Talking to Our Future Selves, Life After COVID-19, and Moving: Part 3 with Sara and Renae!

[Continued from Part 2 of our discussion with Sara and Renae where they talk about their experiences as queer educators.]

Sofia: In the thought of how queerness has changed over the years for you we usually ask what’s something that you would say to your younger self and also what’s something you would say to your older self. It doesn’t have to be specific to queerness we are just wondering what those conversations might look like for you.

Renae:

The one thing I wish I knew, if someone had told me this at thirteen or fourteen I think my life would be entirely different is that the very worst thing someone can say to you is no. When you allow yourself to really process the idea of getting a rejection it’s like okay let’s do this or like okay I can’t do this, let’s do something else.

I had so much fear of someone saying no, I think probably because I grew up in a religious family with so many restrictions. It didn’t occur to me how that played out in the rest of my life. It played out in me not taking certain risks because they might say no! But it’s really not the end of the world. So that’s definitely something I would impress upon my younger self. My older self: good on you, girl, you got here. They say that every birthday is a gift, every day is a gift, and it’s even more so now because we are living with so much uncertainty in our world. Between pandemics and psychotic government, on top of climate and race and all these other things going on in the world it’s like-yeah, today is good! I got my basics. I am domicile and I got folks I love. For me, it really all breaks down to simple things, I know what I’m going to eat. So yeah, that’s what I would tell my younger and older self.

Sara: I would tell my younger self, kind of in the same line, to stop trying to make everyone happy. I think that stopped me from doing a lot of things that I should have been doing for myself. I think that kind of goes in line with just being who you are and affirming that even if people leave or if it makes people upset or if people have to deal with their own feelings about that. Yeah, let people deal with their feelings is probably another one. I spent a lot of time when I was younger, and I’m still very young, so it’s hard to even name the times that I am talking about, but probably 16-21, I just spent most of my time trying to make other people happy. Especially people I was in love with, making them love me meant that I just spent a lot of time carrying their feelings for them and being in love meant good friends of mine, people I was never romantically with, my family. I did a lot to make my family happy that I shouldn’t have. It was lot of running around for other people.

For my older self, I am so excited to be my older self, especially with all the role models I have around me for the awesome older selves I could be. I would be happy to know that person. I guess saying, I am happy to know you and be you.

Zoe: This is in reference to everything going on right now: what are your personal hopes for the future and how are you navigating this particular moment of anti-Black violence and COVID and all those things?

Sofia: and if you were to imagine what that could possibly mean, what would that look like?

Sara: I’ve been sending Renae a lot of this--What I’ve witnessed happen in some circles recently is, a lot of folks are even coming forward about certain nonprofit structures or organizing structures that have also led way for violence especially against black women, black trans folks, black non-binary folks. And so, just seeing that work being done alongside larger scale prison abolition and police abolition work, it’s both exciting and so crazy to witness because it’s so new. It is actually just something that feels like very new language, and maybe it’s just the way that we’re talking about things or the way that we’re centering things. Or maybe it’s just in the social media circles that [I’m a part of], it’s not like everybody is witnessing these things.

I don’t know, it’s just imagining a world where black femmes, trans folks, nonbinary folks are really centered and all of our accountability practices of holding people accountable in our communities you know, when you get hurt or when I get hurt, if those structures of how we respond to those things really do come from a place of centering black femmes and trans folks, I do think that there is hope for those structures to actually make all of us feel better and be safer for all of us. So that’s a hope I have that right now we are also imagining the ways that we need to talk to each other not just the ways that the cops need to talk to us. And there’s so much more in that, when we’re not just talking about the cops and we’re talking about how we can all live together.

Renae: I guess in my greatest honesty, we don’t need cops. Period. I’ve felt somewhat validated recently because for years I’ve been saying that you don’t need cops in your life. And for me that goes back to the idea that if we control ourselves we’re good. If we don’t control ourselves, then external folks need to do it. For most of us, that’s a choice. So, when I think about it that way and when I think about what cops actually do in our societies, I don’t really see a value, I just don’t. And when I also add to it the way that we choose people to be cops, in America in particular, that’s not something we need. That’s not something we need at all. I was looking at some stats recently on police training and how in other places in the world, cops have to train 2-3 years to become police officers, and here it can be 6-18 months. And most of it is learning procedural stuff, I guess attempting to be physical and learning how to use weapons. And that’s not how you run a society, that means you’re running a society that only functions if people are afraid. And to live with constant fear is kind of shitty.

