Love and Basketball (2018) - Documentary
Produced by: Pat Dickert and Adam Howard
No matter where or with whom, love liberates. This upcoming documentary introduces new possibilities for social justice through radically-democratic research collaboration with the men's basketball team at Colby College (Waterville, ME).
FOR MORE INFO on the research project: [ Ссылка ]
---------
Selections from documentary foreword, presented by Pat Dickert at the Globally Elite Symposium (4/13/18):
[...] I’d like to begin by introducing some of the underlying theory that our arguments are grounded in. We draw on the work of bell hooks, a radical feminist and social activist who focuses on the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination.
This is important because the topic we are exploring is one that many people feel uncomfortable discussing. This documentary argues that love and intimate relationships do not just promote, but are necessary in teaching for social justice. In the context of education, we can agree that there is a heavy stigma around the idea of intimacy, as it digs up certain fears about physical relationships between teacher and student.
[...] So, in order to think critically about this argument, we need to put a clearer definition on what love actually is. bell hooks challenges us to understand love less as a feeling and more as an action, one that she insists requires “mix[ing] various ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.” When we think about these certain “ingredients,” we quickly realize that they are all attributes found in good teaching. Defining love this way therefore reveals to us that to truly teach is to love.
However, the theory that bell hooks uses in her writing is based on her experiences teaching in working class contexts, where it’s obvious that there is something to gain from social justice efforts. Through this research, we students, privileged members of an elite institution, explore the more complex question of what social justice has to offer us. Let’s start here: bell hooks writes that at the heart of social justice is “liberation,” being able to think and act without being subject to forces of domination. By studying other elite schools around the world, we take the first step in liberation by identifying and being critical about those forces.
But, to study these things like we usually do is not enough to become liberated. This kind of learning means nothing to the way we think or act, unless we’re comfortable situating ourselves in the findings we discover. In this teaser, Bill Ayers tells us that “the problem with privilege is that it’s anesthetizing,” meaning that we clearly have the capacity to understand the problems with the world, but it’s our privilege that allows us to see these problems as irrelevant to our lives. While this might seem like an advantage, distancing ourselves to these realities is a limitation when we ask why we might not be happy. And it is not uncommon for us to chase after advantages, whether it be money, or popularity, or status, only to ask why we are still miserable, and have made others miserable, once we obtain them. Colby provides us more than enough to chase after these advantages, but clearly the answer to this question exists outside the lessons we traditionally learn from our teachers.
[...] This occurs though when we still have loveless teaching. [...] Education is meant to guide us in making decisions that shape our lives; to make the best ones for all of us, we need to do the uncomfortable work to understand truths, truths about what really is happening around us and truths about ourselves, what our values are and whether we are acting in accordance to them. If we cannot do this together with teachers that love us, we run the risk of just defaulting to the idea that “things just are the way they are, and have to be that way.” To do the latter is to feed into our contemporary crisis, which bell hooks asserts is “created by a lack of meaningful access to truth.”
Teaching for social justice does not mean telling the wealthy to give their advantages away. Rather it is for us commit to the ethic that comes with the act of loving. bell hooks writes that in a socially just world ”careers and making money remain important agendas, they never take precedence over valuing and nurturing human life and well-being.” To value “loyalty and a commitment to sustained bonds over material advancement” are lessons that we learn through loving relationships, like the ones we share with our family, or friends, or significant other.
So as we begin our viewing I propose the question that guides our documentary: if we are to really be committed to social justice, why would we not welcome opportunities to practice love as part our education?
