Ruskin’s first lecture has a pseudo-scientific feel, which continued to make me wonder while reading how literally Ruskin was taking his claims about the plague-wind and plague-clouds. His tone varied from persuasive to animated and I think the overall tone would have been more easily gaged in the piece’s intended lecture format. I enjoyed the progression of time subheadings as a literary device. I thought the passage of time displayed in this way allowed Ruskin to appropriately fragment his work and also added legitimacy to Ruskin’s story because the time was carefully measured and documented. More than Ruskin, Baldwin emphasized how his pieces fit into the historical record. It is an interesting question to think about what was gained or lost by the more subtle approach. In both of Baldwin’s pieces, he clearly outlines the problems and contradictions of African Americans in America and gives a call to action of people who are capable of making societal change. I thought Baldwin was able to articulately utilized the letter format such that the piece was both imaginable as a letter to its specified recipient, but also resonated deeply with a wide audience.

The feeling of intimacy in Ruskin’s open letter gives it a conversational quality- in writing his letter, Ruskin often notes what he sees or what is happening around him and makes connections to what he wants to say about society, which gives the impression of him telling an anecdote rather than giving an argument. However, as Lucy stated, the letter strangely feels more preachy than the lecture. The part about the guards in the park, where Ruskin attempts to preempt some of the questions he supposes he would receive from the reader, felt the most moralizing for me. Perhaps this is because in the lecture, Ruskin attempts to validate himself as an objective analyzer whereas in the letter, he includes his own indignation or derision towards other people. In the lecture, Ruskin gives examples of his positive descriptions of the weather to ensure his audience that he does not speak of the storm-clouds negatively because he is a negative person. However, in the letter, Ruskin’s own arguments, and sometimes his biases as an outsider, are quite visible and he does not attempt to mitigate this. On a non-critical note, the letter slightly felt like listening to my grandfather talk about politics.

Baldwin’s letter illustrates how hurtful systematic oppression could be for an individual in the voice of an uncle giving advice for his nephew, which makes his message feel more poignant. As Baldwin’s explanation of oppression is clear and concise, it could be easily digested by the “innocent” readers of The Progressive. As Baldwin states in the letter that “innocence constitutes the crime,” Baldwin letter serves to break down the naivete of Americans who are ignorant about, or choose to be ignorant about the oppression of African Americans.  As Baldwin in speaking to someone in his next generation, who is also his namesake, his message to his nephew James reads like a message for the future generation. While Baldwin’s open letter is about persevering and not yielding to the prejudices of the society, his lecture to teachers emphasizes their responsibility to change reality. The lecture points out that myths about American history and African Americans must be dismantled, and that education should not teach students to be obedient. It was interesting how what Baldwin says he would teach children is visible in his letter to his nephew, but the audience is not the children, but the teachers who should be making change.

Open Letter 

Dear teacher, 

I’ve gone back and forth in my head if it was worth writing this letter to you, if I should share my pain with you or just let it go. The problem is, though, I can’t just let it go. What I experienced in your senior year religion class will stick with me forever. 

When I walked into your Peace and Justice and the Catholic Church class on the first day of senior year, I was looking forward to it. I was excited to apply what I’ve learned about Catholic teaching to modern day politics, especially with the 2016  presidential election coming up that November. Even though I knew I would disagree with several of the Catholic Church’s views on social issues, I was prepared to be challenged and to listen to opinions different from my own. But what I heard I was not prepared for. 

I was not prepared to for the queer community to be talked about like we are a different species exisiting within and polluting the society that “people like you and me,” as you referred to you and your students as, live in. I was not prepared to hear you place the blame on the queer community for singlehandedly secularizing a once Christian society, for instilling corrupted values into the minds of today’s youth. I was certainly not prepared to hear you liken gay people to psychopaths, as we are born with a diseased mind and have sinful urges we need to control in order to preserve the safety of others. And also for the words “fag” and “dyke” joined with a slight chuckle to exit your mouth so freely when quoting something another homophobe said, as if you were just waiting for someone else to say it so you can too. At this point, I guess I was prepared for when you said, “Look, guys this is hard for me too: I have some friends who are gay, and they really are wonderful people, but this is what the Bible says.” I don’t think the word “fag” appears anywhere in the Bible, but if anyone should know it would be you, being the religion teacher.

I am not just like you, sir. I am queer and I am proud of it, despite the harmful rhetoric you tried so hard to get into my head. In a way, what you said only makes me prouder, as I have proved to myself that me and my diseased mind and secularizing powers can be happy polluting society, as you called it. But I hope to the God you swear by that not one more queer student of yours has to endure the hateful speech you project, becauase one queer kid is already far too many. 

A Guide to Queerness in your School 

Whether you like it or not, your school will have queer students, most likely more than a handul of them. There will be some who are loud and proud, while there will be others who are deeply closeted and scared of their own existence. No matter the type of queer student(s) you encounter, it is your responsibility to make sure they are cared for, supported, and able to exist in an environment where they can thrive. 

