5 posts tagged “class”

To be honest, after a second perusal of Ruby Payne's A Framework for Understanding Poverty I'm not sure how I feel about it. Two years ago when I first blogged about the book I had this to say. Oh, the days when I was a fiery leftist blogger.... I still feel Payne overly generalizes a very large, exploited population whose absent voice in a book such as this speaks volumes. I still feel it is inherently absurd to think you can understand poverty, the lifestyles of many people in poverty, or other such deeply complex and malleable concepts by reading a book. I still feel that the myriad holes in Payne's argument makes it as useful as a two-dollar bill in the vending machines on the first floor of Guyton. However, I do hear more of what Payne was trying to get across after having taught for two years in one of the poorest places in the nation.

Today, I attended my younger brother David's graduation from The Lawrenceville School. I haven't been to a high school graduation in quite some time. Both of my years at Humphreys County High School I have not attended the graduation ceremony due to my ardent belief that the majority of students who were to have diplomas conferred on them were undeserving. In part through fault of their own, though more egregiously through the fault of the adults around them charged with their educational nurturing and intellectual development. Myself included, at times. Regrettably.

The Lawrenceville School is quite the educational institution. An elite, northeastern U.S. boarding school where my little brother's schoolmates include the family members of royalty, comedic icons, corporate titans, and others. The campus is laid out over 800 acres of prime suburban real estate in beautiful Mercer County (my county!) and Lawrenceville is one of the top feeder schools for the venerable Princeton University just a 10 minute drive up Route 206 past the governor's mansion, Drumthwacket. Students at Lawrenceville enjoy the benefits of a first-rate education fed from an endowment of over $200 million. I can recall conversations with my little brother where I remarked with awe that he should appreciate going to a school such as Lawrenceville where students who are barely teenagers can choose from a wide swath of courses in departments ranging from the staples of History and Mathematics to the specialties of Visual Arts and Religion & Philosophy. It is to be enjoyed, definitely.

The Lawrenceville School

Whenever I visit a school such as Lawrenceville I get reminded of the benefits that accrue from exposure to such a cast of schoolmates, instructors, and administrators who are in touch with the very levers of power of our world. I get reminded that many of the students David went to school with these past years were very different than students I attended high school with less than 10 miles away in inner-city Trenton at Trenton Central High School. For instance, the first student who was honored had a good five minutes of verbal praise heaped on her academic performance, community leadership, and relentless selflessness by the school's headmaster before receiving the first graduation prize of the morning. Another young lady who was honored established an award for a faculty member on campus, led three Hurricane Katrina relief trips, and had over 600 hours of community service under her belt in addition to being in the running for the school's valedictorian. Finally, the valedictorian at The Lawrenceville School was a remarkable young man who amassed 24 A+'s while at Lawrenceville along with several A's and one, lone, embarrassing A-. Similar to what I was inculcated with after I escaped my desperation in Trenton to the luxuries of Harvard, students here are told from Day 1 that they will one day run the world. Surely, this is a scary prospect for students at 13 and 14 just as it was for me at 18. However, tis true.

In thinking of what students at The Lawrenceville School are being set up for I cannot escape looking at students on the other side of the meritocratic coin. Students who are not receiving first-rate educations that carry a price tag of over $120,000 over four years. Students who do not attend schools with students of diverse racial, socioeconomic, and geographic backgrounds. Students whose campus is full of cracking concrete, cramped classrooms, and misfunded (not underfunded, mind you) facilities in the middle of "nowhere." These students are those who I teach with the Mississippi Teacher Corps. At best, a chunk of the students I teach will get local service industry jobs at small restaurants, catfish plants, or the supermarket. A few will become the top dogs in Humphreys County as teachers or will conjure up the money and determination to leave Humphreys County as so many of them seem to want so badly. Most, however, will join the ranks of the baby mama's and deadbeat dads who drink alcohol more than water and party more than they read changing little of their educational level, socioeconomic status, or weekly habits from the time they're 15 until they're 50.

I am a firm believer that there has to be some way to reconcile these two dichotomies. I'm not sure if I've found the remedy exactly but there is an interesting prospect on deck. More on Tuesday....

Apparently, the New York Times is reporting that a number of towns in Louisiana have decided that sagging your pants in public is a criminal offense that should be subject to fines or jail time. I think these people have hit a new low (no pun intended). Outside the fact that this is clearly aimed at Black males and is another attempt in the long line of the established order dictating what is good and proper for the "lower" social, economic, and racial classes, it's really about a group of people in power preventing another group of people without power from freely expressing themselves or doing something that's displeasing to the powerful group's visual and cultural senses.

