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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Growing up as a light skinned Puerto Rican kid, somebody who didn't speak very good Spanish, there was always a sense, well, you're not really Puerto Rican enough. Similarly, because I was legally blind, but not totally blind, you know, people, well, you're not really blind. So that, you know, would make me feel isolated. Well, good morning folks. My name is James Francisco Bonilla.
James Francisco Bonilla:I wrote a memoir called E Y E for an I, the letter I, Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry and Family Mental Illness. Today, I'm joined in a conversation with Beverly Daniel Tatum and Charmaine Wijeyesinghe. I'm just really tickled to be able to have this happen. I think what I would like to do now is let them introduce themselves.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:Thank you, Jim. I am delighted to be here. As you have heard, my name is Beverly Daniel Tatum, and I am a psychologist and longtime social justice educator. I've been privileged to know Jim for a long time, professionally and personally. And I was delighted to be able to read his book and be in this conversation.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:So much of the book is about identity. I think it makes sense to tell you a little bit about mine. I am an African American woman, light skinned African American woman, which I think is important to know because the experiences of dark skinned people and lighter skinned people is different, even in the context of racism. And I am someone who grew up in, a middle class educated family. I am a child of educators, heterosexual woman married to a heterosexual man.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:And a able-bodied person, though now in my seventies, increasingly aware of physical limitations as we age. So as they say, temporarily able-bodied. I am grateful to be part of this conversation.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:Good morning. I'm Charmaine Wijeyesinghe, as Jim said. I'm also just so delighted to be invited into this conversation and to share my thoughts on Jim's book and to be in conversation with Beverly and Jim. I know both of you for a long time. Jim and I were in the same doctoral program at UMass Amherst and Bev and I know each other from our time at Mount Holyoke College.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:I have been a social justice educator since 1985. I have a career in higher education, not for profit doing that type of work. Most of my writing and speaking talks about social identity, social oppression, and about the last fifteen years, intersectionality and what that means for identity, social systems, social justice. So I think so much of the book weaves in themes from all of our backgrounds. I'm excited to talk about that.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:Because Jim's book touches so much on how identities and people's perceptions of our identities affect our experiences. Like Bev, I will share a bit about that. Most people will perceive me as an African American woman, and a lot of my life has been shaped by that. I'm a child of immigrants. My parents came from Sri Lanka, which at the time was called Salon in 1958, and I'm the first citizen by birth in my family.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:I identify as biracial, but I didn't always. And part of our discussion might touch about that, the evolution of identity and how we name ourselves. I use she, her, and hers pronouns. I'm a female in my older middle age. And I appear, I think the reason people think I'm African American, have medium brown skin, tight curly hair, it's mostly gray right now.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:And I'm excited to get right into the book and the discussion and what perspective Jim might be able to elaborate on and to be in conversation about Bev's and my perceptions and questions about the book.
James Francisco Bonilla:Thank you. So this is our group. And just by way of identifying, I am what's called a New York born Puerto Rican from a working class family. I'm light skinned. And as we'll talk more about in the book, when I was born with congenital cataracts, which means I could never see out of my left eye and my right eye was pretty functional until something happened.
James Francisco Bonilla:And I'll talk about that in a minute. I did get the sight back in my right eye, but my left eye is still not functional. I think that's all I'll say about myself for now and maybe more will come up later. I just wanted to give listeners a quick overview of the book. As I said, I was born with congenital cataracts.
James Francisco Bonilla:And when I was nine, I got sent to a Catholic boarding school. I call it a reform school. And I had the sight, I lost the sight in my right eye when a classmate hurled a horseshoe at me and it hit me unfortunately in my one good eye. So I lost most of the sight in that right eye. And from that point on, I was legally blind.
James Francisco Bonilla:I was also at home contending with a mother who suffered from pretty moderate to severe mental illness. And I write about that. Went to public school. First I went to Catholic schools, which I got kicked out of. I can say more about that.
James Francisco Bonilla:And then I went to public schools, some of which were excellent, some of which were horrific. Some of that was based on my being Puerto Rican, some of that was based on my being legally blind. So from age nine to 19, I was legally blind. At 19, there was a revolution in the technology that allowed them to remove the cataract from my right eye. And I was able to get the sight back in that eye.
James Francisco Bonilla:And from that point on and even earlier before I had had the surgery, I got introduced to this notion of disability rights and a disability move. I was 15 at my first sit in at an agency for the blind. And that introduced me to the notion of social justice. And even though I started out as being involved in disability rights, especially after I got my eyesight back, I became a community organizer and worked on social justice issues around race and class. And I eventually, and this is where the book pretty much ends.
