There was no place for us in school. I would argue that the greatest waste of time in my
life was the four years I spent in high school. And this is coming from an educator. That
there was, from the food that we were fed, to the only way we were really accepted
in school, you know, that, black boys are the mascots of any high school that they're in,
where I grew up, I don't know about other places--I've seen it in other places though.
I see it now at universities, where like the black dudes are the, you know, they're the provocative
part of your experience in high school or college or in the work place, you know. And
for me, it just, it didn't speak to me. A white boy who walks in the room, and is animated
and moving around and maybe even a little cheeky is smart, and 'isn't he smart? Isn't
he cheeky?' He's almost looked at as 'well, boys will be boys.' A child--a boy-- of color,
especially an African American boy, who walks in the room exhibiting the same behavior,
walks in and is 'hmm, I might need to keep an eye on him' and that, I really believe,
is our internalized racism. That we are afraid of these young boys, and I'm talking young
boys four years old and above. And that instead of the teacher looking at him or herself and
saying, "What is going on with me, that this same behavior creates fear in me instead of
admiration?" We pathologize the boy of color. Race always deals with boxes. And, I think
when we are... So let's say you grow up in the suburbs
or you grow up in affluent area of a city that has an affluent area and a ghetto. But, you're black. A black boy.
And, you... So you get to school and there's a box for you, and that box says you rap, you're
an athlete, you're slightly to highly misbehaved,
you...you're not involved into your education, you sell and/or use drugs. That's the box that you're accepted in.
And, in order to play ball, no pun intended, that's how you interact with yourself, your own identity.
And this is how you're cool, but you feel like the box that it traps you in, is you feel
like to be healthier, to be in a more sound mind state
to think and know and come from a place of foundation in your life
is something that you have to be ashamed of and you have
to denounce can drive you crazy.
So, my sophomore year I took a trip to Appalachia, with just a religious,
kind of service group. And we were set up with little home repair projects in
this very small, rural, low-income community in Eastern Kentucky. And some of the houses
didn't have running water, some of them didn't have electricity and they were down these
rudded roads and in an area that I just never knew existed and conditions I didn't know
existed in our country. And at the same time, there were these huge coal corporations just
raking in huge money in the same communities and it just made me look at what was wrong
with this picture. And what did I want to do about it? And I ended up wanting to take
more people to Appalachia and take people to the deep South and just give 'em a, just
an immersion experience in poverty, an immersion experience in racism.
More and more we came
they were not the problem of individuals. So we had started on this path of trying to
understand systems and in the course of that I met john powell, who is very passionate
about race as well. And so he started talking about his perspective about how he saw race
playing into all of this. And of course, when he started talking about race and how it operated
in our society it immediately started resonating with me because it started explaining all
of these personal experiences, these individuals experiences that I had had in a way that I
could see that they fit into this much larger system. That, it wasn't just my father being
an immigrant, or wasn't just my father being dark skinned, but this was something--this
experience was something that he had had--my father had had, was an experience he shared
with many people who found themselves being described in similar ways.