Rebuild the Dream (2 page)

BUT WHEN I ARRIVED AT
Yale University in 1990, the things I saw did not make me proud of the country I was discovering. Instead, I saw things that made me feel ashamed—and angry.

The beautiful campus was surrounded by shocking levels of urban poverty in New Haven, Connecticut. I saw Ivy League undergraduates doing drugs, getting caught, and going to rehab. Meanwhile, I saw low-income kids—from the same age group, in the same city, living four blocks away—doing the same drugs, getting caught, and going to prison. A law professor explained to me, without a trace of irony, “Well, those inner-city kids are actual drug pushers; our students are just experimenting with drugs.” I failed to find any such exemption or exception in my law books. I had always intended to become a civil rights attorney, but the injustices that I saw during those years turned the fire inside me into a roaring flame.

I rebelled. I began to see the entire system as hopelessly hypocritical and corrupt. I turned on my dad in particular, telling him, “This doesn't look like ‘liberty and justice for all' to me.” We didn't speak to each other comfortably for years.

At the time, I didn't care. I seethed at the idea of an American society in which the powerful mistreated the powerless. As a little boy I had been no stranger to bullies. I wore huge glasses, and I had toothpicks for legs. My knees were so weak that I needed crutches to walk for about a year in elementary school. I was a geek, decades before being a geek was cool. I had escaped the bullies by riding my bike into the woods and reading comic books about my favorite
heroes: the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, and the X Men. I dreamed of someday becoming a champion of the downtrodden.

When I graduated from the Yale Law School in 1993, I decided to make those dreams real—by standing up for those at the very bottom of our society's pecking order.

THE YEAR BEFORE I GRADUATED
, Los Angeles had erupted in blood and flames, sparked by an all-white jury's acquittal of four white LAPD officers who had been videotaped beating black motorist Rodney King. People everywhere were talking about widespread racial bias in the criminal justice system, which was resulting in people of color going to prison for minor offenses that white people didn't even get arrested for. At Yale, I had seen it with my own eyes. I decided to do something about it.

I was twenty-four years old and the quintessential “angry young man.” Even though I had enjoyed a sheltered and somewhat privileged upbringing, I was devastated and infuriated by the gap between the American reality and the America that I was raised to believe in. I was a rebel seeking a cause. So I moved to San Francisco and embraced every left-wing crusade I could find. I attended any protest or march that I heard about. I met other young leftists, most of whom were also alienated students or recent graduates. About a dozen of us formed a small, left-wing collective that met on the weekends; together, we debated economic theories, studied social movements, and dreamed our utopian dreams.

During the workweek, I used my law degree to try to make a difference. I worked with other young lawyers in 1995 to create a lawyer referral service for victims of police misconduct. Our hotline's motto was “The police should obey the law.” We helped to
coordinate litigation against problem officers, problem precincts, and problem practices.

In 1997, through determined and tough advocacy, we convinced the San Francisco Police Commission to fire a notorious officer who had been the target of more than thirty formal allegations of racism and brutality. This triumph vindicated our complaints about the department, put us on the local map, and started a process of meaningful reform within the SFPD. It also helped bring us our first major recognition: the 1998 Reebok International Human Rights award.

In time, our tiny police misconduct project grew into a major organization: the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Our work was hard-hitting, but it was rooted in facts, data, and the requirements of the law. My college journalism days gave me a knack for dealing with the local press. Soon we were raising $ 1 million a year from private foundations and donors. We hired a larger staff and pushed for alternatives to violence and incarceration in some of the Bay Area's toughest neighborhoods.

In particular, we challenged California's youth prison system, which was spending $150,000 per year for each kid it locked up. We pointed out that the state could send “three kids to Yale for the cost of sending one kid to jail.” We organized urban youth and their families to speak out for “schools not jails” and “books not bars.” As a result, we blocked construction of a costly and controversial super-jail for youth near Oakland. Our advocacy was credited with helping to reduce the state's youth prison population by 30 percent, with no related increase in youth crime.

BUT FOR ALL OF THE SURFACE SUCCESS
and growing accolades, something was wrong. Too many of the young people whom
we had gotten out of prison were going right back in again. There were too few jobs and not enough legitimate opportunities to keep them out of trouble. I was tired of going to funerals and seeing a young person in the casket and gray-haired people in the pews. I was tired of seeing prom pictures on the cover of burial programs.