James Francisco Bonilla:I went to graduate school, which is where I met Charmaine and Beverly and became eventually a professor where I taught issues of social justice and leadership and cultural competence. I saw this line and I'm gonna steal it from somebody else, but I think it's a really good line. While this is a memoir, it's also a meditation on disability, race and generational trauma. So I think with that said, I'm gonna open it up to folks' questions, thoughts, reflections.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:Well Jim, let me start by congratulating you on this book. I think it does bring a unique voice to the literature, the social justice literature, in that you weave together these different themes of your identity. You know, growing up New Yorkian, as you said, with a disability, thinking about and having that change. You know, having it change at nine and having it change again at 19. But I'm curious about why you have written this book at this particular moment.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:Talk to us a little bit about the it's very personal about writing this book, and why now?
James Francisco Bonilla:The book was an evolution. A lot of writers will tell you that sometimes the muse leads you in directions that you had no idea. So I had thought about for a long time, and even in my teaching and training, I would talk about being legally blind, being Puerto Rican. I was writing a novel and finally I realized this novel is not going anywhere. And I was at a retreat and the retreat leader said to me, You should write about your life story.
James Francisco Bonilla:And within that afternoon, I basically outlined the entire memoir. I thought it was gonna start out about being legally blind and Puerto Rican, But pretty soon I realized that how I wanted to start the book was to talk about my mother and my experience with my mother and her experiences. And it sort of evolved from there. I didn't plan on writing it coming out at this point in time. I thought, well, it'll just be a meditation on these issues, but, you know, we're living through an extraordinarily challenging time for social justice workers.
James Francisco Bonilla:I'm glad it's come out, and I'm looking forward to how people respond.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:I wanna follow-up with that, Jim, because I think it is a piece for our time because it illustrates both despair and to some extent, hopelessness at times, but resilience and community and finding both personal strength in times of isolation, but also strength in community and ways of doing the work in many different ways throughout the course of our life. So I want to appreciate and thank you for writing the book. The title for me, I want to know more about that. So it's an I, so as you said, an I E Y E for an I, the single letter capital I. Can you tell us a bit more about that and how that came about and how it might relate to the book?
James Francisco Bonilla:And again, it was one of those serendipities. I was having a conversation with somebody, so what are you gonna call it? And I said, oh, and she said, oh, I like that idea, an eye for an eye, because the focus was about, I'm using the word focus, was about my eyesight. But I think as I evolved and as the story evolves, it becomes more about me, the eye. But that wouldn't have happened without growing up with blindness and bigotry and family mental illness.
James Francisco Bonilla:What I've come to refer to now as generational trauma, which I'm realizing more and more that there are people writing about generational trauma, particularly within communities of color. Stephanie Fu wrote a book called What My Bones Know, which is about Asian Americans and the generational trauma she experienced and how it wasn't discussed. Does that answer your question, sort of?
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:It does. And now I'm wondering, is there a passage that you wanted to share?
James Francisco Bonilla:Oh, many passages. Let me pick one. And this comes to the question of why did I write the book? For me, the notion of seeing and not seeing became the basis for a lot of the diversity work I would do. So I'm gonna read a piece from the very end of the book called Seeing Beyond Our Blind Spots.
James Francisco Bonilla:The blind French philosopher Jacques Lusserain wrote a book and he observed, The sighted are constantly diverted from total attention. So are the blind, but not to the same extent. For them, remaining attentive to one's blind spots is a practical necessity. I've said, Jim Beni have said, that blindness is not just something that happened to me, it's also something that happened for me. It is one of several gifts handed me as our being Puerto Rican and living and coping with mental illness.
James Francisco Bonilla:Those gifts began the transformation from the blind eye to the seeing eye, and those are in quotes. Not only am I forced to identify my blind spots, I'm often forced to see new possibilities. Some of my blind spots are physical. Not seeing out of my left eye has caused me to accidentally walk into a bed corner or crash into a stranger who approached me from my blind side. As a child, I could see well enough to enjoy playing on New York City's many concrete handball courts.
James Francisco Bonilla:The hot pink of the Pensey Pinky handball was just bright enough for me to see it against the gray courts and tested my reaction time. But the fantasy of being a handball legend ended pretty early when other kids figured out that a sure way to beat me was a well placed shot in the lower left quadrant of my field division. They could see my blind spots before I did. But blind spots are not simply about physical limits. Once while talking with a friend about a change of presidents at his college, I asked, what's his name?
James Francisco Bonilla:Given my knowledge of higher education, I assumed I'd recognize him. Clearing his throat, my friend said, and you're Mr. Diversity? Our new president is a woman. Back then, I felt embarrassed, annoyed, defensive, and resentful that my sexist blind spot had been exposed.
