I have had Lynell George's book After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame, sitting on my coffee table since I read it this summer and we moved to our new house in South LA.
It's a perfect coffee table book. It's pages contain gorgeous images of our city, but the essays also draw you in, make you ignore dinner party guests around you and demand that you enter their world. Then, upon looking up, these words help start a conversation about gentrification or displacement or neighborhood politics.
That is what this book did for me as I packed up our condo of 12 years and made a move from one LA neighborhood to another.
George’s writing illuminates Los Angeles in many of the complex ways I have come to love and hate this city. It is about the beauty you have to look inside cracks and through buildings to see. It is about the change in this city that comes from power and money and in the name of development and not from the people, the community, the history of this place.
Last year Colson Whitehead’s quote, “Be kind to everyone, make art, and fight the power” helped me through the year. This year the quote ringing in my ears is from Lynell George:
“How do you protect not just a neighborhood’s unique character, but the people and their imprint, their story, and their struggle. [...] How do you want to contribute to the story of the city? How do you want to influence and shape history?”
As much as moving and this book got me thinking about the history of our city, I couldn't help think about how much of LA's history is tied up in our schools. Los Angeles public schools are some of the only structures that have managed to hold their ground, to refuse to be uprooted and demand the city evolve around them. I teach with teachers who attended my school. I teach kids whose parents went there. And my school, which opened in 1939, isn't even close to one of the oldest public schools in our city.
But as the teachers of LA ready for a strike, as our public schools endure yet another attack from privatizers, these historical spaces are at risk. Holding onto our communities is about our homes and our streets and our schools. The work educators and public education advocates are doing to save schools that have struggled to serve our neediest students shows their willingness to shape and influence LA's story.
As we head into the new year, I urge my Angeleno neighbors to read After/Image. Ask yourself some of its hard questions, and then stand with our schools, our city and all of its people this winter.
The story of our schools and our city waits to be told. What will we say?
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