First, it is absolutely essential to include LGBTQ+ history school curriculum. Queer history is an important part of history of the last century. Students should learn about the LGBT revolution of the 1970s, the Stonewall riots, the AIDS crisis, and the marriage equality bill of 2015. All of these events can be and should be included in any contemporary history class. Additionally, the queerness of historical figures should be discussed within the class, instead of concealing it, since their queerness most likely had a large effect on their life and work. 

Secondly, schools should be a place where students can feel safe, protected, and cared for. Therefore, an explicit LGBTQ+ support system should be in place in every school. This can be a GSA (gay-straight alliance), a support group among a counselor and students, or one on one consueling options for any queer student seeking guidance. As a student may not have access to any support outside of school, administrations should be explicit in conveying that these types of programs are available to the students. This safe queer space also extends to spaces such as bathrooms, as every school should have at least one gender neutral bathroom for transgender and gender nonconforming students. Additionally, schools should encourage inclusive language, and discourage derogatory language and slurs. For example, teachers and administrators should promote the use of introducing oneself with their preferred pronouns. 

Process Notes: 

I had a bit of trouble navigating the tone of my open letter, but I chose to go the bitter, hurt, but firm route in order to express how much my experience affected me and how this behavior is absolutely unacceptable. I felt as though the open letter was a good way to tell my own experience and the lecture a way to express how I would’ve liked my own high school experience to have been like.

Letter:

Dear Ms. P,

I feel that I should apologize to you. You really were an excellent teacher who put a lot of work into her craft. You cared about us a whole lot more that your co-lecturer, a famous poet and man who received endless accolades for his teaching despite the fact that he generally disliked children and/or women. We, who were both students and women, loved him for his blatant apathy. We cheered when he ignored our presentations in class to write emails and then gave us C’s. That man really was proof of how much society f-ed up girls: they’ll love a bad boy, even when he’s their sixty-year-old, balding, goateed English teacher who is married to a man. That must have frustrated you.

See, the problem with you is that none of us ever lost the memory of the first day we met you. The problem was that you, petit and blonde, came teetering into the classroom like a baby giraffe. We looked at you. You should have known that we would know that walk. The walk of when you’ve suddenly added four extra inches to your legs, so your glutes look tight, but your quads burn with a thousand fires. You hobbled over to the desk like a runway model. You put down your folders. We could practically hear your toes cracking, contorted and smushed in that patent leather tomb. Could you smell the danger in the air? You were the antelope with the broken leg, still looking cute as death prowled, and we were the starved lion. We hadn’t had juicy, fresh, dripping gossip in weeks.

But the horror wasn’t over yet. Julia, over in the corner, gasped and nudged her neighbor. She pointed down at your feet. Slowly, with wide eyes, we subtly torqued, bending our torsos over our desks to look down. To you, it must have looked like we were bowing. And that’s when we saw it: that flash of blood red. Louboutin’s. You weren’t wearing heels, you were Louboutin’s.

My god, we judged you for that. We talked about your rich daddy that must have bought them for you. We wondered how many pairs you had. We called you tacky and trashy and tasteless. You didn’t deserve that, especially not from us, prep-school girls on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But, for this indiscretion, we withheld our respect for you indefinitely, you who were only a few years older than us, a professional young woman who was making her way in the world. I really hope Madeleine Albright never reads this.

You must wonder why I am apologizing to you now. It is certainly many years overdue. And I noticed that you stopped wearing those shoes. Our viciousness must have struck bone. But I understand now. I understand why you woke up that morning and made that decision. It wasn’t to please men or be a docile servant of the patriarchy. Well, maybe it still was but that wasn’t what you were thinking when you pulled those shoes on. When I’m nervous, all I want to be is taller and more imposing and more attractive and to fill up more space. When I’m nervous, I wish I were the sort of woman who can look men square in the eye and who can turn heads and who can be unapologetically loud. And there is a way to buy that ability: heels. And if you really need the confidence: red-bottomed heels.

Last year, I was asked to introduce a senior diplomat to a room full of 200 distinguished guests. That morning, when I woke up, I was Jell-O. But that’s not very feminist, so I had to pull it together. I put on some heels. When I walked up on that stage, I was 5’10”. My every step was accompanied by click, click, click like a ceremonial drum, safe and steady. I felt graceful and beautiful and calm. And I thought of you and how we robbed you of this moment on your first day of teaching. And, for that, I am very sorry.

Lecture:

The first recorded use of a woman wearing a high heel was Catherine de Medici in the 16^th century. She wore heels to her wedding because she was only about five feet tall, which wasn’t sufficient to her. This fact makes me laugh because it is so transcendent of time. I see a lady named Catherine, maybe an Instagram influencer or a pastry chef, who is getting married to Chad, an investment banker, next May in a little chapel in Tuscany, and she’s concerned that her wedding stilettos will get caught between the stones when she walks down the aisle.