More embarrassingly, one of my city councilors from Trenton actually endorses this ridiculousness and is in the process of bringing a similar ordinance to my home town. Right. Having Black males wear belts is going to make Trenton High better, get the Bloods out of every neighborhood, and fill the potholes on my street (2nd St....I can know when I'm on my street even when I have my eyes closed because I know where every pothole is...they've been there for as far back as I can remember...at least a decade). This is soooooo not the thing that politicians and legislators should be focusing on.

It's strange how I disagree with laws like these though numerous times a day I tell my students to pull their pants up/tuck in their shirt. Am I part of the controlling apparatus of the state? Dang. Gotta keep working on that Freire...

Everyday I read the local newspaper for my hometown in Jersey online here. It's kinda strange. Growing up in Trenton I never had a strong sense of city pride. I just thought my city was, to some degree, like any other city in the country. Working class, relatively diverse racially (especially as far as New Jersey cities and suburbs go), crappy public schools, and a downtown shopping area. Normal, right? It wasn't until I left Trenton and went off to college that I realized my city was not normal by any means. For one, Trenton is not all working class. There are actually a few wealthier sections of Trenton including a very upscale neighborhood on the westside of Trenton called Hiltonia that I barely new existed for my 18 years there. Having grown up in a neighborhood where almost every house looks like this       I had no idea Trenton had neighborhoods filled with houses that look like this        Oh, class segregation.... I also came to find out that although my city was fairly racially diverse (about 50% Black, 30% White, and 20% Latino [of any race]), the public schools were not. Somehow, my high school was 97% Black and Latino. Where'd that 30% of White people go? Speaking of public schools, I found out that not only did Trenton have one of the worst school districts in the state (giving districts like Camden and Irvington a run for the title of worst) but the school year that I graduated (2002-2003) my high school was probably THE worst school in the state. Period. It was something like 1, 1, and 3 in terms of having the highest suspension rates, lowest attendance rates, and highest dropout rates of any public high school in New Jersey. What's more, something like three of the six schools in the state labeled through No Child Left Behind as being "persistently dangerous" were in Trenton. One of which was my high school. Another was my middle school. But I digress....

Strangely, I also had to leave Trenton to realize that I have a big bone to pick with the local media there. When I graduated from high school as I talked about in a previous blog post, I really wanted to help debunk the myth of Trenton teenagers (especially its young, Black males) being violent, stupid, dope-selling brutes destined for the criminal justice system, teen parenthood, or the grave at an all-too young age.  A big part of this was the interview in the Trenton Times, my city's leading local paper.  Despite the positive and rare shine given to Trentonians through that wonderful article, much more often the local newspapers look something like this where three of the top five local news stories on Trenton are about shootings. In all actuality, these pieces would more aptly be called blurbs than articles as a number of them are under 100 words and say little beyond who was shot, where, and what happened to the victim (i.e. whether the victim was killed or taken to hospital X and treated). They serve little purpose beyond scaring the public, which of course influences White/middle-class/Black flight from Trenton and is a large part of why our city's population has consistently been on the decline in the past few decades. Now, one of our former suburbs (Hamilton) is actually more populous than Trenton. What kinda stuff is that? Anyway, articles like these really piss me off as they only seem to serve a negative purpose and never get into deeper issues of inner-city violence such as the connection between it and (duh) poverty...physically dilapidated (and thus psychologically deflating) neighborhoods... pedagogically oppressive public school instruction...almost non-existent green space (I swear I feel like the area around Campus Walk Apartments has more green space than all of Trenton)...underfunded or out-of-touch job training programs...etc. Yes, I will blame everything except the people committing crime themselves because I don't buy into the conservative bull crap about every individual being their own conscious actor despite their environment, so-to-speak. People in sad, seemingly hopeless environments often end up doing sad, seemingly hopeless things. There are exceptions and some people just enjoy doing violent, reckless stuff but they're few and far between.

My favorite television show is The Wire and I continue to see glaring similarities between Baltimore and Trenton. This upcoming fifth and final season of the show, the focus will be on the local media (mainly the fictional counterpart of the Baltimore Sun) and the politics and interests behind which stories are sought, covered, published, and why. I eagerly await the commencement of this season because I am also seeing the aforementioned similarities between Baltimore and Trenton manifested in the city that will be my home for the next two years: Jackson, Mississippi (aka "Jack-town"...denizen for armed robbery). What you have is a majority Black, working class inner-city with a large open-air drug market, infamously poor public schools, and a local media system all too eager to highlight these problems devoid of their historical and present-day causes or, more importantly, prospective solutions. The urban population is running to the 'burbs and, in turn, the suburban population is attempting to return to the city by scooping up low-cost real estate closer to what is often the city they work in during the day but scramble to not be caught dead in (no pun intended) at night. What ends up happening is crazy things like this where, as NPR reports, for the first time more poor people live in the suburbs than in the cities. Funny...perhaps Trenton is not so different after all.