James Francisco Bonilla:Like physical blind spots, bias can be noticed by others, but left unrecognized by those with the bias. Newer cars come equipped with a feature called blind spot monitoring that enables drivers to be alerted when they are drifting sideways into an unseen car. I look back on my decades as an educator as helping supposedly sighted people learn to find and monitor their blind spots when dealing with the other. That required, and it continues to require, my noticing my own biases regarding race, gender, heterosexism, religious suppression, classism, ageism, and ableism. Also demands, overcoming blind spots demands a willingness to admit that we each have mental constructs and implicit biases that limit our vision.
James Francisco Bonilla:These blind spots are often detrimental to ourselves, to others or to both. Growing up as a young Latino kid in Catholic school, I internalized negative expectations fostered on me by white nuns. The nuns belief that I was slow and not very smart resulted in my acting out. As a consequence, I was inaccurately tracked into special needs classes, which happened by the way to a lot of Latino kids. Overcoming one's blind spots is never a one and done proposition.
James Francisco Bonilla:On a recent Zoom call, a writing colleague referred to their spouse telling a story. Not thinking, I asked, what's his name? To which she kindly corrected, my spouse is a woman. This time, I thanked my Zoom friend for correcting my blind spot about sexual orientation. Yep, you can teach an old dog new tricks.
James Francisco Bonilla:We need only to be open to sensing our world more fully by remembering that when one eye closes, another eye can open.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:Thanks for sharing that Jim, it's very helpful. As you were reading, I was thinking about the summary in the flap of your book. And it refers to the book as about eyesight lost, vision restored, insights gained. All of that is captured in the quote you just shared. I wanted to ask you about the opening of your book.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:While so much of the book is about your vision and loss, gain, etcetera, there's also a lot about your mother. And the book opens very dramatically with the scene, when you were five years old, running from your mother who's threatening you with a knife. And it's quite shocking, you know, to think about that experience for a five year old and how confusing that must have been and frightening, etcetera. And throughout the book, you talk about the ways in which your mother's mental illness intruded into your life in difficult ways. And yet your mother was also the person who found the specialist who restored your vision.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:It was her connections that made that possible. And just knowing that speaks to the complexity of the relationship between you and your mother. And I just wondered what it was like for you writing about that.
James Francisco Bonilla:My advice to people who are considering doing memoirs is to have your therapist on speed dial, because I spent, you know, before I wrote the memoir, I had spent a lot of time and as my mother got more sick, things got clear to me that she was not quote unquote normal. A child, I didn't have a language to understand mental illness. And it wasn't until I was, you know, I think 10 or 12 that a neighborhood kid's mother had an episode and everybody was making fun of this kid. And this kid happened to be the neighborhood bully. So it was sort of like, you know, we were having fun teasing him, and then I realized, I'm not going to tell my mother this story because I think I intuited that there was some mental illness going on in my own family.
James Francisco Bonilla:And I was like, I'm legally blind. I don't wanna have the additional trauma of being labeled from a mentally ill family. So it was really quite an evolution in terms of my own experience. And it wasn't just my mother. I had an aunt who was hospitalized.
James Francisco Bonilla:I had my father who suffered from, they didn't have this language back then, but PTSD from his time in Korea. And then eventually, you know, I struggled with my own mental illness in college, almost destroying myself. So it became a theme in the book that I had not originally thought about. But the more I read about and the more I understood, this was a theme that happens in a lot of communities of color as well as, you know, majority communities.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:I want to chime in here, if I might. Following up on that, Jim, throughout the book, were very honest about internalizing messages about yourself and about other people, about people who have a mental illness, about folks who are dark or light complected, and issues around gay, lesbian, bisexual folks, trans folks. So you're very honest about that. I think that also demonstrates for folks that regardless of how long you do the work and how much reading you do, we all have those blind spots and we're going to be continually reading. But in terms of internalizing, I realized internalizing some of the messages early about that example with a bully and hearing what people were saying about his mom, sometimes internalizing those messages prevent us from seeking community.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:Because we're high I think at one point in the book, you talk about part of your experience being almost like being in the closet on some of these things. So could you talk about that in terms of how internalizing those dominant messages about people keep us from being in community?
James Francisco Bonilla:This is ironic in many ways because when I was kicked out of Catholic school, I was sent to this boarding school with the notion that because I was, first of all, put into a slow class in Catholic school because the nuns mistakenly diagnosed my Puerto Rican accent as a speech impediment. You put a kid who's moderately active into a slow class and I acted out. It turns out that literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of kids of color, particularly Latino kids, over the years had been funneled into special ed slow classes because they were misdiagnosed as having a disability. Years later, when speech pathologists who had a Latino background tested these kids, they were not slow. In some ways, many of them were actually average to above average.
