America Behind the Color Line (18 page)

One of our young men has an uncle who’s a limousine driver somewhere in Florida. The young man had to put on a suit for a mock interview. Since the kids don’t wear suits, for example, they don’t know how to wear ties. So the young man called up his uncle and asked him how to put on a tie. He used the headboard of his bed to practice tying the tie. Then he came back and taught the other boys in the class how to do it.

Another young person was working with one of our adult corporate sponsors. The adult used to come in after the kid had already come to work. The kid came to work an hour early every day. Every time the adult came in, she would go in her office and close the door. The kid, because of her enthusiasm, would run to the door and throw it open to say hello without ever knocking. She did this for two weeks before the corporate sponsor said to her, you can’t do that. In this setting, what you have to do is knock on doors.

I asked the sponsor why it took her two weeks to say this to the kid, and she said, well, because she didn’t want to be racist. And I explained that it’s more racist to assume you can’t say it or that everybody knows this. Chances are the kid’s family members don’t do professional performances—they don’t work in a corporate setting. It’s also racist, in a more subtle way, to think there’s going to be a problem in trying to teach the kid something new. People initially feel awkward at the start of the internships—both the kids and the sponsors. Everyone is learning a new performance.

We all learn through imitation in the better parts of our learning. When kids are learning how to speak, they creatively imitate people in their environment. We talk to young babies as if they know what we’re talking about, and they don’t. But we accept whatever they produce, even when they put words together in funny ways. We don’t say, shut up until you know the grammar and the meaning of this word. We participate in the performance. The learning is much more interactive. And then they go to school and it stops. Imitation in school is considered close to cheating. In the Development School, we create an environment not too dissimilar from kids’ early language environment, where young people together are able to perform. It’s not a test performance. It’s the use of performance and performed activity to promote growth and development for thousands of minority kids.

Many of us were told growing up that we had to learn to speak a certain way if we were going to get a job. We don’t particularly try to change how kids in the Development School speak. We just put them in situations that are demanding of them, and they have to figure out that if they want to grow here, they’re going to have to change a lot of things. I have predominantly white, well-to-do businesspeople who train the kids for me. I tell them to teach the kids how to be white, and they almost fall off their chair. They have all the liberal reaction of oh my God, we’re going to step on their cultural toes. I tell them, believe me, after the twelve weeks of training they’ll still be black. But why don’t you use this time as an opportunity to share with them some of the secrets of white success and help them succeed in your world, given that your world is where we all end up having to work? “White” here is code for middle class, for upper middle class, but it’s also code for moving beyond how many of us in these neighborhoods think of ourselves.

I’m meeting more and more black professionals whom I’m exposing to these very poor black kids. Black professionals want to immediately go and change the kids’ language, like “aks” to “ask.” White people do that also. This is remediation, and it conveys to kids that there’s something wrong with what they’re doing. This is very different from putting kids in an environment where they do new kinds of things. I teach white people that I want them to speak to the kids in the ways they themselves speak, because the kids can then grow off of what they’re hearing. It’s ridiculous if white people try talking hip to these kids. I’m trying to introduce these kids to a new world, not to hip white people. They learn the language that fits, and they start to speak it almost unconsciously. In a way they correct, if you will, themselves.

One of the things that white kids have that the black community doesn’t have, going back to the notion of cultural deprivation, is a cosmopolitan worldview. White kids go through a broadening of life experiences that makes them more worldly and sophisticated. We have kids living in New York City communities like Queens and Brooklyn today, forget thirty-five years ago, who never saw the World Trade Center. They didn’t know it existed until September 11. Almost none of the young men in these communities know the experience of putting on a suit and walking down a street in Midtown and finding a way of being related to that’s so very different from the usual ways in which they’re related to. That trip across the bridge is measured in obstacles much greater than miles.

I don’t really care whether the kids in the Development School become Wall Street executives. I want them to know that Wall Street exists. I don’t care what they do with that knowledge or that experience; I want them to have it. One of the reasons I’m concerned about the bottom 90 percent is that a lot of those kids don’t ever leave our communities. Almost everybody focuses on the top 10 percent, the Talented Tenth, as W. E. B. Du Bois put it. Those kids are going to make it anyway, for the most part. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t support the middle-class kids, but they’re going to make it. They’re going to be okay in the world. They’re going to go out and do the things that black professionals do, and they’re going to leave their communities. But there are millions of kids who don’t leave their communities and who still deserve a better quality of life, who need to be related to and developed. I’m not so much interested in developing them to leave the community. Our All Stars shows focus on how we can grow people who are staying in the communities. A lot of people will decide to do that.

Dr. Du Bois is one of my heroes. But we were barely out of slavery when he spoke of the Talented Tenth. We were trying to do something very different then, which was to establish the fact that we were human beings. Today the concept is sometimes misconstrued to mean that only 10 percent of the black community can develop. That misconception could be a result in part of the poverty and failed education in our communities, and the sense of discouragement that’s followed. I was saying to a white corporate manager that we were interested in developing young people who never get to see Wall Street, kids who are not among our top 10 percent. I said, never would the white community be told that only 10 percent of them can develop. And he said, that’s a good thing, because he was in the bottom 90 percent and would never have made it if that philosophy had been applied to him.

I guess that in terms of a nationalist understanding, I’m trying to get the kids in our programs to de-racialize. It’s not a black or white thing when young people say to other young people, where are you going all dressed up; you’re being white. It’s peer pressure; basically young people saying to other youth, this isn’t for you. Dressing up isn’t a “white thing.” A lot of what we think of in terms of color, because of how the society is structured, is not an issue of color. It’s a class thing too. And we often confuse class with race.

