On teaching, organizing, and the spaces between
By John Proctor
Many of you already know this, but for those of you who don’t: I HAVE A NEW JOB!!! After 15 years, I’m leaving Manhattanville College. As of September 7, I’m now the Communications & Digital Organizing Manager at Freedom Agenda, an initiative of the Urban Justice Center focused on decarcerating Rikers Island and helping create a post-Rikers New York City.
When I tell people now that I'm a community organizer and activist who spent his last 15 years as a college professor, it makes me sound much more self-assured than I've ever been. I never meant to become a college professor, and in fact I wasn't one in my first few years at Manhattanville - even when I went full time after the first year it was as “teaching staff,” a designation created for teachers of first-year writing so the English Department faculty wouldn’t have to do it. Our department head, an ABD (all but dissertation) almost-graduate at NYU, told us all that despite our titles we were faculty, and he fought for years to make the college recognize us as such. My students had called me Professor since I started there, and I felt like I was holding this dark secret, lying about my rank and place at the college. That department head never lived to see his and our lie become the truth, as he took his own life the summer of 2016. Just months after his death, the college made every one of the “teaching staff,” myself included, full time non-tenure track faculty members. I immediately had cards made for myself, and would rub the lettering of the word “FACULTY” with my thumb, savoring those block letters and the personal shame they erased.
More important to me though, were the few months immediately before the death of our department head. One day that spring, he invited me into his office and told me that he was brokering a partnership between our college and Sullivan Correctional Facility through Hudson Link, an organization that matches colleges and correctional facilities to offer degree programs to people inside. My department head told me he knew I wanted to teach people other than first-year college students, and he also remembered me telling him over beers that my father had been incarcerated. He thought I would be a perfect fit to teach inside. That partnership fell apart after his death, but I found my way onto Rikers Island and began a writing workshop for older men that became the seed of Re/Creation.
But I’m falling into the standard narrative I’ve developed for telling my story, which I’ve honed over years now so much that it feels like I was destined to be exactly where I am now. I want to focus for just a bit on the incongruencies.
Like, in my high school my rank was 347th out of a class of 637. At 17 years old, despite testing well in most subjects and being placed regularly in AP courses, I never felt like school was a place for learning, at least for someone like me. When I graduated, I thought of my primary two options as 1) joining the Marines, which I did a month after graduating before skipping boot camp, and 2) starting a long life of factory work at Packer Plastics, which I did in my second month out of high school. My third month out of high school, my cousin Monica convinced me of a third option, 3) going to Highland Community College, where she’d gone and I could continue running track and maybe take a class or two.
Or like middle school, when one teacher, Clenece Hills, surprised me by saying I was a good student despite all evidence I gave her to the contrary. She cast me in small roles in the school plays she directed, and she and her husband drove me home and sometimes even fed me dinner. She is still one of my closest friends and my strongest advocate more than thirty years later, and I still have no idea what she saw in me then.
Or elementary school, which was actually seven schools for me as my family moved from rental to rental. Or when I was a toddler and I told my mom I was going by my middle name John because the father I wouldn’t even remember by grade school made a dumb rhyme out of my first name before he left the state so he could start fresh without having to tell employers he was a convicted felon.
And maybe that’s the sense I’m drawing here. All these incongruencies in my life, these fractures in my story, have come to be the story itself. Like so many children who’ve lost parents to our modern American carceral apparatus, I exist as an adult in cobbled-together fragments. I recognize fellow fragmented souls, but I also recognize that I’m really, really lucky. My father got a fresh start, and by the time we rediscovered each other I didn’t even remember the man he’d been before our reunion.
We are only recently awakening to the horrors our national addiction to incarceration has wrought, fracturing families, making everyone who has been touched by it a little less whole. Many, maybe even most, of us are so fractured we don’t see ourselves as part of anything worthwhile. This is a wrong turn we’ve taken as a social body, separating our limbs and our organs from each other and then isolating and punishing them when they don’t function. This never makes a body whole again, it just fractures it further.
To me, this is what community organizing is: collecting the organs of our social body and getting them to work cohesively again. This will always mean conflict with oppressive systems that set themselves up in non-functional social bodies to keep them functional enough to leech the vitality and energy of the people they oppress. It will also entail internal struggle as incongruous limbs and organs learn to live together again as one body. But I believe, to my agnostic soul, that the amorphous, asymmetrical social body these ill-fitted parts make will be the most beautiful and unexpected thing we’ve ever created, specifically because we’ve gotten these damaged, seemingly non-functional parts to fit and work together.
Close Rikers Coalition Rally, 10/12/21
John Proctor is a writer, educator, activist, and founder of Re/Creation. He is also Communications & Digital Organizing Manager at Freedom Agenda, an initiative of the Urban Justice Center focused on decarcerating Rikers Island and helping create a post-Rikers New York City.