James Francisco Bonilla:But that message of I was slow haunted me for years. So much so that even when I was in graduate school, I was really struggling to write my dissertation because I felt like Val Young talks about imposter fraud fake syndrome. And one of the things that got me through that was Beverly's husband, Travis and I ended up putting together a small group of men of color who were also trying to finesse our way through higher ed and who were also struggling with our own internalized messages.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:Thank you for that, Jim. And the follow-up question is something that Bev touched on, how the book demonstrates the complexity, the interweaving of the nature of oppression, discrimination, and how it affected you. My work with intersectionality, I always think about it and it encourages us to move from eitheror to bothand. A number of chapters are dedicated to your relationship with your mother and her mental illness and its impact on you. But there's also a chapter, I think, it demonstrates how Dee is abusive and manipulative.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:But I think on page 162, I wrote it down. There's a chapter on choosing a parent, where you very graciously say, this is what she gave me, resilience, the operation, her connections. So she was both abusive and ingrained some very lasting skills in you. Your supervisor at what I think is Camp Lighthouse, who attempted to assault you and then also helped you with college and jobs, and how schools were both places of isolation, but in high school also opportunities to engage in student government and clubs and athletics. So there's this idea of eitheror or bothand.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:So I was wondering how your process of writing the book or some of the even the content might help people doing social justice work hold both and perspectives.
James Francisco Bonilla:Yeah. Part of this has to do with just my getting older and being able to understand some of the nuances. I think in the earlier draft, I was harsher on my mother. And one of the early readers said, do you wanna talk at all about Puerto Rican women in the forties and fifties and sixties who, I mean, in Puerto Rico, there was scores of them that were sterilized without their consent. There was very few, if any, resources for Latina mothers who might've had issues concerning mental health.
James Francisco Bonilla:I mean, that's starting to change now, even though the cuts to Medicaid, maybe not so much. But at the time, there were not a lot of resources for her to tackle her issues around mental illness. And it wasn't really until her husband died two years before she passed that she finally went to go see a therapist. She had the resources and because it was available. The complexity that you're speaking of is being able to see that she was both abusive and critical to my becoming who I became.
James Francisco Bonilla:I think at one point I referred to her as force of nature. Well, that force of nature sometimes got turned on me, but sometimes ended up working for me. And being able to hold both of those things as true is I think one of the places where I was forced to stretch. This brings up a related question perhaps. I talk a little bit in the book about, you know, I struggle with the idea of having surgery because I liked who I was as a legally blind young man.
James Francisco Bonilla:Once I had the surgery, I was like, oh, this is fabulous. And I think both are true. Being able to hold the contradiction of being legally blind, I was fine. When I got the eyesight back, that was very helpful in so many ways. But sometimes we tend to say, well, either you're for a cure or you're against the cure.
James Francisco Bonilla:And I think it's never that clear cut.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:I wanna pick up on that, if I might, because that was one of the things I wanted to ask you about, you know, this tension between having an identity as a person with limited vision, then really a blind person. And then all of a sudden, a sighted person, you know, at the age of 19. You talk about what would that mean to go from one to the other. There's a chapter titled Seeing in Technicolor. You know, the experience of Technicolor, of course, was quite wonderful.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:You know, like being able to taste all these new flavors, but still, you know, so much of your identity up to that point had been built around being a person with a visual disability, with, you know, limited vision. How did you navigate that?
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:And if I might jump in, Jim, as you know I am prone to do. As an intro to answering Bev's question, for folks who may not have read the book, I mentioned to you that a particularly poignant area of the book appears on page 123 in the chapter that Bev mentioned, seeing in Technicolor. For folks who haven't read the book, it's really going to give them that context of the significance of this piece.
James Francisco Bonilla:Okay. I should have been grateful, but the night before surgery, I've been panicking about just those exact words. What if I'm no longer a blind person? What if I suddenly become sighted? Who will I be then?
James Francisco Bonilla:Having spent more than half of my nineteen years of life legally blind, I was terrified. I developed into a high functioning young blind man, able to work as a counselor in a camp for the blind, capable of attending college and even studying in London. I thought of myself as the poster boy for the well adjusted, successful, high performing disabled person. I had taken the hand life had dealt me and assembled my identity accordingly. I liked the legally blind me in capitals.
James Francisco Bonilla:Why would I want to be just another member of a sighted society indistinguishable from the hordes? And and this ties into some of the other themes about the book, finding community. It had taken me a long time having been legally blind and gone to some schools that were supportive, some schools that weren't, including college, to find a sense of community and my sense of myself in that. I had a blind community that I was quite comfortable in and acknowledged in, not just by the other blind participants, but by the counselors became my friends as well. And so this notion of all of a sudden, I was no longer gonna have, in my head, access to that community was really kind of terrifying.
James Francisco Bonilla:I think one of the ways that I ended up coping was I didn't really leave those communities. I ended up becoming an advocate. I took part in sit ins. That identity became the jump off spot for my activism. And once I became active in those communities, other communities opened up to me.
