Erasing Events and Acknowledgements

 A shorter post today and a bit earlier as I have had a busy week of events, workshops, and talks and I need to take some time this weekend to rest and work on some article writing. I was going to go to the International Women's Day (IWD) march tomorrow, but my bodymind needs a bit more rest after the busy week I've had. 

But the fact that we are almost at IWD had me thinking this week about those digital calendar providers that I will not name here who made the ridiculous decision a few weeks ago to delete events like Pride and Black History Month. It made me think for some reason of that song from Band Aid in 1984, "Do They Know It's Christmas Time" to raise money for Ethiopian famine. That song was something that always fascinated me in retrospect, because when it came out originally I was a tad too young to be able to do a deep critical analysis of the lyrics.

But now over 40 years later I can honestly say, what in the actual was going on with that song? I mean sarcastic interpretations aside. So it really had me thinking about this idea of acknowledging events, and also how we do this acknowledgement or erasure work in practice in our educational spaces. 

A lot of the discourse has been focusing on how by erasing events like Pride or Black History Month on digital calendars that some how it will do the work of erasing awareness of the need for these celebratory events being acknowledged. And I mean that kind of reads like an argument for not remembering your friend's birthday because you didn't go on Facebook. It is not a digital calendar that will make an event be acknowledged, celebrated, cared for, and shared. 

It is the kind of things we do in our spaces that will keep these celebrations and acknowledgements alive. Not just on the days, weeks, or months that they happen, but throughout the year. I had a conversation today with a former colleague about National Accessibility Awareness Week (NAAW) (you are never going to get me to spell that with that stylized Ability thing they do) and Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). We were talking about for one week or one day a year it seems like we are supposed to think that people should care about accessibility, when in fact it is all the big and small decisions we do each day in our designs, our language choices, our event planning (like associations making people pay a higher fee because they can't get themselves organized to send out a draft schedule, or promoting great talks only to use very outdated non-accessible technology without captions to share it online) that makes things like NAAW and GAAD necessary.

If we had a more holistic and equitable approach to education, the erasing of Pride on a calendar would be seen as what it really is, a feeble attempt at trying to suppress even having words related to Pride in circulation. But here's the thing, if this year has taught us anything so far, it's exactly that we don't need words in hypercirculation right now, we need grassroots, and microcommunity actions that support what those words stand for. 

So you see as always it is not about just words, which have real meaning yes, but it's rather about how our pedagogy, curriculum, and community work support what those words mean. We are so far beyond words with empty actions right now and the best way to counter the erasure of these events on a calendar is to: 1. continue calling out the empty promises to action that you see, 2. continue to celebrate these events like Pride, IWD, Black History Month within your communities, and  3. continue to keep these words and ideas in currency in our educational spaces along with real action to support what these events are about.