Unless they have huge fantasies about being the next P. Diddy or Michael Jordan, a lot of kids living in poverty today think their kids are going to be poor and their grandkids are going to be poor. Kids in the inner city lead blind and uneventful lives. They’re filled with all the rage and anger and nondevelopmental displays that go on in poor communities. People fight and scream and turn to sex at thirteen or fourteen because that’s what there is to do. One of the reasons I got out of Chester is I remember sitting on my porch and looking at the three cars that went down my street every other hour. Being bored is so overwhelming. To me, it was one of the worst experiences of my life.
The growing economic gap between the rich and the poor has real consequences in our community. Many of our people haven’t gotten richer and more economically stable since the 1960s, even though we’ve produced a black middle class. I don’t know if the class divide in the black community is permanent, but I would like for us to acknowledge it more. I have a strong reaction to affluent black people commenting on this country’s current economic conditions as if they themselves are impacted in the same ways that the black poor are. When they say things like we’re all a paycheck away from being poor, it’s not true. It’s a way of denying both the benefits of the Civil Rights Movement and the fact that there is a big grouping of black people who are dirt-poor. We’re not all the same, and saying we’re all just a paycheck away from poverty only masks the differences.
Legal freedom from racism has had a true impact. The Civil Rights Movement has raised new challenges and new responsibilities, choices like do I go to class, do I do my homework, do I not get pregnant, do I not do drugs? That sort of choice in some ways is a very personal decision, and in other ways it’s not. The poverty in our communities today is chronic in part because young people do not have the sense of possibility we had in the 1960s. What’s not working for the black community and poor blacks today is more subtle than it was then, when people were fighting to change the world for us and there was a sense that all of this poverty wasn’t our fault. Today there is more of an effort to blame the victim. It’s almost like kids who are poor and failing are told, you have all of this available; how can you not take advantage of it? But in many ways they don’t have all of it available. They don’t have access. I think the educational institutions in our cities are failing. They have failed the kids for a host of reasons, and the kids are bewildered.
Since the 1960s, too much emphasis has been placed on economic deprivation and not enough on recognizing that we live in a country where it’s about superiority and inferiority. The white experience is seen as superior, the black experience as inferior, and most American institutions were developed for the superior people. Even things that have nothing to do with racial issues are seen in black and white. There is a sense in our communities that there is black behavior and there is white behavior. You can rant and rave about that and say down with the system, which I understand. But in a way that misses the point. That’s how things are. The schools were not created for all the kids who go there. I think they were created for white kids in the 1890s, different sets of white kids who could function in particular ways. And one consequence of creating a pedagogy for white people, for the superior people, is that it doesn’t work with the people who have been labeled inferior. White kids have a very different view of the world and a very different life experience than young black and Latino kids. White kids are insiders. They view themselves as insiders; they’re connected to the American mainstream. The approach in poor communities is remedial. The statement and posture are that there’s something wrong with you; you have to catch up. Our kids feel like outsiders because they are, and you have to deal with that.
When I think of who it is that has to take some responsibility for the failure in our community, I think of the black establishment, the people who have benefited from the Civil Rights Movement. Many activists in the movements of the 1960s and 1970s recognized this hierarchical arrangement in our society, in our schools, in our institutions. The problem is that they were nationalists; they used identity politics. I think they looked at black culture, poor black culture, and defended it on face value. They talked about it as being economically deprived but culturally rich, and I think that was a mistake. I understand what they tried to do. But I think we made a major mistake in saying that we were culturally different as opposed to culturally deprived, because being culturally different covered over the fact that we were culturally deprived.
In 1968 there was a fight in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn over local control of the schools. The mission of the coalition that led the fight was to educate our kids. But my God, at that point in 1968, the young people in the black community were two grades down in terms of reading scores, and they lived in mostly segregated communities. Nearly thirty-five years later, they’re in segregated communities, almost overwhelmingly, and I think there was a test that showed black kids in eighth-grade English performing at 24 percent of their grade requirement compared to 57 percent for whites.
We have to deal with this, but we also have to take responsibility for it, because while the mission was to educate our kids, that movement failed. The failure has to do in part with an economic situation that hasn’t changed dramatically. But some of it has to do with the fact that a lot of the activists and militants who participated in Ocean Hill–Brownsville got absorbed in the bureaucracies of the Democratic Party. They either lost a sense of the mission or they didn’t have the political or conceptual tools to produce quality education. I think their efforts to solve the problem of undereducation in our communities, or miseducation, with nationalist identity politics devastated our community and miseducated us.