James Francisco Bonilla:And this raises the question that I'd spoke of earlier of, you know, there are people who are pretty articulate and adamant that they don't have to be cured. I have a chapter in the book that I like a lot that talks about with correction and all the people that are disabled. And I ask at the end, gee, what would it have been like if all of you able-bodied people had been corrected? You might be something far more than you imagined your life would be.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:Yeah, well, triggers another question which goes back to your birth, right? You know, born with congenital cataracts. My husband is now a man in his 70s and like a lot of us had a need for cataract surgery, Right? And so when I read that about having a baby with congenital cataracts, I was imagining that in today's medical world those cataracts probably could have been corrected, fixed, you know, at the time or early on in your, you know, toddlerhood perhaps. And then thinking about what would that mean for you, the person you are today.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:All of the experiences that you've had, whether that was, you know, with the mother you had, And you asked that question like, would a kinder, gentler mother have produced a different person? Corrective surgery early in life, would that, I mean, clearly that would have changed your school experience in many ways. It's just an interesting question to contemplate that the person we're talking to today, Jim Bonilla, author of this great book, is the result of various circumstances, some of which in today's world would not exist or could have been prevented, if, you know, maybe that's another way to say it. And just wondering your thoughts about that.
James Francisco Bonilla:So I'm a lot older than I look. That's my vanity speaking. Because sixty years ago, there was no surgical procedure that worked with cataracts. What I understand is that the lenses of the eyes, which is where the cataract grows, when you're very young, there's fibers that hold the lens in place and they're very hard and they didn't have the surgical expertise at the time to do surgery unless you were very old and those fibers had softened. Then somebody came up with an idea of, Oh, we can't surgically do it but what if we use ultrasonic sound?
James Francisco Bonilla:And that's exactly what they did. They put a little vibrating needle by my eye which shattered the lens and they had like a little tiny vacuum cleaner that just vacuumed out the lens and now they gave me a contact lens to wear on top of that. Today, they just use lasers and it's poof, poof and it's gone. So the level of complexity and the technological fixes have just gone right through the roof. But I think this is an interesting question because there's no real right answer.
James Francisco Bonilla:I have no idea what would have been like if I weren't legally blind. And this is where the idea of how identities intersect. There was a way that my being legally blind in the New York City school system where only 80% of, where only twenty percent of the Puerto Rican kids in the system graduated high school. The fact that I ended up getting special services because I was legally blind, I credit with getting me through high school and even junior high school. If I had not been legally blind, I still would have had to deal with other aspects of my identity, being Puerto Rican in a system that was at worst hostile, at best apathetic.
James Francisco Bonilla:And I would also still have to deal with a mother who suffered from pretty severe mental illness. The fact that those identities intersected like that, yeah, it's an interesting question. I don't know what the answer.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:It's so interesting what you said just now that I'm gonna call your, being legally blind your special identity. You know, that being made special in that way got you services that you should have had anyway, but maybe weren't available because of the racism in the system. So it's just an interesting intersection how, the one hand, being a victim of ableism, but on another hand, the response to the disability in some ways counteracted the systemic effect of the racism, which is, you know, I hadn't really thought about that as I was reading your book, but it's very interesting to hear you, reflect on that now.
James Francisco Bonilla:If I had been going to school a few years earlier, as as the 1960s, New York City public schools had no legal obligation to provide any special services for disabled people. And there was a young woman named Judy Heumann who was in a wheelchair and Judy brought a lawsuit and she ended up becoming one of the faces of the disability rights movement. I'm gonna make a plug for a movie called Trip Camp, which is about a camp that I had ended up attending where Judy helped organize a lot of young disability activists who then moved to California and then were instrumental in passing disability rights. But if I would have come along just a few years earlier, I don't think I would have gotten that additional attention and it could have been much worse.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:Jim, in addition to your identities intersecting or kind of influencing each other, I just wanna highlight the systems were too. The systems of racism, the disability oppression, classism, we're all a part of that conversation because sometimes in my experience people think of intersectionality as a frame or a lens on identity. For me, it's about the systems and how they interplay. And then when we think about social justice, how do we need to enact change by not just working, for example, for racial justice, but to understand how disability oppression may be part of the strategies that we're using because we think we're doing good work around race, but maybe excluding people because we're not attending to how our efforts may not be friendly, not be welcoming, accommodating for folks with disabilities or folks who are queer or women. But the idea of place is a large part of your book, and place could be community, physical space, historical space.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:If we're willing to, I want to pivot to that, how place influences people throughout their lives. And you talk about your mother and understanding her mental illness as being perhaps part of her early experiences with her place, you know, being separated from her mother because her mother was sick and observing her mother actually pass away. A theme for me that runs throughout the book is your connection to place and particularly to nature and how nature is really a saving space for you.