So, when I put that in context of, you know, who I am, it’s even more frightening and it’s an even shittier way to live. And I completely understand why people do the things that they do. Like, I remember a month ago when Rayshard Brooks was killed in Atlanta and everybody is like “But he ran!” And I’m like, of course he fucking ran, what else would he do? He’s a black man who had recently been incarcerated on some petty shit, on check-forgery or something like that. Stuff that people do all day every day and never get busted for it. If anything, they get a slap on their hands or they have to pay a fine. But somehow or another this guy ended up in jail for it and [was] separated from his family. And on this particular day, he was drunk, so what? There’s nothing illegal about being drunk, he’s of age. And had all this stuff going on.

And I know it hit me a little deeper because he was talking about how he went to visit his mother’s grave, and I don’t know if you guys know but my mother passed away about two months ago, so it hit me a little more personally. But if you’re standing there talking to a man for 45 minutes and he’s telling you about all of this stuff that’s going on in his life, and he’s being respectful and rational and all of those other kinds of things, there’s no justification for shooting him in a freaking Wendy’s parking lot, my god!

And it all goes back to this idea that we’re a fear based society, we’re a fear based culture. We have all of these rational fears that we learn and we have to figure out how to unlearn. Will I still be able to get a job if I don’t get into the school of my choice or the program of my choice? Will my entire semester suck because I got locked out of this course? What would happen if we started thinking about things like one alternative of another, instead of “it absolutely, positively, has to be this?” And what would it look like if we really delved into our own humanity and made choices that didn’t harm other people, didn’t destroy other people’s stuff, and just went about our lives. What would we really need a policeman for? If we raised sons that didn’t grow up to be rapists and we lived [in a society] that provided enough for its people that people don’t have to turn to illegal activities to eat or to have things. If we lived in a society where people aren’t always dangling rich toys over your head, like “this is what you gotta do!” If we didn’t have silly rules like, you finish school at this time, you marry at this time--what if we didn’t have all of these weird rules.

So yeah, I guess going forward, yeah I would absolutely want to abolish the police. I’m not even about defunding them, I’m about abolishing them entirely and creating some other situation where if people are in distress they can get the appropriate help. An hour ago, I was reading an article about a mentally ill man in Astoria who was basically tased to death. And he was in his house and didn’t even want to open the door, and he just cracked open the door and they burst in and tased him as much as they could, and he ended up dying of a heart attack. And before he let them in, everyone on the block was like “he’s mentally ill, we called his mother, she’s coming”--he was a 21 year-old guy! It makes no sense!

In my [better] world we would have some sort of guardian type folks that dealt with those kinds of things. Because the other stuff that police do is not really that helpful. If someone steals your car, they’re not gonna go find your car. If someone breaks into your house, it’s not like TV where they’re gonna be dusting your house for fingerprints and find that person who broke into your house, they’re not. The only thing that’s gonna happen is that if enough people’s cars get broken into in your neighborhood, your insurance goes up, and the same with your home insurance, like really, what was the point of that? I cost myself money in the long run.

So ideally, I guess it is something I think about a lot, how do we create a world where people are more thoughtful and respectful of each other? How do we do that? Even if [people] think of it selfishly, “if I’m not an asshole, he won’t be an asshole to me.” How do we create a world where people have some ability to be self-aware about what’s really going on with them. I don’t need to freak out in the grocery store if the line is long, but I know I’m really stressed about the fact that I can barely pay for these groceries. How do we create that world? I have no idea what the world is gonna look like post COVID. I guess, in my darkest thinking, people are going to do everything they can to make it exactly the way it was before COVID, which isn’t necessarily a wonderful thing.

