What if the river is poisoned?

In the day to day scramble to prepare the next lesson, teach, grade, attend meetings, call parents, and tutor, I easily sleep into the easiest mode I can find and forget that I am in this because I want to be more than a teacher. I want to be an advocate, a mentor, a listener, an activist for justice for the community I work in.  

I need my community from grad school to help me. But with all of us teaching around the Bay Area, it's hard to stay in touch.  So I was grateful that a few Fridays ago, even after a long week, a professor an activist whose work I admire, spoke at Mission High.  Bree Picower spoke to my cohort a few times and her words helped me find my footing as a white, privileged woman desiring to work with urban youth.  

She showed a video that had a quote that I've been mulling over since. It captures the work I want to do. But it's in connection with a proverb that many are familiar with and thus perhaps makes the purpose of my work more easily understood by those unfamiliar with the hard, long work of justice in communities without power and privilege.  Here it is: 

"There's an old proverb that says it's better to teach someone to fish, than to give them a fish. But what if they [those with power] sell the river? Or what if the river is poisoned? And what good is it to know how to fish if the owner of the river doesn't let us fish."  

The struggle for equity is real. The struggle for justice is real.  It's not about handouts, it's not about sharing the knowledge that I have that helped me succeed in my small world.  There's a struggle for access that handouts and knowledge of fractions and decimals won't solve.