James Francisco Bonilla:Yes. I mean, I grew up in the city, so the access to nature was not something that I routinely had. The experience I had as a messenger about going to Paley Park in Manhattan, It's the site of an old building. It was actually an old infamous gambling establishment. And the guy out of guilt donated the building.
James Francisco Bonilla:They tore it down, but they kept the back wall and they planted a whole set of trees. And in the back wall, they did a waterfall. And as you're walking down the street, I think it's 53rd, you step into this place and the sounds of the cities drop away and all you hear are the birds in the trees and the waterfall. I was a blind messenger, there's a chapter in the book where I laugh about that, but I would go there for my break or waiting for them to tell me where I was gonna go next. There was a little cafe, you could eat coffee, and there was something incredibly calming about that experience that I just didn't find anywhere else until I went to Camp Lighthouse and at Camp Lighthouse, which was on the Jersey Shore, I started having these very intimate experiences.
James Francisco Bonilla:I would do like, I think my second or third night as a camper, I illegally or violating all the rules went for a night hike at midnight and went for a swim. And you had to walk across a boardwalk to get to the bay where you could swim. And of course the boardwalk was over a marsh. And at night, a marsh is like one of the most alive things you can experience. It just became a proving ground for my fine tuning my senses to nature.
James Francisco Bonilla:And at different points, and I would say in different crises in my life, I felt like nature came to me and said, Hang on there, young sir. It was the equivalent of therapy. At the time, there was certainly not something that was available for low income communities. But nature became a balm, a healing source for me. As I started towards retirement, I've increasingly been interested in getting more young people of color in nature.
James Francisco Bonilla:You know, I had spent a big part of my career as an academic looking at systems that discriminated based on race or gender. And I became, Bailey Jackson, who is one of my role models, I would use his model and work with lots of colleges and universities and nonprofits to explore how it was that their systems unintentionally sometimes excluded women and people of color. And so I became sort of a systems person. And towards the end of my career, I was thinking, I've never really talked very much about the personal aspects.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:I think that's very important that the personal narrative, particularly, as you said, people connect to the narrative and learn from it sometimes in ways that maybe more theoretical or abstract discussions are not as effective. As you were speaking about it in this moment, we're having this conversation, You know, where there's so much, what we might call anti DEI, you know, anti diversity, anti equity, anti inclusion rhetoric coming from the highest places. It seems to me your book provides an antidote in a way to that through the narrative, through the personal narrative. Because it makes clear, you know, the wide range of experiences and the intersection as, both you and Charmaine have pointed out. You know, your personal narrative intersects with systemic barriers, repeatedly.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:And there are allies in the story, people who take action to help you in ways that are really important. Think of your advisor who says, you should go to London, and sends you there and says, you know, don't worry about what other people say. I'm in charge. You know, I can make it happen. You know, I mean, there there are lots of examples of people who opened doors and who were advocates or allies in the face of these systemic barriers.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:I think it speaks to the power of the individual, as well as the importance of acknowledging the power of systems.
James Francisco Bonilla:You know, one of the things at UMass Amherst, Laura Rauscher and I pioneered the first Disability Oppression Weekend. And one of the interesting things that she and I talked about was the fact that people who would often be resistant to acknowledging racism or sexism or heterosexism just couldn't relate to those identities and they would never see themselves in that place. But as we know, most of us eventually become disabled, maybe temporarily, but as we get older, sometimes permanently. And I felt like, we're living in times where people are resistant to this material. How do I reach them?
James Francisco Bonilla:I was in a writers group that were not social justice people at all. They were just other writers who were writing memoirs. And I noticed that there was ways in which I was able to reach them, talking about the disability experience, that if I had come at them at first about, you know, Latino ness or being working, you know, they would have recoiled. And Laura Raschu's now passed, God bless her. We talked about there's a potential here in connecting disability work to these other issues that I think has real significance, particularly in the times we're living in.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:It reminds me, Jim, too, of our own, you know, for those of us who work in social justice or those of us who may be considering working in social justice across generations or whenever people choose to enter this work, is particularly, I find, in times of stress or either perception of the reality of shrinking resources, that we cling to this idea of hierarchy of oppressions. We have to deal with race first, for example. I encounter that a lot when I talk about intersectionality for people of colour. They'll say, This is all great, but just so you know,
James Francisco Bonilla:race is at the top
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:of the list. Or someone will say, Class is at the top of the list. And I think what your book does wonderfully is interweaving, it reflects that interweaving of experiences and connections to oppression and connection to attending to all of them in social justice. Sometimes it's possible for certain, I want to say identities, I use the word social location to emphasize the power, to be foregrounded. And so in your book, sometimes disability is foregrounded throughout and yet there are times that race takes a more significant part of the narrative.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:And I just want to affirm the power of using narrative to teach. Throughout the book, you interweave your story with other resources and other experiences. Was that an intentional choice? So it highlights your story throughout, and yet you connect it to larger frames of knowledge. As Bev was saying, these are unprecedented times, and at the same time we've been here before in some way, shape or form.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:How do we work as communities as social justice educators? And also, how can we use personal stories to connect to larger systems and larger change?
