Lane Center board member and long-time USF adjunct instructor, Rebecca Gordon is a knitter and a weaver. Using needles and looms and spindles, she creates forms out of fiber that go on to warm a neck or decorate a space. Yet Rebecca’s talents for weaving and knitting and spinning are not confined to the textile arts. She also applies these skills to all aspects of her life. For her students, Rebecca weaves ideas and action into a whole piece, transforming philosophy and theology from intellectual exercises into acts of service. In her labor organizing and community activism, she knits together diverse coalitions to bring about change for the common good. In her research and scholarship, she spins stories to include unheard voices and design new patterns of thought that challenge our assumptions and point us to a generative way of thinking. While rooted in the Mission District of San Francisco for
decades, Rebecca also takes her talents on the road—from Nicaragua to Nevada—advancing the cause of peace and nonviolent resistance. All along, Rebecca never loses hope.
In a recent conversation with Kimberly Rae Connor, former faculty chair for Mission Integration at the Lane Center, Rebecca described how she sustains and shares her belief in a hope-filled future, despite the daunting challenges she sees young people facing. She laments the “frightening world they are walking into” but aims to prepare them. Living in the Mission neighborhood for so long, Rebecca has witnessed vivid changes there that signal a disturbing drift away from a multicultural and working class community that welcomed diversity and cooperated to build thriving conditions to one that has been overrun by a wealthy tech class that has displaced families and the businesses, places of worship, and organizations they created.
For inspiration to not surrender to despair and to put her own privilege in context, Rebecca recalls her friend Cali’s encounter with a young woman in the war zones of Nicaragua where Rebecca lived for six months working with Witness for Peace to report on the effects of U.S. involvement. “My friend was feeling really depressed. There had been a horrible counterattack, and a bunch of kids were killed nearby. A young girl in the family that she was living with said to Cali, ‘Hey, come on, we’re going to go to a party down the street.’ And Cali was like, ‘I don’t want to go to a party,’ and the young girl asked, ‘Why not?’ When Cali said that she was depressed about the attack and murders, the young girl looked at her and said, ‘Look, you can afford to be depressed because you’re going to go home to the United States one day. We have to stay here and live and fight, and that’s why we have parties. So put on your dancing shoes, because we’re going to a party!’ ” Even in the worst context of war, that, Rebecca observed, “is practicing hope.”
Rebecca explains what she means by practicing hope by identifying the common thread that holds her life together: her Chrisitan faith. The fact that she came to her faith and the study of theology after years of activism illustrates well the importance of persistence in sustaining hope. Just as she continues to scout and collect a variety of fibers to blend into her creations, so too does Rebecca continue to find new sources of meaning and new reasons to hope. From one of her teachers at the Graduate Theological Union, Rebecca discerned that in the Eucharist we come to recognize the community that forms the body of Christ. Hope, she explained, has its origins in the three graces derived from the Apostle Paul: faith, hope, and love–each of which cannot be accomplished alone. To this trinity of gifts of the Spirit, she adds freedom because she sees her work as helping to create the conditions of freedom that allow the graces to thrive. “Hope,” she insists, “is a revolutionary virtue” that we achieve by “practice.” Virtue doesn’t exist outside of human action so it is incumbent upon us to “create and practice hope. We achieve hope through practice, through habit.” Her life of activism across the world and at home that she “feels privileged to do—all of those things are the practices that form the virtue of hope in me.”
Speaking more directly to current events, Rebecca observes evidence of hope in the Palestinian people, how even in the midst of Israeli bombardment and living with scarce resources they continue to plant and tend gardens, offering actual and spiritual nourishment.
Many are also observing a Ramadan fast, putting their faith in God and the possibility of a self-determined future. “Talk about hope, right? I believe that hope is a virtue that we have to create in ourselves, and if we’re lucky we get it as a spiritual gift, too. And who’s to say that my believing this isn’t really actually a spiritual gift?” Turning to her work as a teacher, Rebecca again invokes the conviction that education “creates the freedom for people to live virtuous lives; education has the possibility of giving people the freedom to become full human beings, to have ordinary lives, to be able to live without struggling every moment just to breathe; to live a flourishing life in which they are able to contribute to the larger community in a meaningful way; to have meaningful work and make decisions about their own lives; to demonstrate to the world their humanity. Ordinary life. That’s the whole point of revolution.”
While the image of faithful Palestinians inspires Rebecca, she says she’s not a romantic about oppression. She sees that behind it is the reality of a harder struggle—to sustain hope while taking on the oppressive systemic structures that limit people’s opportunity to experience freedom and exercise the virtue of hope. That’s where teaching and scholarship and activism unite. She encourages her students to take an informed perspective to their actions in the world, describing education as a “prerequisite for democracy.” She observes, too, that this approach is not unique to her. “I see it in all the teachers I know, all the people that I talk to who are engaged in some way in education with young people.” Their commitment inspires her because it’s not for “the money or the power; people do it because they believe in education.”
Even when efforts fail, Rebecca insists that out of loss, hope can emerge as roles change. “There was a time when my leadership as an organizer was really important, and I was kind of the kitchen cabinet for some of the upstart groups.” While some of the movements she led over the years—feminisim, racial equality, and gay rights—became “stuck,” she also understands that lasting change comes when it is led by those most directly affected by injustice and that she still has a role to play in advocacy and allyship. She cites the example of her participation in a grassroots effort to get out the vote against Proposition 209 (which prohibited affirmative action efforts in all levels of government in California). “We lost. At the height of the campaign, we had 11 offices and 45 employees who were working on this massive effort to defeat the proposition. But out of that came an organization—Californians for Justice—that continues to exist to this day. My partner, Jan, and I, as founders, have kind of receded way into the mists of history, which is what we always wanted. Today the organization is led by people of color, and for the last 20 years their primary focus has been on racial equity and public education.”
Out of this effort, many of the young people involved have gone on to activism and advocacy for other social justice concerns. At a recent informal reunion, Rebecca was “honored” to learn of their good work and gratified that “they all wanted to tell Jan and me how much they thought they had learned from becoming organizers in the context of Californians for Justice, and how it had shaped their lives.” Rebecca remarked on this legacy of loaves and fishes by quoting Bernice Johnson Reagon, who like Rebecca is a model for how to blend roles, talents, and energy to inspire change. A member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights Movement, founder of the musical group Sweet Honey in the Rock, author, composer, educator, and Smithsonian curator, Reagon observed that “if whatever you’re working on would die if you left, then you haven’t built anything at all.”
Rebecca and I concluded our conversation with another example of how beauty inspires resistance to oppression and offers evidence of a hope-filled future, this time drawn for her labor in textile arts. She recalled how when her academic book on U.S.-sponsored torture came out and she was touring to bring the issue to people’s attention, she received overwhelming support from a vast social network of fiber artists, “all these friends I had known but had never met. But there they were. There was this connection between my scholarly work and these textile artists, many of the committed to making valuable change in the world in whatever way they do it. One of my dear friends is part of this thing called ’shave ‘em to save ‘em,’ which preserves rare breeds of sheep by making sure that their fleece is available to spinners, saving lives of sheep that have been bred for over 400 years. These are the kinds of things that give me hope—people who are doing work that has a future, in spite of what we face today.”
What Rebecca has done and continues to do will live beyond her in the activists and in the students she has “had the privilege to teach, especially at the McCarthy Center, students who are part of USF’s public service and community engagement minor. They are amazing leaders who are carrying this thing into the future. Those kids, those young people are going to change the world. It’s the indwelling of the Spirit that helps to make resistance—enacting the virtue of hope—possible.”