Sara:

Yeah and I just want to add to that, Renae, when we’re saying the world and we’re talking about abolishing the police, I also want to imagine a world where Palestine is free, and I don’t think that that’s far off from what you’re saying. We have to imagine, truly, what a world order looks like, where everyone has humanity. And that does look like reconciling traumas that people have, but also reconciling that that there are people who are on stolen land. And until we really deal with the reckoning of being on stolen land and what reparations look like and what land giveback looks like, we’re gonna continue to destroy the earth.

It’s funny, I always imagined seeing the freedom of Palestine in my lifetime and the abolishment of police and systems of policing being in my kids’ lifetime. And it’s so funny to now see how quickly those things have reversed in COVID times. Like, Palestine was just annexed as of July 1st, and Israel has fully tried and taken, and we’re actually seeing times of abolition in our lifetime. So it’s just interesting doing this imagining work, because I’ve had it all wrong my lifetime when I was thinking things would happen.

Renae: I also want to see a country where our borders are truly opened and not selectively opened and where we don’t get to selectively mistreat people who show up at our borders. And if anything, America actually is what it was set up to be, which was this democracy. It just reminds me of the whole statue situation, and I never liked statues as a kid, I was terrified of statues. I don’t know what it was, but some big piece of metal or hunk of earth freaked me out, like I had complete childhood meltdowns over statues. So in the last three days, descendants of Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jefferson, and Theadore Roosevelt, have all come out [and said] “take those statues down.” But we also live in a country where people are so miseducated that they don’t know what the statues are about in the first place. It’s mind blowing that the textbooks that you read in 10th grade were very different from the textbooks that a kid in Texas is gonna read because publishing companies have the right to put in and delete information as the local government sees fit, it makes no sense! That makes zero sense whatsoever. If Columbus discovered nothing but disease and raping to the New World, then that’s what he did! That doesn’t change. But people are so miseducated that they’re actually freaking out about statues that are coming down that are nothing but pigeon poop collectors anyway. I’m very much for taking all of them damn statues down and putting them somewhere in the middle of the country that needs the financial input and it can be a big school trip for every school in the country, you know? Go visit the statues! So yeah, I definitely don’t want to see a lot of statues. I want to see streets renamed. Living in Bed-Stuy, most people don’t know this, but most of the streets around here are named after Revolutionary War characters or former presidents. Every street around here is like Stuyvesant, Lafayette, Madison, Monroe, like all of that, going all the way down into Clinton Hill which was a revolutionary battle ground, so there’s really a lot of those names there. We kind of need to understand that, I want to see all of these street names go, it just doesn't make sense. It doesn’t erase the history, they will still exist and we’ll still learn about them in the proper context. It was super dope that Thomas Jefferson's descendants said that Thomas Jefferson should come down from the mall on Washington and Harriet Tubman should go up, and I’m like, that’s kinda cute!

Sara: Also, the Jeffersons didn’t accept that they had a Black side of their family until like, years ago.

Renae: Well this person is like the only Jefferson descendent that acknowledges the family of Sally Hemmings and the lineage there. He’s a writer for the Village Voice. It's kind of interesting.

Sara:

On that note, decolonizing education I think is so important. Especially the students I worked with in the summer program, a lot of them are so used to being fed this like being grateful for getting into a school like [ours], or grateful to have an opportunity for education. And I was an immigrant kid so I was fed that my entire life. It was like, my parents came here to give me a good education. And that’s all I do with [my students] for three weeks: every time they say a “good education” I make them name it, and for the first two weeks they really hate me every time I do that because they’re like “it’s so obvious it’s a good education.” And I’m like, “you’re gonna hate it here, you’re gonna hate the books you read, you’re gonna hate the math, so what is it?” So yeah, just interrogating that idea of what makes a good education or what makes a good person and all this good and bad that we name-- I really just hope that all of that’s fucking thrown up in the air like a piñata and hit as many times as it takes for what’s actually good in it to fall out.

Zoe: I love that image of everybody trying to hit out what’s good and what we claim to be good. And Renae, I feel you about the statues. Recently, I had a conversation about statues with my grandparents and we were like “well, in Germany they don’t have statues of Hitler” and my Grandpop was like “Well do you think we’ve had Hitlers in this country?” And I was like, “pick a card! There are so many!” It’s this strange ideology that’s been so embedded that we have to revere these men just because they “founded” this country.

