Accidental Careerist

I’m not one of those people who went searching for a career in life. I’ve had two careers and they both happened because of a chance meetings. They were more like accidents than opportunities. I don’t know if it is possible in today’s world to be an Accidental Careerist.


Growing up in the 60’s and 70’s I wasn’t a very ambitious kid. My first love in life was drawing. Some of my earliest memories are being in kindergarten drawing elaborate scenes of Spiderman webbing his way across skyscrapers fighting bad guys like the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus. If I wasn’t drawing Spiderman I was drawing scenes of war mostly involving tanks and jet fighters blowing up palm treed jungles. What I didn’t know then but can clearly see now my early life was heavily influenced by television as the psychedelic Spiderman cartoon was my favorite tv show and I must have been catching glimpses of the Vietnam War on the evening news, I don’t know how else to explain my obsession with drawing military hardware and burning jungles at such an early age.


In grade school my drawings became influenced by R. Crumb though at the time I had no idea who he was but I liked his art because drawing the “Keep on Trucking” guy became my trademark. I probably liked the Crumb stuff because it was forbidden for someone of my age. I can remember stopping into the Altadena Record store to look at the Crumb posters with the Keep on Trrucking guy and the buxom women. In the R. Crumb style I began drawing guys with huge afros, bell bottoms, and handguns, no doubt influenced by films like Shaft and Cotton Comes to Harlem. I was big into drawing motorcycles and choppers probably because of the film Easy Rider and the long forgotten tv show Then Came Bronson. Mad magazine was also a heavy influence for me. Mort Drucker and Sergio Aragones were the first artists I knew by name. Most of my drawings were in my spiral notebooks I used for school and the front and back of my PeeChee folders so nobody other than my friends saw my drawings. I never showed stuff to my parents, teachers, or other adults. In my mind they weren’t interested in my drawing skills, they were more concerned with my grades, completing household chores, and being good at sports.


As I approached junior high school I began to exclusively to draw Marvel comics superheroes. My younger brother Kenny started collecting comic books. Being the cheapskate that I was I didn’t collect too many comics, I just read the ones Kenny and his friend Marc bought. The Hulk and the Avengers were my favorites. I was always drawing the Hulk, Thor, and Conan the Barbarian, trying to emulate the style of legendary Marvel artist John Buscema. I was really good at reproducing comic book pages and even created my own comic book called Atomic Man that I made with typing paper and a stapler. Issue number one was an epic battle between Atomic Man and the Hulk. Up to this point in life the only thing I had dreamed of becoming when I grew up was a football player in the NFL. Now I was starting to dream of becoming a comic book artist. The only problem was that I knew nothing about how comic books were made and I didn’t know any adults who worked as a professional artist. My parents, their friends. and my many aunts and uncles were mostly blue collar workers working in factories or like my mother, a professional working for a large company like Pacific Bell. My mother started out with Pacific Bell as an operator but by the time I was in grade school she had moved up to an office job. I don’t know what she did but whatever it was it required her to dress professionally because she always went to work looking sharp in dresses and heels or the occasional smart looking pants suit. My father worked for Lockheed and I didn’t know what he did but I knew it was blue collar work because of the way he dressed and the tool box he carried in his van and truck. When I was in high school my father made it to the engineering level because he started dressing nicer and his wrenches and screwdrivers were replaced by a calculator, slide ruler, and a Commodore Vic-20 computer.