James Francisco Bonilla:The question of hierarchy of oppression has always been interesting to me. There's a joke in Puerto Rico that when we assemble a firing squad, we do it in a circle. And how that plays out in larger political dramas is it weakens us. And I've been just increasingly aware of growing up as a light skinned Puerto Rican kid. There was sometimes, and now somebody who didn't speak very good Spanish, there was always a sense, well, you're not really Puerto Rican enough.
James Francisco Bonilla:So that would make me feel isolated. Similarly, because I was legally blind, but not totally blind, people, well, you're not really, really blind. And I was reading, there's a wonderful book called The Country of the Blind, wonderful book. And he talks about his experience going blind and he goes to these different organizational conferences. And what he notices is even in the blind community, there's a hierarchy so that if you're blind and also developmentally disabled, they didn't really wanna interact with the developmentally disabled.
James Francisco Bonilla:This notion of hierarchy of oppressions really works to weaken our ability. And this is where my community organizing life comes back. We're as strong as we are together. You know, you can snap a pencil in half pretty easily, but when you get a group of 10 pencils, see if they can snap those if they're tight. That's been a little bit of the learning curve for me.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:Jim, I want to share with you that one of my favorite sentences in your book comes toward the end when you are describing, the experience of surfing, body surfing, And, you know, being tossed by the waves and all of that. And then you say, you know, one of the things that you've learned from that experience, that it's possible to navigate choppy waters and still experience hope, joy, and ultimately peace. I will take this minute to do a personal plug. My latest book is called Peril and College Leadership in Turbulent Times. There's a lot of turbulence in the higher education atmosphere ecosystem right now.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:But at the end of my book, there's a chapter called Reasons for Joy. And in it, I talk about the ways in which people find joy and a sense of purpose and possibility even within all the turbulence in the higher education ecosphere. You know, you're speaking personally, but it spoke to me in the context of having just written that book and thinking about all the turbulence in higher education. To think about being able to navigate choppy waters and still experience hope, joy, and ultimately peace.
James Francisco Bonilla:That chapter ended up touching some people, again, who were not at all connected to any of the issues of social justice, but they could relate to this question of, even in turbulent times, we not only can find hope, we have to find hope. Because without that, then we're really lost. And coming back to this issue of nature, for me, not only was it a healing place, but it was a place where I found hope and joy and awe. And I think, again, we need awe as part of our strategies for going through these really difficult times.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:You know, as Bev was talking of the idea of joy, reminded me in my bookcase, luckily is right here, of our colleague Diane Goodman, who wrote a second edition of her book Promoting Diversity and Social Justice. And she interviewed a number of people, and Jim, you may have
James Francisco Bonilla:been one of them,
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:I know I was, because she did a chapter called The Joy of Unlearning Privilege and Oppression. And she said, as I recall, you know, we think about this as just heavy work. And she wanted to use humor and she wanted to say, we can be joyful as we go forward. So I want to appreciate Bev and also Jim, your book there are sections where you talk about joy and happiness and fulfillment. One thing I want to Jim, if you had any last comments on the idea that the work is always ongoing.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:What I've been really trying to emphasize when I talk to intergenerational folks, younger folks, is saying oftentimes I feel our goal is to say, I have arrived. I know everything, so I don't have to know anything more. If nothing else, working with younger people has taught me I have so much more to learn. I don't care how long I've done this work because for me, the issues are always evolving. I talked about doing homophobia in women's sports back in the 1980s with Pat Griffin, who is still in our community, and then we were talking about trans athletes.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:Now I would imagine if we did that work today, we would be talking about that. And as you were talking about, technology has changed, the nature of disability and our understanding of that has changed. Do you have any comments for people listening about the work is ongoing and therefore our work has to be ongoing?
James Francisco Bonilla:You know, one of the questions I wanted to pose to you folks while I had you was, what kind of advice do we give to this next generation of social justice advocates and activists that, you know, who are facing really tough road? You said something, Charmaine, about know your history, that we've been in tough places before. It's not that it makes this moment in history any less difficult, but it gives it a context. It's not as hopeless. The other thing, and this sounds a little zen, but maybe it is.