In the 1960s, our political movements were geared toward establishing equality in the sharing of power across all aspects of American life, and that made sense to me. But the shift in our communities toward black cultural nationalism did our community a disservice and does black people a disservice. As a people, we played a role in the shift toward that ideology. The idea that we are all the same is in part one of its aftereffects. It’s probably also a result of our experiences in slavery and with the Jim Crow racism of the South. In some ways, you come together to survive. Even if you don’t do so literally, you do conceptually, and I understand that.
I wasn’t political as an eighteen-year-old. But I also didn’t want to participate in documenting failure in black communities. In the mid-1960s I had read Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power. Around the time of Ocean Hill–Brownsville, I had decided I wasn’t interested in discovering any more crap about black people. Then as a graduate student in psychology, I reread Dark Ghetto and understood it better. One of the things Kenneth Clark talked about in that book was cultural deprivation. I think our communities were culturally deprived then and still are today. Lowering standards or artificially creating a sense of self-importance in black kids by throwing black identity at them or records of black achievement will not cover over that failure.
The black cultural nationalism of the 1960s affected a lot of people, and most definitely did so at the universities. We ended up saying you can talk about certain things in the black community but you can’t talk about them outside of it. If you speak Ebonics, for instance, then you’re more black than those who don’t, even if that means you’re failing out of the school system. So I think we participated in creating a situation where we’ve left poor black people behind. Glorifying the culture of poor people in our communities isn’t helpful to them. They are over there, and we relate to them as hip or whatever, but they’re failing in communities that aren’t growing.
The academic literature suggests that if you’re born in poverty, it’s harder to move beyond poverty—that you can’t get out. The way that poor people have been related to over the last twenty or thirty years suggests the same thing. I was a psychologist in training during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I have a real passion for black people. I hated the cultural de
privation movement because of how it was being used academically. And because I was concerned about it, I wouldn’t touch it. But at some point, you have to come to terms with the fact that we’ve been deprived, and that glorifying our culture is not going to change the failure our kids are experiencing in school. We need to come up with a methodology that accepts this failure and deprivation and moves us on to development.
So how do you do something about the hierarchy that’s been built in to the educational system and that dominates what learning is for our kids? We have to create an environment where there’s value to what kids produce. What we’ve looked to do at the All Stars Project is to build nonhierarchical models for learning.
The All Stars Project took shape as a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization after years of grassroots community organizing that began in the early 1970s. Dr. Newman and I founded the project in 1981. It comprises two youth programs—the All Stars Talent Show Network and the Joseph A. Forgione Development School for Youth—and the Castillo Theatre, an off-off-Broadway theater for people of all ages.
Castillo specializes in experimental, socially relevant work, a brand of theater it calls “developmental theater.” Like the youth programs of the ASP, Castillo is concerned with human growth. It gives kids a connection to the world of theater and culture that they wouldn’t otherwise have. Pam Lewis, who is codirector of the Development School and national producer of the All Stars Talent Show Network, is also an actress in the Castillo Theatre ensemble. It’s not unusual for her to bring what she’s learning in the performance ensemble into the work with young people in the talent shows and the Development School. Many members of the full-time staff of the All Stars Project are actors in the Castillo ensemble.
We raise about $4 million a year for our theater projects and the two youth programs. We wanted to establish the integrity of the educational program without all the bureaucracy of government funding. Our independent financial footing has made a huge difference. Without it, you have to dance to somebody else’s tune, which means you don’t get to develop kids. For years, many wonderful volunteers have sat around telemarketing tables raising money to fund our projects. I was on the phones raising money about three nights a week for ten years. We also go out and talk to people in the streets about the importance of investing in the growth and development of young people of color, and the people we describe the programs to often become part of our volunteer telemarketing operation.
All three ASP programs are based on the use of performance as an important technique in human development. What we mean by performance is a capacity for human beings to do things that take them beyond themselves, to try on different costumes or identities, different ways of being in the world. It’s a technique that allows people to reinitiate growth, because you can step outside of who you are and who you think you are, outside of “identity,” and become both more of who you are and other than who you are. We’ve developed a learning approach that speaks directly to the kids in the black and Latino community who have been underdeveloped by our society. That’s why we want to grow this learning approach and why we want people to know about it.
What we’re doing with the ASP is raising the idea with kids that they can have many performances, and that if you have only that one performance you grew up with, then when you go out into the work world, you’re not prepared. You don’t know what to do; you don’t know how to participate. When people feel uncomfortable with them, the kids feel uncomfortable too. As an educator, I believe that part of what it means to learn—to be a real learner— is that you have to acquire a sophistication about the world. You have to be worldly in ways that a lot of our kids aren’t. There are all these ordinary jobs and ordinary ways of being in the world that kids who come from very poor communities aren’t exposed to and don’t know about. We’re teaching young people how to be more worldly and sophisticated, given that the dominant culture in our society is white, especially in the work world. We teach them how to perform onstage at a talent show or in corporate America on Wall Street. They’re learning both how to be more of who they are, as young black and Latino people, and more of who they are not.