During my high school years I outgrew comic books and soon discovered Heavy Metal magazine. The incredible artwork and the mature stories and naked women made Marvel comics seem like child’s play. The artwork was beautifully done, less like comic book pulp and more like the fine art of Da Vinci and Michealangelo. In addition the stories were more inline with what I liked on a literary scale. Even though I loved comics and pop culture for drawing it was a different story when it came to reading. For written material I preferred science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery. Comic books were soap operas with simple good guy vs. bad guy story lines but Heavy Metal had stories of incredible fantasy worlds, metaphysics, philosophy, existentialism, cyberpunk, and sex. Since most of the artists were Europeans there was also an air of mystery about the artists. Moebius quickly became my new favorite artist but I also loved the artwork of Bilal, Phillip Druillet, Milo Manara, Liberatore, Richard Corben, and Frank Frazetta. The art was so good it was intimidating. I’d give my left arm to make art like Moebius but I didn’t have that kind of confidence in my ability. In my mind I had to be as good as these guys to make it as an artist and I wasn’t so I put becoming an artist out of my mind. I was really naïve about doing art. For my whole life I drew everything free hand. I would sit down with some paper and just start drawing. It was only much later in life when I was working as an artist did I realize that it was par for the course for artists to use references such as photographs, anatomy books, sculptures, live models, and tracing to create illustrations and drawings. In my limited view I thought that was cheating. I worked in a vacuum. I didn’t even consider myself an artist, I was just somebody who enjoyed drawing as a hobby.


As I mentioned before the only thing I dreamt about becoming as a kid was an NFL football player. Baseball was my first sport. My Dad coached Little League and I have many fond memories of spending Saturday’s at Loma Alta Park playing in games and consuming snow cones and hot dogs afterwards. Football though was my true love. Me and my brothers and neighborhood friends were obsessed with football. We all played Pop Warner football for the Pasadena Bulldogs and spent countless hours playing pick up games in the street or at the local parks and schools. When we weren’t playing real football outdoors we played electric football indoors. I don’t know of any other kids on the planet that went to the lengths we did in playing electric football. Our local toy store and hobby shop Henry’s sold electric football teams. We’d save our money and buy our favorite teams and we would have tournaments all day Sunday while watching real NFL football. We would usually meet at someone’s house and bring at least one extra football field so we could have multiple games going on at once. We bought model paint to modify our players so they looked like the real thing. We’d paint on wrist bands, elbow pads, high white socks and white shoes. We used small strips of foam to add neck braces behind player’s helmets. We stripped the paper off the wiring used to tie loaves of bread and made face masks. We made sure all of our players had the correct jersey numbers. We cut the letters off the decal number sheets to put names on the backs of player’s jerseys. It was a game of one-upmanship to see who could make their team look most like the real thing. I even made a locker room out of a shoe box for my teams. We also were rabid collectors of football cards. Me and my three brothers had shoe boxes full of football cards. We knew all the players in the NFL because we had their cards. We didn’t buy them for collecting, we bought them for the love of football. Little did we know that these cards would be worth major bucks to collectors as the years went on. Most of our cards ended up in the garbage, thrown out as we left adolescence for adulthood.


By the time I reached high school my fantasies of being an NFL football player began to fade. With each new level of playing the stakes became ridiculously higher. Up to high school I played football strictly for fun but once in high school football became ultra serious and practice was like boot camp and the team was like a military outfit. I played football for St. Francis High School in La Canada which at the time was known as a football school with a grand tradition of winning and uniforms that resembled the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. At St. Francis you were a nobody if you didn’t play football. I knew I wasn’t going to be an NFL player. I didn’t have the religious devotion to the sport that was required to reach that level. The game was no longer fun to me. After my freshman year I quit playing football much to the dismay of my father and the coaching staff. They were counting on me being a key figure on the team for four years and possibly going on to play college ball. I was a pretty good football player. I was a two way starter at defensive end and wide receiver but my heart wasn’t in it. I switched to basketball and track, two sports that received little respect at St. Francis. I was good enough at basketball to be considered college and NBA material. We made the playoffs my senior year after years of being a perennial loser and in track and field I set the league record in the triple jump and medaled in the CIF southern section finals.