This was written journal style my first night in Oxford, this past Monday (June 4). Just wanted to offer some background into what's brought me here:

As I sit in my new apartment at the University of Mississippi, I find time to reflect on what has brought me to this remote locale in Oxford, Mississippi to begin what may be the most difficult experience of my life three days before my graduation from Harvard University.

At some point in my upbringing I knew I wanted to be a teacher. I think I was first bit by the teaching bug when I was nine or ten years-old and a student at Patton Joseph Hill Elementary School in Trenton, New Jersey locally known simply as “P.J. Hill.” It was here at a school where bullet holes pierced what should have been safe windows and pre-teen students fought administrators for the lucrative bounty of one dollar that I realized that I would prefer a career in teaching to any other. This was a fleeting thought, however, and between elementary school and college I went through a broad range of careers. Like many inner-city youth, I soon wanted to be a professional basketball player. From that I went on to focusing on becoming a rapper. Through my interest in rap and the music business I developed an interest in entertainment law, largely because around the age of 16 I learned that the top entertainment lawyers in the U.S. made $800 an hour—which would come out to $40,000 a week for a fifty-hour work week. My career was set. I went to Harvard with this career focus in mind.

While at Harvard, I took a few steps towards entering the music business after graduation from college. I went through the “comp”[1] for a spot on the staff of our campus radio station, WHRB, and by the second semester of my sophomore year I was a member of the radio station’s studio engineering department as well as its Black Urban Contemporary (BUC) department spinning rap, dancehall, and R&B from 3-5 a.m. Sunday mornings. I had established contacts in the rap publication industry through my girlfriend and hoped to work during the summer after freshman year for a record company or rap publication in New York City.[2] I also joined up with the nascent student-run record label at Harvard, Veritas Records, named after our Latin motto ve ri tas meaning "truth." I thought that I was firmly on my way to doing everything I needed to do to have a successful career in the music business and I was not altogether wrong.

Due to what was then a side interest in civil rights issues and Black history, I applied for a spot on an Alternative Spring Break (ASB) trip to when I was a freshman. I had never been to the “Deep South” and was excited when I was accepted as one of eight students to go. We had two great chaperones on the trip. One was Gene Corbin, the Executive Director of the Phillips Brooks House Association, a student-run social service and social action organization at Harvard with nearly 80 programs and thousands of student volunteers. Gene used to run a non-profit in Jackson, that we volunteered at while we were in Jackson that week. The other was Claudia Highbaugh, the Chaplain of the Harvard Divinity School who had family from Jackson and a sublime understanding of civil rights history and its relationship to churches; not to mention a much-needed maternal and supportive nature. While we were in Mississippi we did everything from meet Constance Slaughter-Harvey, the first Black woman admitted to the University of Mississippi’s Law School, to visit Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the infamous 1964 kidnappings and murders of three civil rights workers historically referred to collectively by their last name--Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Our conversations with various civil rights leaders and visits to various civil rights landmarks left an indelible mark on me.

On one such occasion and trip, we met with Hollis Watkins who was an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. On the wall of Mr. Waktins’ office were two posters that showed a map of Mississippi by county. One poster showed each county in Mississippi’s racial makeup. The other poster showed how much funding for public education each county in received. The stark racial disparities were shocking. The counties that were more heavily Black invariably received less funding than the counties that were mostly White. It was not until then that I realized that public education and its problems were not only a New Jersey issue between Abbott Districts[3] and more affluent suburban ones—it was a national and even international issue that kept particular races and classes in subjugated states. This revelation’s impact on me cannot be overstated. The education bug once again sunk its teeth into me and this time it was there to stay. I came back to Harvard, changed my concentration (major) from English and American Literature and Languages to African and African American Studies and Government, changed my summer plans from gaining a job in the music industry to working with an educational and recreational PBHA summer program in inner-city Boston, and changed my career focus from entertainment law to urban public education.

Thus, this is an abbreviated breakdown of why I am here now. This is why I am avoiding the immense paychecks and signing bonuses of many of my peers and friends at Harvard. This is why I am missing the last three days of my college career including my class of 2007 photo, an award ceremony and banquet for my academic department, and a Class Day speech by former U.S. President Bill Clinton. This is why I got chills today when I walked into Holly Springs High School in Holly Springs, Mississippi—the site of the Mississippi Teacher Corps’ summer school where I will get my teaching practice before becoming a teacher in Jackson’s public school system in early August. I have come to Mississippi to address the intellectual, emotional, and—if necessary—material needs of people that I care about and love deeply though I have never met. Human beings that, due to their life’s circumstances, are growing up in social and economic situations I feel mirror my own. I am in Mississippi to bring positive and radical social change to the world. But first, I have to put up my shower curtains….