James Francisco Bonilla:I think one of the things that I've learned as I've gotten older is about practicing gratitude. That oftentimes when we're sort of fighting the fight, gratitude is the furthest thing from our mind. So I think practicing joy, spending time in nature, and practicing gratitude really, I think, sustain the spirit that we need in order to continue to do this work. But I'm also intrigued and wondering about what your advice would be to the next generation of activists who are maybe listening to this and wondering, those old people, what do they know?
Beverly Daniel Tatum:Well, Jim, I'll start by saying this, that when people ask me, as they often do, sort of what gives you hope, particularly in this moment, I often turn to history and say, you know, I like to quote Doctor. Martin Luther King in his last book, Where Do We Go from Chaos or Community? And even though that book was written in 1968, you know, it reads like it was written today. And certainly we stand on the precipice of that question of chaos or community. One of the things he says in that book is that after every period of progress, social progress, after every he uses the term after every period of racial progress.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:But if we broaden it to say after every period of social justice progress, there's pushback against that progress. And we are feeling a lot of pushback right now. But to me, the fact that we are feeling so much pushback is evidence of a lot of progress. That if we understand that, you know, there's periods of progress and then there's pushback against it, Inevitably, there is progress again. So the question for us today is just how long will the pushback last?
Beverly Daniel Tatum:As we're speaking, there's a hurricane in The Caribbean. The winds are strong, and yet they subside and people rebuild. And that is our challenge, I think. I also like to say, in the much that you have said, you know, about practicing gratitude, there is a wonderful quote that I use in my book that I came across reading a modern interpretation of the rule of Saint Benedict. Okay, so Saint Benedict was a sixth century monk, you know, founded the Benedictine order and wrote something called The Rule of Saint Benedict.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:And it has been, interpreted in modern language in a small book called Always We Begin Again. And in that book, the paraphrasing of Saint Benedict is this statement that life will always present matters for concern. There's always something to be concerned about, always something to worry about. But each day, however, brings with it reasons for joy. And that for me has become my practice of what's my reason for joy today.
Beverly Daniel Tatum:And so certainly on my list today will be this opportunity to have had conversation with you and Jermaine.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:I think for me, Jim, in the last, I'd say even decade, what has brought joy to me is intergenerational work. I oftentimes will do conference sessions now with people who are thirty to 35 younger than I am. And when I first started working with them, particularly in the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity called NCORE, we were on planning groups together and we didn't like each other. And part of it was I thought, we were working on teams for intersectionality, I thought they don't know what I know. And they thought of me as someone who is just old and irrelevant.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:And over the course of a couple of years, we came to like each other and I could take their advice and their knowledge and make room for that. I had to do my own personal work so I was able to do that. And they take what I have to offer as a gift. So I feel like trying to find ways to find and accept gifts in places we maybe hadn't been looking before and finding joy in that. And the last story I'll tell is of a young person.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:I was once in a community I lived in New York, there was a weekly gathering around Black Lives Matter and we'd stand there with our signs and it was cold and wet and I didn't really want to be there. And there was a young person there dancing in the streets with her sign. And I thought that's what I need to figure out how to do every day, is to find joy and to just dance in whatever way that looks for people. So because if we're not doing this with gratitude and enjoy and learn to do it in a spirit of fun and community, then I feel personally for myself, I will surely just give up or not be open to thankfulness and gratitude because I'm so resentful. So I think for me, finding joy as people have been talking, finding fun in the work, which could be very difficult now, but for me what has been transformative is working with folks I never would have thought I would have worked with in terms of generation.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:It gives me a chance to impart history because sometimes young people will say, I'm so interested in Black identity development and I mentioned Bill Cross and Bailey Jackson and they don't know who they are. If you can imagine that because knowledge changes. So I'll say, I'm going tell you who they are and now you tell me your interpretation of their work now. Working in the multiracial community, I tell people you need to know the history of race in this country to understand where you may experience resistance. So there's a difference between knowing history and being constrained by history.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:So it is this back and forth interplay. Jeremy, I
James Francisco Bonilla:thought you were working on a book. Am I imagining that?
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:Working on, it's a work in progress. It is more conceptual at this point. As many of us have stated, we're older, I'm in my late 60s. And as you know, book projects can stem two or three years. But I do have a book in development, particularly around race at the intersections of other forms of oppression.
Charmaine Wijeyesinghe:It may be a kind of second carryover from my last book was The Complexities of Race, Identity, Power and Justice in America with NYU Press. I am pursuing that publisher. And the question is, do we have enough time and energy for another look at intersectionality and race? So, but thank you for offering me a chance to encourage me to perhaps go forward with that. Thank you.
James Francisco Bonilla:Good, you're welcome. Well, thank you and I want to thank the University of Minnesota Press for putting together this podcast. And, I look forward to catching up with both of you at some point in the not too distant future. This
Narrator:has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book, An Eye for Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness by Jim Bonilla is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.