By the time I was 17 my views of myself and life started to change drastically. In my community growing up being good at sports brought more respect than anything else. If you were good at sports you were known, people spoke of you, girls liked you, other guys thought you were cool. If you were good at something besides sports it was like nobody even cared. You could be a straight A student and you could still be a nobody. It was the same thing at St. Francis. Honor students were just students while athletes walked the school grounds like they were the gods of Olympus. As a black athlete at a white school all that was expected of me was being good at sports. In the minds of much of the student body that’s what I was there for, to help bring the school more football glory. I rebelled against this notion. I wanted to show that I was more than just an athlete. I wanted respect for my intelligence more than my athletic prowess. Little did I know had a rebel spirit in me. I began to rebel against expectations others had of me, including my parents. I declared myself an atheist to the priests at school. They wanted to counsel me like I was a troubled youth but I was having none of that. I was kicked off the basketball team for not seeing eye to eye with my coach and speaking my mind. I was no longer part of the “in” crowd at school so I started hanging out with the marginalized students. I began to question sports as my future and my ticket to a college education.


I didn’t realize I would be writing this much for the set up part of this particular blog entry. This was supposed to be a writing about how I got started in my careers and I haven’t mentioned anything about that yet. I’m going to end this entry here. I’ve laid down the foundation and I’ll get to the meat of the subject in the next entry. Stay tuned!


… to be continued

Drive By

Fortunately for me my brushes with the law have been few and far between. All my encounters with the police have been traffic related. Many times it was just a case of DWB but on a few occasions I have been stopped for legitimate purposes like expired registration tags, which in my younger days was the rule not the exception.


In my impoverished young adulthood vehicle insurance and registration were at times beyond my paltry budget so I took my chances and boy did I take chances. It wasn’t like I was driving some middle of the road, financed, upstanding citizen, blend into the void, kind of car… I drove a 1965 Rambler American. It was in good shape but it was a beater. It was a ska mobile that I bought off my most excellent friend Dan Parada who had decorated it with photos of the cast of the Big Chill on the inside passenger door, and with the words “Elvis died fat” printed on the dashboard under the radio. It was a four door that made for easy piling in and piling out of with the crew while wandering the streets of Los Angeles.


I must confess that I had many a reckless night in the City of Angels negotiating the freeways and mega boulevards for mile after mile from Pasadena to Hollywood, to Westwood, to Santa Monica, to Long Beach, Newport Beach, and back, even surviving the dreaded S-curve near the end of the Pasadena Frwy just before Ave. 64. The curve doesn’t have a name and people don’t speak of it but anyone who has driven that stretch knows the curve. Built in the 30’s and the oldest freeway in California the 110 Pasadena/Harbor Frwy had curves put in to make the drive “not boring” for the snail paced Ford Model T’s. making the drive from Pasadena to Los Angeles. Well “not boring” today is now “hair raising”. I was in the Rambler with my friend Dan P, on our way to Westwood to see “The Road Warrior” of all movies and we saw a VW go airborne and do multiple flips in the air right in front of us. The woman driving the Vee Dub didn’t hit anybody she just caught her wheel on the inside curb on the S-turn and up she went. I watched the car flip twice in the air, I thought it was going to land on us. She hit the ground, rolled once more and landed on her feet. We stopped about two feet short of her. Miraculously she was unhurt. Although physically she was ok, mentally she was scathed. She and the car were a wreck.


Thanks be to gods unknown I was never involved in an accident while driving a car… a bicycle yes, but never in a car. Part of my job working for the YMCA was transporting children in vans and busses which required me to have a Class B commercial driver’s license and certification from the California Highway Patrol so I had good driving skills. I may have been an irresponsible driver at times but I was always a safe driver. Before moving to San Francisco the only moving violations I had was a speeding ticket I acquired in law abiding South Pasadena for going 40 in a 35 mph zone. On the DWB stops I never had to ride in the paddy wagon because my name always came up clean on the computer search as well it should as I am a good citizen. That all changed when I moved to San Francisco.


My first month two months living in the Bay area were spent living in Oakland although I worked in San Francisco. My boss let me use the YMCA van to get to work and back until I relocated to the City. He didn’t like leaving the van in a the YMCA lot because it was a target for vandalism. I was so busy working the new job that for the first two months I didn’t go out and since I had no friends I hadn’t gone out to any bars in San Francisco or Oakland. My first night out at a bar in San Francisco would prove to be unforgettable.


