America Behind the Color Line (17 page)
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 deprivation 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.
The Development School enrolls 120 kids a year from more than thirty high schools in New York City and Newark. We go into the best high schools, the worst, and everything in between, and do outreach. We talk to the kids about coming on board and about what we stand for and about giving them a summer internship in Manhattan at the completion of the training, and I say to them that they can still grow. I’m looking for people who still want to grow. The kids come into the program, and when you ask, why is it you’re here, one of the things they say is, because I thought I was finished, meaning they were stuck where they were in life—and they’re fifteen and sixteen years old.
We mix kids who are doing great in school with kids who couldn’t get an A or a B if their lives depended on it. That kind of diversity is very interesting because both groups of kids bring something different to the table. What I’m requiring them to do isn’t particularly what any of them are so great at, and this creates an environment where all kinds of kids can grow. I’m not trying to get them to be like we were when we were kids, to re-create that environment that worked for us. I’m trying to give them an opportunity to be who they are and can be, based on what they bring to the table. That’s a key aspect of the theoretical work we do.
After the kids go through our training at the Development School, we give them eight-week summer internships sponsored by Wall Street corporations like Blaylock & Partners and the CEO there, Ron Blaylock. We want the kids to be able to do what the affluent kids do. I tell them, we have a hip-hop show in the All Stars Talent Show Network. So wear those costumes to the show. But when you’re going to Wall Street for your internship, I tell them, take the three earrings out of your ear, don’t wear a nose ring, and put on a suit. I object to that being defined as “white behavior.” That’s ridiculous. The kids share experiences of putting on a suit for the first time and getting on a subway and having somebody move over and make space for them, for the first time. Or walking into a corporate building and having people respond to them as if they’re people—not even people of importance, but ordinary people you don’t have to defend yourself around. They like that experience, and then they start figuring out what else goes along with it. You can’t blame them for not dressing like that without having someplace to go, or think they’re going to just run around the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant or East New York or Jamaica with suits on. That would be insane. In some ways, they are inspired to put on suits because they’re participating in a new aspect of their lives. They’re doing something different.
One young man in the Development School, a Puerto Rican student, said to me that somehow when he was in junior high school, he saw something about business and decided he wanted to be a businessman. But he didn’t know how to get from his situation in the South Bronx to becoming a businessman. He was very frustrated and started not doing school and just hanging out. Then Pam Lewis showed up to do an outreach in his high school. Later this young man told me, Dr. Fulani, I felt like God had sent her. We hear stories like that over and over and over again.