Heal Ourselves

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo-obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

Angela Davis

Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974)

Recently I watched the documentary film 21 Up South Africa: Mandela’s Children, which is based in theme and format on the famous Up series documentaries by Michael Apted. The basic premise is to take a group of seven year olds from different socioeconomic backgrounds and interview them every seven years to see how their lives were progressing. Apted’s Up series started in 1964 and the last film released in the series was 49 Up which came out in 2005. Mandela’s Children started in 1992 not to long after the fall of apartheid in South Africa. The film opens with an interview with Willem who is an Afrikaner. At age seven he’s being interviewed on the family farm just north of Johannesburg. The interviewer is asking him about his school which for the first time will be integrated with black children.


“There will be blacks there until the first break, after the break there’ll be none.” says Willem.


“Why?” asks the interviewer.


“They’re not allowed in our school.” replies William


“Why?”


“We don’t like them. They’re not allowed in our school. They’re not white.”


While Willem is giving his answers he’s smiling and not at all nervous or hesitant with his answers. He’s completely comfortable with what he is saying. At the tender age of seven his indoctrination into racial bias is already well under way. To be fair to Willem I have to also touch on what he said about his answers when he was 14. He said he was stupid and was just expressing the views of the world he lived in. He said the blacks that came to his school were good people and he did not expect that. At age 21 he is shown playing for the rugby team for Johannesburg University and he is seen embracing his teammates black and white.


The next child to be interviewed is Thembilise who at age seven is living with her grandmother in a shanty town in Soweto that has seen its share of violence and killing. The interviewer is asking her what she wants to be when she grows up.


“I’ll be a policeman so that I can shoot you.”


“Why?” asks the interviewer.


“Black people are ugly and whites are beautiful.”


Just like Willem she does not hesitate and answers the question with a smile on her face. Like Willem at age seven she is being indoctrinated in racial bias but the twist here is that it is self directed. At times in the interview Thembilise refers to black people as “they” or “them” as if she sees herself as not being black but something other. At age 14, like Willem she says she was just expressing what she had seen as a young girl. At age seven she talked about black people killing each other. It is unfortunate that a child at age seven has this kind of knowledge. Willem looks like he was able to outgrow his racist views he held as a seven year old and not have to carry that baggage around because it was not about him. Kids believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy but eventually they come to know the truth and they move on. Thembilise on the other hand has branded herself with a self hatred that will probably affect her views of herself and the world she lives in for the rest of her life.


How many black children over the generations have been infected by self hatred? How do the feelings of self hatred manifest itself in the world we live in? What can be done for black children so that they develop a healthy view of who they are? These are difficult questions with no easy answers and it is something that we in the black community don’t want to talk about most of the time but it is something we need to address because everything starts with the children. For black people around the world self hatred is not endemic. We aren’t born with it. It develops in places like South Africa and the United States where there is a significant number of black people but the dominant culture and ruling class that is not black. It happens in places where there has been a historical campaign to paint black people as inferior and unworthy. Yes we have made progress. We have a black president, there are black CEO’s, there are visibly wealthy black people in entertainment and sports, there are black scholars, black doctors, black scientists, black writers, and black entrepreneurs but these people represent the best of our best. On the other end of the spectrum there is a completely different story going on. The number of black people in prison far exceeds the number of black people in college. The poorest sections of all of our major cities are black. We have a high rate of fatherless homes. We have a high rate of drug and alcohol abuse. Black students drop out of school at an alarming rate. Our biggest contribution to society in recent times has been rap music and saggy pants. Worst of all we black people kill, rob, and rape other black people which to me is the most significant indicator of how deep our self hatred goes. In the United States the gulf between the have and have nots grows ever wider but in the black community that gulf is even more profound. We can point to our successes and say we are making progress but how do we account for our disproportionate representation in the prison system, unemployment, welfare programs, and school drop out rates? It is bad enough the damage inflicted upon us by the status quo but the damage we inflict on ourselves is even worse.


We will always have our critics. In the mainstream media from the daily news to films and tv shows we are either saints or sinners, mostly sinners. We have bought into it much to our own detriment. We were not always like this. In the 20 years after slavery there were over 800 published black newspapers. Universities were erected to quench the black thirst for education. We gave birth to institutions like the NAACP and the Tuskegee Institute to be the vanguard of black progress. We fought valiantly in American wars to prove our worth as Americans. When shut out by segregation we created our own music (jazz), baseball league, and ballet companies. We had visionary leaders like Marcus Garvey who challenged us to be better not by word but by action. We knew who the enemy was and it was not us.


In modern times we have met the enemy and he is us. My parents raised me without much rhetoric. They didn’t denigrate white people or the greater society. They didn’t speak negatively of black people or any people for that matter. Mostly they stressed that I needed to be prepared for the reality of the world I live in and that success in life was based on hard work and to take everybody I meet at face value. This was shown more by example than by words. They never said it was going to be easy but they also never told me that anything could hold me back. This was my basic defense against what was happening in the world beyond my home and neighborhood. On the walls of our home there were only two prints that represented people, one of Martin Luther King and the other Angela Davis. Me and the ‘rents never had a sit down to discuss the two legends but their presence on the wall stood for something and my brothers and I were allowed to absorb it on our own terms. Without being overt or didactic my parents instilled in me a love of self and pride for being black. I was fortunate to grow up in the “black is beautiful” era. I can remember a gathering of cousins back in the early 70’s and being led by our Uncle Jim in chanting “black power!” with fists raised in the air like John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the 1968 Olympics. As a child I was not aware of the significance but the seeds were planted.