My first night out at a bar was on Halloween night, 1991. Me and the youth staff at the YMCA had just finished doing the annual Haunted House fundraiser which was a smashing success. I was invited by one of the staff to go celebrate. We went to a bar called the Covered Wagon located on Folsom street in the South of Market area of SF. I was tired from a 16 hour day at work and I had not eaten but I was in a festive mood because I had just pulled off my first major event at my new job so a little celebrating was in order. Over the course of three hours I had 4 pints of ale. When I left the bar I didn’t feel drunk but I was feeling very tired. I hopped in the van to make the drive home not thinking twice about my condition. I made it across the Bay Bridge and was just about to get off the 580 freeway at MacArthur when I saw the red and blue flashing lights in the rearview. I wasn’t speeding or swerving so I was wondering what I was being pulled over for. The CHP officer said he pulled me over because I was straddling the line. He asked if I had been drinking. I said I had a few beers. They made me do the drunk tests, you know, stand on one leg, follow the finger, touch the nose, etc, etc. I thought I did well but the officers had other ideas because the next thing I know they tell me they’re taking me in for possible Driving Under the Influence. They were a couple of polite chaps so I went with them without argument, debate, or struggle.


Being handcuffed and put into a police car was a new experience for me. I had only been in a police car once in my life before this and that was in Rosarito Beach when me and my buddy Wes were pulled over one midnight in Rosarito Beach, Mexico. They told us we were speeding but we knew that was bogus, they just wanted to search us for bribe material. The Mexican cops put me in the back of the squad car without cuffing me. I knew the situation wasn’t that serious because they didn’t cuff me and in the backseat there was basket full of freshly done laundry. These guys weren't hardcore shakedown artists they were just bored and looking for a score. They searched the VW van and found a roach in a box of Marlboro reds. The maddening part about this was that neither Wes nor I smoked cigarettes and neither of us had brought any herbage for this trip because we couldn’t find any. The Marlboro reds had been left in the van by another friend weeks ago and the herb was homegrown which in LA is practically an insult. That roach ended up costing us $50 each. They wanted more but Wes beat them down on the price thanks to his well honed negotiation skills that he had developed haggling with Mexican vendors and store owners over the years. Here I was in the US of A where haggling for a DUI was out of the question. They drove me to the Oakland city jail where I was booked and put into the community cell. I never spent much time imagining what the inside of a jail looks like. We have all seen jails in movies and television shows but when does that ever measure up to reality? Courtrooms are always so beautiful and dramatically lit in the movies but every court room I have been in has been drab, rundown, and uniformly lit by harsh fluorescent lights which is the typical look for cvic offices and buildings that deal with the masses. The Oakland jail feels subterranean because there are no windows and everything is bland off discolored white brick, painted grey metal, and 1960’s green tiled floor. They gave me the Breathalyzer test and I came in at .09. Just my luck California had just lowered the drunk standard from 0.1 to .08. A year earlier I would have been legal but now I was considered legally drunk. I was photographed, fingerprinted, and put in a cell with about a dozen other men, all black and latino.


I surmised by the body language I was the only newcomer there. The cell was all hard surfaces with one metal bench, one dirty metal toilet, and one dirty pay phone. The phone was in constant use but nobody went near the toilet. Men were stretched out on the floor catching some z’s or or sitting against walls nodding off. I wouldn’t say that they were comfortable but they seemed used to the conditions. I was the only one standing up looking around checking everything and everybody out. Nobody in the cell was talking. All seemed quite content to pretend that the others didn’t exist. It was relatively quiet. I could hear the officers joking around with each other like people do on any job and I could hear them processing the perps. About every 10 minutes or so one of the inmates in another cell would start belting out the song “Somewhere” with a voice that eerily sounded like the lead singer from Blood, Sweat, and Tears. The Oakland jail was the last place I would expect to hear someone singing a song from West Side Story but since I’m a huge fan of that musical I found the singing rather comforting plus it's difficult to feel like you are in a hard place when some gravelly voice down the hallway starts belting out, "There's a place for us! Somewhere a place for us...!" The irony, which escaped cops and inmate alike, put everything into proper perspective for me. For this night the Oakland jail was my place of existence and a place for me to make up for past transgressions and pay my dues.