After Catherine, men caught on to the notion that one need not be limited by biology when it comes to height. In fact, heels were almost exclusively worn by men for centuries and were seen as tools to make themselves more masculine and assertive. It wasn’t until the 20^th century – and the invention of a small piece of metal that allowed for a new breed of heel: the stiletto – that heels became gendered as women’s shoes.

And that moment of gendering is where the real problem starts. I illustrated the history of the high heel because it is important to know that heels were, first and foremost, meant to be a way to enhance your appearance, specifically in a way that makes you seem more powerful. Of course, there is an element of toxic vanity inherent in their conception – why couldn’t people just shift their perspective so that height didn’t matter when it came to authority? But height is tricky because it has a primal, biological function. The small, footed fish that first waddled onto land that exists in each and every one of us – it knows to be intimidated of something that is big. It also knows to feel safe when it is protected by the big thing. So, height is something we will always struggle to be non-judgmental about. Maybe, one day, we will escape that vanity. Until then, we have heels, which, I argue, are inherently an empowering and equitable tool.

Heels have been corrupted, however. Now, they are meant to be worn with black pencil skirts so that the sinews of one’s entire leg, tense and tight, can be seen by all who walk behind them. Now, they are a social expectation for a professional, working woman to wear every day to every meeting, despite the pinching and aching and blood-taut blisters. Now, they are the adorable ball-and-chains that keep a woman from dancing at a party and make her nervous that, god forbid, should she find herself needing to run away, she wouldn’t make it more than a few steps. We have taken something good, gendered it, and made it toxic.

But I am here on a mission to redeem heels. Firstly, we need to de-attach heels from gender. This is a movement that has already begun, and we should move full-steam ahead. Wouldn’t it be great if Michael Bloomberg could stop carrying a step-stool around the campaign trail and just buy a pair of Louboutin’s? I also believe that opening the world of heels to men would have a double benefit: there is no way men would allow themselves to be so uncomfortable regularly. I have to believe that money would flow into endeavors to find the world’s most cushy heel.

Secondly, we have to stop making heel-wearing an expectation. This is an argument you may have heard in regard to make-up – it’s only toxic if you make it so that people can’t choose not to wear it.

You may be asking: why undertake this project? Aren’t there other things that should be redeemed before we turn our focus to this? So, I invite you to pick up some heels – maybe start with kitten if you are a beginner – and find a long, smooth hallway. Just put them on and walk. Notice the sound, the echo, the way the world looks from a height that isn’t your own. Very rarely on this Earth do we get to change our physical perspective like that. Very rarely is there such an easy way to make us feel better about ourselves. Heels still have potential for human empowerment but, if, and only if, we choose to redeem them.

Working Notes:

I really tried to shift my tone when writing these pieces. I think I enjoyed the open letter a little more, because I felt it gave me a little more space to wax poetic and to do different things with tense and technique. It just felt like more of a creative endeavor to me. For the lecture, I tried to write it with the intention of it being spoken. I think that limited what I could do with technique but also meant I had to be more clear about the thoughts I was expressing. In sum, I wrote the open letter for me, if that makes sense, although I had an awareness that others would read it. For the lecture, I was very focused on what would be going on in other people’s heads when they heard or read it.

Response to Ruskin:

The open letter seems, to me, to be a vehicle to show personality while also expressing viewpoints, in a way that one couldn’t in an essay or lecture. That was certainly my impression of Ruskin’s letters, because in addition to his social critique, he included so many visual descriptions of what he was seeing, which cemented his identity as an art critic. There was something strange to me about Ruskin’s letters, however: I feel that open letters often provide an opportunity for the writer to seem a little less preachy because he or she is talking to friends and can be a little more casual. Ruskin, however, seemed much more preachy to me. The scene on p. 326 where he criticized a Venetian worker for thinking about costs, and not about other people, seemed ridiculous when Ruskin himself was a foreigner and not a manual laborer and therefore, could hardly understand this man’s situation. It did remind me a little of Agee, in that Ruskin was imposing himself on a situation he couldn’t really understand but still felt entitled to make commentary about.

Response to Baldwin:

Unlike Ruskin, I think Baldwin’s letter is so intimate that it does not come across as preachy at all. It is always strange for a child to hear about their parents as children and given the gravity of the experiences that Baldwin describes his brother experiencing, I imagine reading this letter would have been a very intense experience for his nephew – which also makes it even more poignant for other readers. I also found Baldwin’s lecture so compelling because he included specific lived experiences, like being told to use back doors or realizing his Park Ave is not like the Park Ave downtown. I think that using the example for the Third Reich in the 1960’s would really resonate with the teachers that he was addressing as it frames the seriousness of this issue in a way that any person at that time could understand.