Growing up black there are many things you come to know not by being taught directly but by absorbing it from the society we live in. My immediate community may be saying that black is beautiful but the message from the greater society was that white was the standard that I had to live up to. The closer to white you were the better. Even as a child I was aware that lighter skin and straighter hair were valued over darker skin and kinky hair. As a child Michael Jackson represented the epitome of beauty with his glowing smile and perfect afro. But as he became older he traded in his afro for a more processed, wet look. This was the trend that was happening across black America, the afro was giving way to the mullet like shag and the Jheri curl. Black being beautiful was in question. I struggled with it myself. As I hit puberty I began to believe that I was ugly, at least to the opposite sex. My skin was too dark, my lips were to big, and my hair was too kinky.


In my early 20’s I began working with school aged children and really began to see how self esteem was crucial to a child’s development. Children are strong but they are also very fragile and sensitive. Even though we are born with a unique personality and innate skills, as children we can only know the world from the communities we live in and the adults who are responsible for raising us. Like Willem and Thembilise children are a reflection of what they have been taught either from direct experience or absorbing from the environment they live in. They mimic what they see and hear around them but because of their limited ability to comprehend they are unable to distinguish truth from dogma, propaganda, and manipulation. Much of the time it is not the actual knowledge or information that makes a difference for a child it’s the source of the knowledge or information. Children come to recognize authority figures in their life, the people that set their boundaries and approve or disapprove of their actions and behavior. These are their true role models, not celebrities and athletes.


While it is possible for a child to overcome negative and dysfunctional environments it is more likely that they will develop and incorporate the dysfunction because it is what dominates the environment. As a child matures influences multiply and at some point they come to understand that there is a prevailing standard for behavior and ways of being and if they aren’t up to that standard they can become conflicted. If there is no way for them to deal with the confliction it becomes internalized. It becomes the subtext for their actions in the real world which as they mature becomes more dominated by the status quo.


Is it possible to change dysfunctional children without severely altering dysfunctional communities? The prevailing wisdom seems to believe that by changing the conditions of the community you can change the people. There has been much focus on welfare and social programs aimed at uplifting and changing communities but have they been effective or are they just tools of politics? When I was a Senior Program Director for the YMCA I ran the Summer Youth Employment Training Program for San Francisco for two summers in a row. The process for winning the grant was very political and the main motivation for going after the grant was not to help young people get jobs but to help secure our bottom line and to make our resumes more attractive. The program, like many social programs, was more concerned about the bureaucracy than the actual participants. It was always a numbers game. We had to reach specific goals in recruiting and placement and as long as we did that we were successful in the eye of our auditors and would most likely receive the funding again the next year. If it looks good on paper everyone involved on the management level can use it to promote themselves from the Mayor to the non-profit CEO. The reality is that a good number of kids failed at retaining their jobs because nothing about the program dealt with the participants as individuals. They were given jobs and expected to succeed and when they failed they were just placed in another job or they dropped out the program. Instead of giving the kids jobs we would have served them better by acting as mentors and coaches providing them counseling to assist them with improving their self esteem and personal habits and letting them find the jobs themselves with our support.


In my last year working for the YMCA I started a midnite basketball league. It wasn’t really a league, I just opened the gym on Saturday night and let the local gang affiliated teens come in and play basketball. I did this in response to some of the local parents and adults asking us at the YMCA if there was anything we could do to keep the youth from loitering on weekend nights and causing trouble. I started the program with no funding or public relations work. We just put the word out to the local teens that the gym would be available to them. They showed up with their street personas acting hard and aloof and treating me like I didn’t exist. Basically the only rule I laid down to them was to respect the facilities. No drugs, no weapons, no fighting, and properly dispose of candy bar wrappers and soft drink cans. Once in the gym they were on their own. I stayed at the front desk monitoring the door and left them to their own devices. Once the kids were off the street I noticed it didn’t take long for them to drop their street personas. I would peek in on them and they would be laughing it up playing ball and having a good time. The gym was a place they could let their guard down but as soon as they left they reverted back to the street. I could see the transformation of each youth as he passed through the gateway from the YMCA lobby to the outside world. The smiles disappeared and the bounce in their steps gave way to a swagger, a message to the world of “don’t fuck with me.”


For weeks they never said a word to me but at some point they began to trust me. They started to say “hi” to me when they entered the building and soon they asked me if I wanted to play. That’s when I knew I was making progress, or rather they were making progress. Around the neighborhood I started to receive acknowledgement from the local gangsters. The word was out that I was “ok”. This is where many social programs fail. Time is not taken to build trust, it’s not in the budget. I didn’t pass judgment on these kids nor did I heap on them undeserved praise, I just stood by them for the possibility of change. I supported them silently. I let them come to me. Unfortunately just as I gained their trust I left the YMCA for reasons I won’t go into right now and that was the end of Saturday night basketball. I don’t know what became of those kids or if my minimalist approach had any lasting effect but I am glad I did it. I learned a valuable lesson about working with people. It’s the human element that makes the difference. It doesn’t matter what your reputation is, what legacies you have, or how much money you make, in order to successfully work with young people you have to show your humanity.


As much as I love Bill Cosby, when he called out the black community to do better by itself I didn’t agree with his methods. He took the route of the bully pulpit. He took a big brush and painted many people with it without knowing who these people were. It was judgment without humanity, without connection. Whether his words were right or wrong was immaterial, it was the perception that mattered. He was a have that was berating the have nots. In the end Cosby’s words didn’t affect the people he was aiming at, they rejected the messenger, but it was a boon for the media who made it into a controversy.


I can’t do proper justice to the subject of collective self hatred in a blog. Books and dissertations can and should be written on the subject but what I can do is shine a light on it and acknowledge its power and existence. We have the power to do something about it. As I said before it starts with the children because that is where the damage begins that lasts for a lifetime. As author Andrew Vachss states, children are “another chance to get it right”.