I don’t quite know what “authentic black culture” or “black authenticity” is. I think that there is no such thing, and that we’ve gotten into a lot of trouble with those kinds of terms because they glorify narrow ghetto identities to the exclusion of other identities. It’s fine that we know from where we’ve come and that we’re knowledgeable about Africa. But I don’t think that’s the same thing as being able to perform in ways that are academically stable.

To me, blackness isn’t monolithic. Most of the kids we work with are black by birth, but being black means many different things. I want them to have experiences of the larger world. They can figure out what the larger world is for them, and their experiences will then shape what it means for them to be black. The dominance of hip-hop images teaches poor kids this is how they have to behave to be authentic and successful. A lot of these images are crafted by middle-class black people who go to college and then come back with hiphop and get cool. That’s a choice, and they have the right to choose that. But then they put on their suits and go do their other things, and usually make a lot more money doing these other things. A lot of white kids who come from affluent backgrounds are influenced by hip-hop, and they have five earrings and the whole bit. It’s a performance. We’re trying to teach inner-city kids that it’s a performance that they don’t have to be trapped in. They too can wake up the next day, put on a suit, and go to work.

I tell the kids that we need more nerds in the black community. Who has benefited from all of our hipness? A lot of white record companies and clothing companies. These companies are able to make fortunes off of marketing hipness in a way that most black kids can’t or don’t. The kids have got the hip part down pat. We train them to go to Wall Street and to walk into huge buildings and be able to produce a performance that’s in step with what’s going on there, and these experiences help the young people to grow.

The kids in the All Stars Project typically find themselves challenged by their peers as being less hip, and those challenges are often framed in the language of being “less black.” However, kids who are failing in the school system join our program, do a corporate internship, and then go back into their communities and engage in a dialogue with their peers. Their peers see their growth. And they then ask them, what are you doing? Where you going? How do I get to be a part of that? The kids in the community are then starting to experience their friends as role models, and to be influenced by young people just like them who are doing different kinds of things. They’re told to hang in there, and it means something, because it’s coming from people like them, and “like them” is not just a matter of skin color. All of a sudden the world beyond their community, be it black or white, is not so far afield that they can’t connect to it, because for the first time they see young people they grew up with on a street doing something different with their lives, and that’s an inspiration.

What we’ve produced is their education, or development. We’re doing things with these kids that the schools can’t produce. And once you demonstrate success among this population, you are in a position to figure out even more for them. I’m looking to those of us who are more well-to-do to participate in that fight. We have to be more than role models. I think that for us, being a role model to some degree ends up getting used for not doing more of what needs to be done. If I’m black and I’m doing well and people can see me as a role model, then that’s all I have to be, and all the black middle-class and upper-middle-class people don’t have to have a connection to black poor people. We can’t afford simply to be role models. There are ways in which we have to fight for our communities. We have to be connected to our communities. We have to find programs that allow our communities to grow and develop, and not think that it’s enough to be seen.

Even on TV, the kids barely notice all the accomplishments of black people of our generation, the black role models of today, like Colin Powell and Maxine Waters. My experience is that when the kids recognize me on TV and say, oh, I know Dr. Fulani, it’s because they’ve seen me first in their communities. A lot of these kids don’t know who Colin Powell is. It may seem impossible, but how could you have lived in New York and never seen the World Trade Center? Dick Parsons, Franklin Raines, and others are more recent role models than the ones held up as examples in the community control movements of the 1960s. But pictures hanging on the wall don’t teach kids how to read.

I can’t say I don’t care whether successful black people give back. I do care. I have all kinds of opinions; I am opinionated. A black person doesn’t have to give back, but then people can’t claim that by virtue of their mere existence they are doing something to give back. You can’t go around saying well, but if a kid has my picture in a tenement on a wall, that’s enough to inspire them. I think the real deal is figuring out the challenge to successful black folks relative to what they need to do to give back. I think giving back has to be a commitment to developing not the top 10 percent, but the bottom 90 percent and all that entails.

People want more. They battle for survival, and we can’t ignore it. The notion that you don’t commit crimes if you’re really poor but good, as opposed to the bad poor, I think is a highfalutin description that has very little to do with what goes on in the world. Kids in poor communities of color talk about the culture of poverty. I hear heart-wrenching stories from sixteen- and seventeen-year-old black boys who say, I go to school; I do everything I can do to stay close to home. I live in a project. I don’t sit on the park bench because the cops come and they do roundups and everybody who’s there gets picked up and you go spend one or two nights in jail. A lot of kids talk about being worried they’re going to end up on the wrong path just by simply walking down the street.

There’s a way in which we don’t want to look at the realities of what our communities are, but we have to. We have to acknowledge the unhealthy and nondevelopmental things that are going on there that we want to end. We have to figure out what we need to do to grow the young people and the notso-young people in those communities so they can have better lives.

What I’m saying to these kids and their parents in poor communities is, you can’t wait any longer. I’m teaching young people that you have to work with what you have, and you have to create with poverty and crap if that’s what’s in our communities. You have to use that to go somewhere. I don’t say to them, you have to do something first before I can participate in helping you develop. I take them with what they bring.

I think the black community in New York is reawakening to its political power. We have a long way to go, but one expression of our getting there occurred in November of 2001, when the black community did a magnificent thing. It broke with the Democratic Party and voted to the tune of 30 percent for Michael Bloomberg, our mayor, who was running both on the Republican ticket and with the Independence Party, which I helped to create. I went out on the streets and helped to build that party from the bottom up. This is something I’m very passionate about. One of the things I was teaching our community is that if for the first time we made a move to give someone other than a Democrat a significant portion of our vote, we would up our political clout overnight. It’s taken thirty years and the right circumstances for people to learn that lesson, but it’s had a tremendous impact on our community.