only on an individual level to those involved, but to the progress of the ongoing civil rights movement at large. From this, one dialogic question I wanted to pose from was to: describe one way in which you have witnessed the American immigration system upholding and perpetuating racial prejudice.

easy to understandinggood grammar

Poetry Is Not a Luxury (

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985)
Audre Lorde

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product
which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is
within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.
This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which
are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That
distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births
concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.

As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny, and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the
products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form
our silences begin to lose their control over us.

For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit
rises, “Beautiful and tough as chestnut/stanchions against our nightmare of weakness” and of
impotence.

These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they
have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us
holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion
and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is
dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.

When we view living, in the european mode, only as a problem to be solved, we then rely
solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were
precious.

But as we become more in touch with our own ancient, black, non-european view of living as
a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our
feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and
therefore lasting action comes.

At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of
these two approaches as keystone for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our
poetry. I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile
word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to
cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the
quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and
change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external
horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences
of our daily lives.

As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of
them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring
of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any
meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found
intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems.
This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to
respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those
feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry
which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of
our lives.

Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is also not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy. We
can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths
we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by canards we
have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been
warned to seek for safety. We see ourselves diminished or softened by the falsely benign
accusations of childishness, of non-universality, of self-centeredness, of sensuality. And who
asks the question: am I altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving
you to temporary and reactive action? (Even the latter is no mean task, but one that must be
rather seen within the context of a true alteration of the texture of our lives.)

The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet-
whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and
charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom.
However, experience has taught us that the action in the now is also always necessary. Our
children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who
else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours?

Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain
alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as
women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations
and recognitions from within ourselves, along with the renewed courage to try them out. And
we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions our
dreams imply and some of our old ideas disparage. In the forefront of our move toward
change, there is only our poetry to hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the
implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into
accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors.

For within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our
feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes,
feelings were meant to kneel to thought as we were meant to kneel to men. But women have
survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden
that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They lie in our dreams, and it is
our dreams that point the way to freedom. They are made realizable through our poems that
give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through
promise, is a luxury, then we have given up the core-the fountain-of our power, our

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womanness; we have give up the future of our worlds.

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what
our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 AM, after brunch, during wild love,
making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of
being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths.

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