Many contemporary educational
challenges are faced in urban environments. At entry, most students
go through metal detectors and security guards. They then proceed
in some cardinal direction down the hallways, where security guards
signal to encourage the pace, blowing a whistle or air horn when deemed
necessary. Books are collected, and students find their
seats. They receive books, which are to prepare students for knowledge
to be assessed in a proficiency exam. Once the determined information
is digested, the student then graduates to the next level, where the
process continues until the completion of high school.
However, our children are struggling
to make it there and beyond—not because of academic
rigor, but for reasons which are entrenched in debate. At the heart
of the debate lay resentment, racism, anger, hatred, fear, and a system
that does not work as is. And as debate has squawked on, improvements
only petered, the generation gap spread, the achievement gap spread,
our communities have made inroads against themselves, territorial conflicts
and racial conflict plague the halls, and “making it big” has mesmerized
the sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters of those who struggled
just for a chance. In other words, times have changed.
For urban youth today, I feel
excitement and anxiety. To them, a precarious position has been given.
Growing up in a newly re-separated and unequal America, our children
search for role models, after-school programs, artistic outlets, stable
communities, and available parents. They find underpaid and underappreciated
public school teachers who have little energy to dedicate to the classroom
in need of individual help. They find under-funded NGO’s and they
lose program after program dependant on federal aid, which goes, increasingly,
to wars. They find drugs and gangs. Do they find what they need?
Or even further, what do they need? I only insinuate teachers.
Should I have placed responsibility
on teachers? The first response I would have expected to that statement
would be “You can’t possibly expect the education system to take
responsibility for the war on drugs!” And I would say, “You
are right. I expect no systemic responsibility in trying to stop this
issue.” In fact, I call it a systemic issue and call for an
extra-systemic—or pre-systemic—solution. Another response would
arise, and another, and debates would continue as we each exercise our
rhetorical abilities learned so well. But my point would be lost in
debate. What tends to be forgotten in debate is our children always
learn; they just now tend not to learn the system.
Therefore I refuse to offer
a clear solution. What I ask is for conversation. What has been lost
is the community as a whole. It has been fragmented, and the
stories told are of hoop and microphone dreams. Should we look at gang
histories in a place like the Bronx, which the Bronx African American
History Project (BAAHP) is doing, we would see that so many rappers
come from the same groups that tend birth violence. What does this mean?
Hip-hop’s consciousness is untenably being held by street life, originally
being a voice to young black males—now the voice for urban youth around
the world. Are we listening to each other?
Our youth are partially being
educated in materialism and conflict, but also structure, organization
and a rebellious spirit with an ego. The mainstream view of urban realities
denies the ingenuity and the awareness it takes to run a successful
establishment on the corner. It demonizes this space, and derides all
morals and cultural expressions associated with this space. This is
no defense or glorification of the life-style, but I do—and believe
we need to—acknowledge the realities of a certain kind of accomplishment.
Without doing so, we alienate independent communities that beg to be
heard.
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