Renae: I’ll do you one better, only in America do losers get statues. Anyplace else on Earth, if you lost a war, if there was a civil war and you lost it, you don’t get a statue! You just don’t! That’s not how it works! But only in America do we have confederate statues of soldiers everywhere, but they lost! Loser, go! I don’t get that. And the reason why we have most of those statues was to reinforce Jim Crow laws. It’s that fear thing, [they’re] more symbols of intimidation. It’s like, you lost, it wasn’t a minor conflict, it was a real knock-down drag out fight where tons and tons of people died over the use of Black bodies. And the South I think is still in shock, because the south had so much money that they didn’t think that they could lose but they did. Money ain’t no strategy, it didn’t work.

Zoe: Just to end everything, I think we’ve all been trying to find some kind of silver lining in this time, and we wanted to ask: what are some things that have been bringing you joy recently?

Renae: Animal crossing. My switch is life.

Sara: I’m currently looking for a Wii for myself, actually, I want Wii tennis and Wii bowling in my life. I’ve been making a lot of phone calls again, which is good because I’m a bad texter. (Renae makes a face at Sara) Look at your face! But I am getting good at making phone calls! And putting my home together, I just moved from Brooklyn to Harlem--

Renae: In with your girlfriend!

Sara: In with my girlfriend! And two other very sweet boys who live on the other side of the house. Yeah, so it’s been fun to put the place together and do some home decor stuff, I feel like I should have my own Netflix show at this point.

Renae: There should be a Netflix show about how college students and young adults move around, because I’ve seen some of the most ridiculous things in my life. You guys can move entire homes in station wagons or in ten subway trips. Like,“let’s get an unlimited card and we can make the move!” All of that kind of stuff awesome. But it’s part of the process.

Sara: It’s a six floor walk up! It was like fifty bucks tho so we were like, we’ll do it!

Renae: Yeah, I think my first apartment out of college was a fifth floor walkup in the Lower East Side. So yeah, it’s what you do!

Sara: Yeah now we are on the ground floor here so we’re good.

Renae: So what are you guys doing to maintain your sanity?

Zoe: This!

Renae: I hear you.

Zoe: Yeah, which is why I really wanted to do a project like this that involved communicating with all of our wonderful friends who have submitted artwork and reconnecting with folks like you guys and we’ve already Zoomed with Laura and Marion and having those conversations were really wonderful. And we were all crying by the end of our Zoom with Laura just because we love her so much! So this has definitely brought me a lot of joy within this crazy time.

Sofia: Yeah, I agree, this! And lots of just trying to see friends as much as possible through the computer screen which is still kind of a sad thing but, [I’ve been] making those connections when I can. Like, I have long calls with Miriam often on her farm now, and we have weekly Queery meetings at least which is really good.

Miriam: Yeah, I don’t know if you guys can hear me because I’m in a woodshed in the middle of a thunderstorm. But definitely Queery! I’ve been moving around a bit and staying with different grandparents and now I’m working on a farm, and it’s just nice to feel connected to [our high school]. Like [our school] is so special and last year felt so whole, and I feel like I got catharsis and clarity at the end of it, and just being able to still be in it is so special. And talking to you guys, I just feel like there is a really strong queer community especially in faculty in staff at [our high school], and it shaped me in ways that I’m just being able to name now. And it’s been lovely to be swimming through that. And Zoe and Sofia are brilliant and wonderful as always, as are you!

Renae: Yeah, I worry about your generation because this is the time when you’re out there doing the big social stuff and making those connections and figuring out your world and stuff and now you just have to Zoom about it, so that kind of sucks. But at least you got a prom and a pizza party and all of the other good stuff!

Zoe: That’s so true, I’m so grateful that we were able to get our senior year.

Renae: Yeah, I feel bad for this year’s class.

Sara: But it’s been fun to see--like Papi Juice’s Zoom party--like what people are making of right now, even this! Seeing Queery get put online and have another iteration and another form. And I don’t think a lot of these things would’ve happened.

Renae: That’s true, there are definitely a lot of new spaces.

Note: Interview has been lightly edited for clarity.