I am Stringer Bell

As of tonight, I am officially in business school. Though my accounting and statistics classes from earlier in the week will be equally challenging and thought-provoking, at those meetings I still felt relatively normal. Tonight, I am Stringer Bell. For those not familiar with The Wire’s infamous character, this high end drug lord attends college economics classes by night, and by day explains the principle of elasticity in the marketplace to youth who sell his drugs. Like Stringer, I am a mole—gleaning knowledge from a foreign world to translate into a language spoken by my community. Oh, the distance.

The class I am in tonight is “Social Responsibility of Corporations,” and is one of a required two course series that teach “values management.” To start off the class, my teacher prompts us, “What is the purpose of a corporation?” After scribbling quietly in our notebooks for a few minutes, we watch a televised interview with a prominent businessman, and then our discussion begins. We return repeatedly to a few themes: serving stakeholders, producing profits, and corporate accountability. In light of the current economy, one student remarks, “Who wants to be accountable now, anyway?”

We talk about accountability. Is the corporation accountable, or its leaders? Why should the corporation be responsible for fixing social problems? What if it created those problems? My professor quips, “People who do the right thing are saints. The rest of us… are more or less human.” Our chat continues. In our discussion of poor management practices of a string of for-profit nursing homes, one student queries, ‘If the service is so bad, why don’t they just move?”

The insensitivity and ignorance in the room make my head spin. Did my professor actually just refer to every person in his examples with male pronouns? Does that really still happen? I lazily try to imagine the best intervention. Do I innocently ask him if all people participating in business are men? Do I make all of my remarks about women? Talk to him after class? Email him my complaints? What about all the students who don’t seem to mind the damage wreaked on our society and planet by reckless corporations? What do I do about that? I decide to wait. Survey my surroundings, assess the stakes, and identify any potential allies.

When class is over I check my phone and see that I have been invited to a concert. I weigh the pros and cons of going out after such a late class, though something propels me to go. Within twenty minutes I am at the Alberta Street Pub, seated between friends, surrounded by my community, and watching, listening, and singing along to the songs of Coyote Grace, a beloved queer band. Not knowing exactly what had driven me here tonight, I breath in the smells and sounds of this familiar place, and realize that this is what will keep me sane.