Meanwhile, jealousy, misunderstandings, and infighting among activists left me feeling exasperated and demoralized. I began to see that protests and criminal justice advocacy were necessary and important, but they were not enough to make a lasting difference in kids' lives. By the early 2000s, I was feeling lost and burned out. I felt like I was in a hamster wheel, running furiously toward a goal I had no hope of reaching.

In the end, I reached out to the one person whom I knew could give me sage advice: my father.

He told me something that, in hindsight, seems painfully obvious: “I know you are doing your best, son, but those children can't eat protest signs. You want to stop the violence? Well, like they say, nothing stops a bullet like a job.”

He went on. “The main problem these kids have is simple: they're poor. If you can solve that, the rest of the issues will begin to go away.”

I did not entirely agree. Racial bias in the criminal justice system impacted even middle-class African Americans. We needed to keep battling racism, I told him, and intensify the fight for more social services to blunt the impact of poverty on their young lives.

Daddy cut me off. “That's all fine and good, but let me tell you something,” he said. “Nobody can give those kids anything that will stop them from being poor. The government could give them dollars, but money will just stop them from being
broke
—for about a week.

“If they are still poor in their minds, they will be broke again next week,” he continued. “Every poor child has to learn how to climb that ladder out of poverty, themselves. Each one has to take personal responsibility, no excuses. That's the way I did it.”

I scowled. “But they have every problem in the world,” I countered. “We can't just blame them for being born poor and hope they figure it out.”

“Of course not,” my father said. “Kids have responsibilities to climb the ladder. Adults have responsibilities, too, to make sure that every child has a ladder that they can climb. Mentors, internships, jobs. For poor kids today, where is their ladder of opportunity? I had that, when I was their age. They don't. That's what we need to fix.”

Then he lowered his voice, and he spoke to me with as much gentleness as an ex-military cop could muster. “I think that's what is wrong with your program, son. You are just blaming the system, fighting the system—but you are creating no opportunities for that individual kid who wants to excel. If you want to stop the violence, focus on jobs. That's harder than suing someone, but you might make more of a difference, in the long term.”

I HAD LONG AGO DISMISSED MY FATHER
as being too conservative and out of touch, but my lived experience had given me a deeper appreciation for his point of view. I thought about the young people whom I had seen blow really terrific opportunities, either because they were not prepared for the job or because their attitudes did not fit the workplace. We had nothing in place to get them job ready—in terms of skill set or mindset. We had focused on trying to rescue them from an unjust prison system, not on giving them the tools to build a good life outside of it. We were good
at helping them speak out. We were not so good at helping them climb out of poverty to fulfill their God-given potential.

Our organization needed to go beyond fighting against the things we did not want. We also needed to start working toward a future that we did want. Good jobs would be fundamental; so would programs to teach young people how to get, keep, and create jobs. It had taken me nearly a decade of urban activism, but I finally saw the wisdom in my dad's tough-minded, American idealism.

I figured out pretty quickly the kinds of jobs that I wanted to focus on.

California had passed a raft of laws supporting the solar industry; the clean-tech sector was beginning to boom in Silicon Valley; other green businesses—organic food and eco-friendly products—were beginning to take off in the state. I realized that there might be a tremendous opportunity in the growing green economy, a host of good jobs that required minimal training at first. With the right approach, Oakland's youth could be trained and hired to weatherize buildings and make them more energy efficient; to install solar panels; to repair, recycle, and reclaim materials for re-use; to plant and tend community gardens and gardens on rooftops. Alongside these entry-level jobs was a long list of green careers that are perfectly suited to revitalize the dead and dying manufacturing belt of this country, jobs for our skilled laborers whose jobs have been outsourced to other countries.

Some of the Ella Baker Center's donors were the leading entrepreneurs and investors in these socially responsible businesses. I had met them through progressive business groups, such as the Social Venture Network. I was ashamed to admit that we had asked them for donations but not for job opportunities. We needed to up our game—and up their commitment.

So I turned my attention in 2003 to promoting green jobs as one solution to poverty. I traveled the country, evangelizing the idea. “The surest path to safe streets, peaceful communities, and a healthy future is not more police and prisons, but ecologically sound economic development,” I argued. “Today's youth need green jobs, not jails.”

As I learned more about the ecological crisis that was spurring the green revolution, I had another lightbulb moment: I saw that our country was throwing away too many precious resources into landfills and incinerators—and too many precious people into jails and prisons. Both patterns violated a central tenet of my faith. There are no throwaway species, children, resources, neighborhoods, or nations. All of creation is sacred and should be treated with respect.