I chose to forgo making a phone call and trying to post bail because I was too embarrassed. I figured I messed up and needed to take my punishment like a man which meant staying the whole night in jail. After they let me out I would go retrieve the van and go to work and try to act like nothing happened. In my mind I was set to deal with whatever fallout that would come from my debacle. That actually put my mind at ease so I stood there in the cell just taking in the jail experience. More men were brought in over the course of the night. Sensing I was not a regular a few of the guys struck up conversations with me. I don’t know if I would call them conversations, they were more like confessions. It was like all of a sudden I was the cell priest or psychiatrist. Guys were telling me stories of remorse and how they ended up in jail…again. One guy I remember in particular because I really felt bad for him. He had been in jail for three or four years for armed robbery and all he wanted to do was get straight and see his kid who had just been born right before he went into the slammer. He was back in on parole violation. He said he had only been out a few days when he borrowed his brother’s car to go see some old friends. He was spotted and pulled over. He gave consent to check the car and the police found some crack cocaine underneath the driver’s seat. He said it wasn’t his but if you are a black man with a record there is no way the cops will give you the benefit of the doubt so here he was back in jail. I believed him. He had no reason to lie to me and he seemed really busted up about not being able to see his son. Most of the guys I talked to were back in for parole violations. The most common violation was hanging out with friends who were also known felons. These aren’t the smartest guys in the world to begin with but the way the system is utilized by law enforcement these guys will be in and out of jail most of their lives. I felt sympathy for them. I don’t know how they were on the street but in the cell they were polite and cordial. There was no fighting, dirty looks, or signifying. They were just quietly biding their time until release. Nobody was coming for them they just had to do their time.


I was released at about 7am. I retrieved my belongings and it felt good to be free once I hit the streets of downtown Oakland. I hailed a cab, picked up the van and drove home. I cleaned myself up and went to work. I told my boss what happened. I didn’t know what to expect. I felt bad because I let him down. He recruited me to come to work in San Francisco and I had impressed his superiors so this was definitely going to be a blow to my image. It seemed my worries were unfounded because he supported me 100%. I wasn’t proud of getting the DUI so I didn’t tell anybody, not even my parents. I just made a vow to do everything that would be required of me for the DUI, like paying the $1500 fine and attending the 6 weeks of DUI classes. For me it was a lesson learned. I wasn’t mad at the world or even myself. I made a mistake, plain and simple. The best thing for me to do was deal with the consequences without pity or apology.


About two weeks after the incident I finally received mail from the City of Oakland. I figured it was my court date notice. When I opened the envelop and read the letter I couldn’t believe what I was reading. The DUI charge had been dropped with no explanation. No further action on my part was needed. I didn’t have to go to court, I didn’t have to pay any fines, and I didn‘t have to attend any classes. Sometimes in life you get lucky and this was one of those times. Even though I was not a religious man I thanked the Lord for my fortune. I’d had plenty of misfortune in my life up to that point so I guess in the end it all balances out. In life sometimes you are up like a hang glider riding the thermal winds as free as a bird and other times you are down in the dumps with no way out. Sometimes it is by your own hand and sometimes it's just how the world turns.


Even though the charges were dropped my license was suspended for a year. I could only drive to and from and during the course of employment. That was not a problem for me since I only drove to and from work. I had been riding my bike as my main mode of transportation for five years so driving was something I only did for work. A few weeks later I moved to San Francisco where I have lived in various sections of the Western Addition for the last 18 years. San Francisco is the perfect place to live if you prefer to ride a bike over driving a car. It is the one thing that has kept me here for all these years. The City is so small geographically all you need is two feet and a pair of working legs. You don’t even need a bike. If you have too much to drink you can just walk home. It’s my preferred way to travel after leaving a bar or party. You never know what you will see or who you will meet and best of all I don’t have to worry about getting stopped by the cops for DUI or DWB. That’s something a brutha can live with.

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”.