young voices from the ghetto:
HE BECAME ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS GENERALS IN RECENT AMERICAN HISTORY,...
HE BECAME ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS GENERALS IN RECENT AMERICAN HISTORY,...
THANKS TO THE CRISP POISE AND TOUGH INTELLIGENCE HE DISPLAYED ON TV during the 11 months of Operation Desert Shield/Storm, and on one rainy morning in the spring of 1991, I watched him step briskly from a limousine into a tight cocoon of security men and high school officials, wearing his new celebrity lightly. He was home at last to Morris High School in the South Bronx. He had been gone for 37 years and was proving that, for at least a morning, you can go home again. As a crowd of onlookers gathered to take a look at him, he shook his head in an ironic way, and went it. He was there to give a speech and my friend Francine Waxmann and I, both professors of writing at Interboro Institute in midtown Manhattan, were there to listen to him.
It was then that one of the young black men in the crowd by the name of Roderick said, I seen him on TV. That man's whiter than George fuckin' Bush! Talks real pretty! Th' guy's got everything he wants, college boy, all that shit. Another joined in, then a third and a fourth, and soon the familiar rap was flowing. They'd drawn the wrong hand in life; they were poor and black; or poor and Hispanic, or poor and luckless, and therefore never had a chance in a World They Never Made. They had been locked up by cops, beaten by their mothers or fathers or flunked out or sneered at by racist schoolteachers, abused by mean Army sergeants or heartless welfare investigators or cruel bosses. Francine and I stood for a moment listening to the old familiar litany. It was one that the both of us had heard each and every day in one form or another from a similar cadre of Interboro students who were Pell Grant recipients from ghettos like the one Colin Powell had grown-up in, and some had already begun the all-encompassing American whine of minority victimisation.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was impressive. The core of his 20 minute speech, delivered in a gymnasium with a broken roof, was made of platitudes: Stay in school. Get a diploma. Don't take drugs, because that is stupid. Much of these bromides were given renewed power power because he now spoke with authority of a successful man. He was a black man who had come from Kelly Street, down at the bottom of the broken tundra of the South Bronx, one of the worst slums under the American flag. He then delivered what was certainly the morning's most important message: If you're black, if you're Puerto Rican or Hispanic, be proud of that. But don't let it become a problem. Let it become somebody else's problem.
I'm not sure when - or more important - why -on our taxi ride back to Interboro to teach our afternoon classes, Francine and I came up with the idea. Neither one of us pretended to have the answers to the cosmic questions of how a generation of children like the ones we taught, whose parents had once worshipped in the church of self-reliance, now had children who were growing-up in the vast grip of whining, so we decided to combine our writing classes in order to find a few answers. Our students were going to write essays about their lives in the ghetto and read them aloud in class.
And over the next six-weeks, that is exactly what they did with exactitude and candor.
The Young Voices from the Ghetto gave valid argument that no words, no pictures, no movies could ever express, of lives lived on the level of nightmare, of energy consumed by the furies of being among the underclass, of wasted youth filled with the self-inflicted wounds of human tragedy, of lives wasted by being too busy blaming others to look into their own hearts. They had once wanted respect without accomplishment, and were damaged by the premise that they would never be able to live extraordinary lives. And yet...
...And yet, it somehow began to evolve over the six-weeks that lay ahead...
...Each one of them began to give hope that collecting a college education which they were now receiving would perhaps, one day, change all of that, by putting a moratorium on their own self-pity. All of them were aware that they needed less Freud and more Gandhi in their lives, less adolescent whining and more stoic maturity, less weeping and gnashing of teeth and more bawdy horselaughs in the face of adversity. They wanted only to be free of the world of shaping their ideology through victimisation. It was if they had been there to hear Colin Powell speak about the living of lives, whether black or white or Latino, male or female, of every class and religion, and had heard his words when he said: Be proud, live life in your own skin, and whatever is bothering you, hey man: Make it someone else's problem.
Which was exactly what they were now attempting to do...
...And little did they know how proud of them that Francine and I were...
...But we hoped that they could see it in both our smiles and in our laughing eyes...
It was then that one of the young black men in the crowd by the name of Roderick said, I seen him on TV. That man's whiter than George fuckin' Bush! Talks real pretty! Th' guy's got everything he wants, college boy, all that shit. Another joined in, then a third and a fourth, and soon the familiar rap was flowing. They'd drawn the wrong hand in life; they were poor and black; or poor and Hispanic, or poor and luckless, and therefore never had a chance in a World They Never Made. They had been locked up by cops, beaten by their mothers or fathers or flunked out or sneered at by racist schoolteachers, abused by mean Army sergeants or heartless welfare investigators or cruel bosses. Francine and I stood for a moment listening to the old familiar litany. It was one that the both of us had heard each and every day in one form or another from a similar cadre of Interboro students who were Pell Grant recipients from ghettos like the one Colin Powell had grown-up in, and some had already begun the all-encompassing American whine of minority victimisation.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was impressive. The core of his 20 minute speech, delivered in a gymnasium with a broken roof, was made of platitudes: Stay in school. Get a diploma. Don't take drugs, because that is stupid. Much of these bromides were given renewed power power because he now spoke with authority of a successful man. He was a black man who had come from Kelly Street, down at the bottom of the broken tundra of the South Bronx, one of the worst slums under the American flag. He then delivered what was certainly the morning's most important message: If you're black, if you're Puerto Rican or Hispanic, be proud of that. But don't let it become a problem. Let it become somebody else's problem.
I'm not sure when - or more important - why -on our taxi ride back to Interboro to teach our afternoon classes, Francine and I came up with the idea. Neither one of us pretended to have the answers to the cosmic questions of how a generation of children like the ones we taught, whose parents had once worshipped in the church of self-reliance, now had children who were growing-up in the vast grip of whining, so we decided to combine our writing classes in order to find a few answers. Our students were going to write essays about their lives in the ghetto and read them aloud in class.
And over the next six-weeks, that is exactly what they did with exactitude and candor.
The Young Voices from the Ghetto gave valid argument that no words, no pictures, no movies could ever express, of lives lived on the level of nightmare, of energy consumed by the furies of being among the underclass, of wasted youth filled with the self-inflicted wounds of human tragedy, of lives wasted by being too busy blaming others to look into their own hearts. They had once wanted respect without accomplishment, and were damaged by the premise that they would never be able to live extraordinary lives. And yet...
...And yet, it somehow began to evolve over the six-weeks that lay ahead...
...Each one of them began to give hope that collecting a college education which they were now receiving would perhaps, one day, change all of that, by putting a moratorium on their own self-pity. All of them were aware that they needed less Freud and more Gandhi in their lives, less adolescent whining and more stoic maturity, less weeping and gnashing of teeth and more bawdy horselaughs in the face of adversity. They wanted only to be free of the world of shaping their ideology through victimisation. It was if they had been there to hear Colin Powell speak about the living of lives, whether black or white or Latino, male or female, of every class and religion, and had heard his words when he said: Be proud, live life in your own skin, and whatever is bothering you, hey man: Make it someone else's problem.
Which was exactly what they were now attempting to do...
...And little did they know how proud of them that Francine and I were...
...But we hoped that they could see it in both our smiles and in our laughing eyes...
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