We work with about twenty thousand kids a year in the All Stars Talent Show Network—every kind of kid you could imagine, between the ages of five and twenty-one and beyond. We’re saying to kids, if you’ve never been accepted for anything, if you’ve never filled out a form for anything, you should definitely try this. Young people who have already performed in shows go sign up kids on street corners in New York City, Newark, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Oakland. They ask, do you want to audition for a talent show? Some of them do the audition saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, and when we accept them, they’re blown away. People bring friends and families to the auditions. Everyone who tries out gets in, though they don’t know that before the tryout. For some kids, it’s their first experience of success.
We have an audition, a workshop, and a show, and a parent meeting following each show. We put the kids onstage and they do hip-hop, and we don’t censor them. They make their statement. But in the process they’re creating a show, they’re mentoring young people, and they’re learning about performance, not just onstage but as producers of something that’s successful. The shows are amazing. I’m not anti–hip-hop culture. I don’t think we should crush CDs. I actually like hip-hop. It’s been played a lot in my house, and I don’t have any problem with that. What I’m saying to young people is that hip-hop is not all we are. Black people have led the way in other forms of cultural experience and entertainment. Hip-hop culture is youth culture, but it’s not the beginning or the end. Everybody’s not going to be P. Diddy. The kids come to think that everybody can make a million dollars if you make a few rhymes. On some level they know that millions of them are not going to be able to do that, given the other things you have to learn and do to get there. We don’t have to negate the positive aspects of hip-hop culture, and I don’t think that being black has to be equated with hip-hop. I think it’s a cultural expression that’s in our community. To the extent that people insist that’s the only way we can be, we have to engage kids by giving them other opportunities and other experiences.
Most of the kids realize this is their one shot. So across the board they perform their butts off, to use their expression. They take it and run with it. I think there are millions of kids—African American and Caribbean American and African and Latino—who are waiting for somebody to come into their community and say, I’m going to give you this so that you can develop. The kids are eating it up. African Americans in our program are just as able to take advantage of the opportunity as black children of immigrants, such as West Indians, contrary to the stereotype that says African-American kids are less good at learning. I think that in general African Americans are more jaded, because they live so close to luxury and yet so far from it. They’ve been living with a different perspective for a long time.
One of the things that’s different about us is we don’t insist that parents participate. We go directly to the kids, both for the All Stars Talent Show Network and for the Development School. The parents then see what the kids are doing and they say, my goodness, they’re getting up at six o’clock in the morning to be somewhere. They’re getting dressed, they’re rehearsing in the hallways, they’re performing. All of a sudden they’re doing things with their lives that are unusual. The parents then show up to see what the kids are doing, and their attendance has grown over the years. I think it’s the way to go, because it’s challenging the parents. It’s also including the kids in their own development and not tying it necessarily to parental participation. In some ways, parents have to decide what they want to do with their own lives. These programs are built for the kids to make some decisions, and what the kids decide then impacts on what the parents do and say.
The parents are invited to come join a committee and be active builders of the All Stars Talent Show Network in their neighborhood. Many of our parents come out to get
help on how to raise their young people, how to be more sophisticated and less narrow in what it is they’re doing. The parents are isolated, and they don’t often get a chance to ask questions of someone with a Ph.D., for better or for worse. There are things happening in the communities that parents are totally overwhelmed by. One of the dialogues I often have with parents whose kids are going to schools that are not supporting them is what it means to say to kids, you’re in this school because we’re poor. If I could do better, I would send you someplace else. I know that it’s not working out, and I don’t want to pretend about that, so let’s figure out what we’re going to do together, given that this is the best we have at this moment.
That’s one of those conversations you’re not allowed to have. But if you don’t have it, you participate, I think, in both underdeveloping your child and creating a level of hostility between you and them, because you’re sending them out into something that’s not working and insisting that it work for them. Without this conversation, the failure at school reinforces the negative environment at home, and everybody hates everybody.
Our leadership training program, the Development School for Youth, was founded in 1997 as the result of ongoing conversations with some of our contributors who are businesspeople. They were looking for ways to become more directly involved with the kids’ education. So we now have an after-school, supplementary education program for kids between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one that meets for three months, with three classes that meet once a week each in an after-school setting. After-school programs are where young people are learning a lot of things. I think white kids are better at what they do because they have exposure to after-school activities that make a huge difference.
America Behind the Color Line Page 16