11-24-08 words

it started last week at your service. a friend of yours stood up during the quaker style part at the end and referred to you as an activist. i'd never heard anyone use that language with you before.
he quoted johnny cash, his explanation for why he chose to dress in black (" " )
to be looking out for the little guy. your friend saw you this way.
my ex called you a language activist. that makes sense. you broke things down into tiny pieces, seeing the connections on all levels.
today i look through your books in your office and there is almost a whole shelf on black english/ ebonics/ education issues for african american students.
it occurs to me how much you always made a point of standing up for black english and how it was a legitamate dialect, with its own rules and that it wasnt that people were speaking 'incorrect english' as was often said but that the world was the one with the problem of not recognizing it because it wasn't academic english. how did you get interested in this? it has nothing to do with you or anyone you ever knew too closely, i think. but you learned from your students, friends of mine, friends of friends. you were interested in the ways people spoke , even the ones who dont' get a real voice in this country. i feel so proud of you, to know you, to come from you. i take a book about gender and grammar. i see on your shelves my book from my woman studies class. you were a strong feminist, didn't ever skip a beat with my queer and later trans identities. you were interestted in the way inner city kids talked and took that as seriously as any of the books you had to read for your dissertation. eric wants to keep some of your membership things going---planned parenthood, the southern poverry law project. you were into buying from catalogs that donated money to social change or envirnonmental organizations. i feel like looking out for others/ hte larger good was jus so muc of what you did, never ever witht the intention of getting any praise or even ackowlgenment .
they say of you at the service how you were driven to make things btter everyerehw you went. sometimes this played out as perfectionismn or criticsism of others ways of doing things, but mostly it played out in you serving others and i feel really proud that you were the person i called mom.