What My Greatest Failure Taught Me: Young Black MenAren’t the Problem, We Are

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Four things that you should all know about me rightfrom the start. I grew up in a single-parent home, theyoungest of three boys. I met my father for the veryfirst and only time at age 28. My oldest brother Eanwas shot and killed at age 30—just shy of his 31stbirthday. And it is a scientific fact that I am mymother’s dumbest child.

That’s the first time I’ve ever admitted that last part outloud. It’s always been a source of shame, strangelyenough. Even insecurity.

While it’s something I’ve since overcome, I can stillpretty clearly recall those biting feelings of inadequacy I felt growing up in my house, knowing that mybrothers, Ean and Jeffrey—on top of being older, bigger and stronger than me—would always be better inschool, as well.

No matter how many A’s or high B’s I brought home, I would invariably come in third place—or second, onthe rare occasion that either of them were sick or otherwise off their games. Not even after winning a full-tuition scholarship to college did they completely disappear.

But why am I starting off a talk about the future of young black men with this particular anecdote? some ofyou might be asking yourself.

Because it’s necessary to paint a portrait of some of the environments in which many of us grow up thatultimately lead us to be subconsciously ignorant of—if not complicit in—the plight facing so many youngblack men across America.

Most people who know me today don’t know that I once used to be a middle school teacher. They don’tknow that I was accepted into Teach For America—what many consider the most selective teachertraining program in the country—immediately after graduating from college.

They don’t know that I taught 7th and 8th grade Language Arts at the Warren Street School in theNewark Public School system. Moreover, they don’t know that I stayed in my position for a mere twomonths before quitting. Throwing in the towel. Giving up.

Just two short months in, I, being all of 22, had judged the young black boys in my classroom—and it wasalmost always the boys who were a “problem”—unsalvageable. There was nothing I could do for them, Ithought. I had had enough of their “rudeness,” their “laziness,” their “indifference,” I decided. I was there toteach, after all, not babysit.

I’m embarrassed and ashamed to say that it’s taken me a decade to realize just how wrong I was in myown rude, lazy, indifferent rush to judgment, my rush to prosecute them without examining all of theevidence.

The young black boys in my classroom who were dispassionate about education weren’t the problem, Inow realize looking back on the 10th anniversary of my submitting my letter of resignation and walkingaway from the first real job I had ever held as an “adult.” Neither was it their problem or their fault that Iresponded to their reluctance with frustration and—on more than one occasion, I’m not proud to admit—anger.

Again, it wasn’t their fault. It was mine.

By being born the way I was, raised the way I was, I had unwittingly and foolishly become party to asystem that took a seemingly laissez-faire attitude toward black male achievement. I naively assumed theyoung boys in my class would simply come into this world ready to learn straight away—fully-equippedwith their pencil sharpeners and protractors as I had been.

I was wrong.

Our young boys deserve much more than that. They deserved better than what I gave them. Our societycan’t afford to make such costly mistakes any longer.

We must begin to see our boys as boys. What’s more, we must begin to see them as early as possible andnever allow our eyes to stray nor our attentions to wander. Not unlike families with financial means, wemust begin to construct intricately detailed blueprints that outline the destinies of our sons so that theyhave a road map to follow into and through life.

We must encode into their very DNA make up the notion that higher learning, if not higher educationnecessarily—whether that means college, technical, culinary or art school—is not only their birthright but aform of fighting back. After all, education serves as arguably the most durable shield against the countlessfalsehoods that we all too easily recite about black boys before they are even old enough to stand.

To combat this constant bombardment of preconceived notions about their race and masculinity that theyare bound to encounter—both from members of their own community and the greater society—it’sincumbent upon us to cultivate in young boys a sense of open-mindedness to accepting new andcounterintuitive concepts. This is why such activities as regularly reading to and with children when theyare young are so extraordinarily important.

It’s only via the vaccination of education, through a premium placed on the importance of learning forlearning’s sake, that we can protect them from the many harmful messages they are victim to each andevery day.

“Black men don’t speak ‘white.’” “Black men don’t go to college.” “Black men don’t study poetry, art orSTEM” (science, technology, engineering and mathematics.)

But it’s important that this work begins from Day 1. We can’t just leave them idle and to their own devicesuntil they stumble aimlessly into manhood, burdened—and at times angry—with a sense of abandonment.

If I have learned nothing else over my seven years as a teacher in Newark, counselor at the IllinoisMathematics and Science Academy, and librarian for the New York Public Library, it’s that education,while always awe-inspiring in its power, is very rarely an interventionist enterprise. Indeed, for education totruly be transformative, it should be planted as early as possible and given time and space to firmly takeroot and blossom.

The plight that young black men face today isn’t a result of them merely being born; it’s a result of aseemingly endless procession of supposed grownups in their lives who don’t appear to be all thatconcerned about them until it’s very often too late.

Through a mixture of our own apathy, lethargy and—yes, I’ll admit—frustration and anger, we simply bideour time ineffectually. We go through the motions long enough for our boys’ voices to deepen, for theirmuscles to grow sinewy and intimidating, for the first wisps of manhood to sprout on their faces.

Because only when our boys become men do we appear willing to truly see them. And fear them.

After all, how else could a young man get to the 7th grade while only being able to read at a 4th or 5thgrade proficiency level? Consider for a moment how many people had to fail him before he ever got theopportunity to fail himself. His teachers. His counselors. His parent or guardian. To steal a well-wornbaseball euphemism, we all had to have dropped the ball.

Still, we can comfort ourselves in the knowledge that it’s rarely ever too late to pick it up again and atonefor our past errors.

It’s almost never too late to begin again. As the Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett once said:“Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

(I, for one, try to fail better a little too often probably.)

But we must first put aside our preconceived notions about black boys; we must issue each and every oneof them—and the ones who are yet to be born, above all else—the equivalent of a “fresh start” slip, as wereferred to it in my library days. We must assume that they each enter this world as unbruised and ripe forthe picking as any other child.

During my time with NYPL, I got the opportunity to volunteer with inmates at Rikers Island CorrectionalFacility—the vast majority of them black and Hispanic and around my age.

Here were the spectral manifestations, over a decade later, of the young men I grew up with—who satbehind me in homeroom, who lived down the hall from me, who I regularly played basketball against atClaremont Park in the South Bronx.

There, but for the grace of God, go I, I thought each time I walked the halls of the GRVC unit at Rikers. Isaw myself in the faces of these young men, and I secretly wondered whether or not they saw themselvesin me.

I know this much is true.

I failed the young men in my class a decade ago. I failed them because I couldn’t somehow understandwhy they weren’t like me, why they didn’t get to school well before the first bell each morning and stay latelong after school let out each afternoon.

I based their fate on my presuppositions about who they were, what they should be like, and what theyshould and shouldn’t know. I didn’t think about the teachers in 5th and 6th grades who failed them. I didn’tfactor in the fathers who may or may not have been present in their lives, much less the overburdenedmothers who were so busy toiling, trying to keep food on the table, they very rarely, if ever, prioritizedreading, writing and arithmetic.

My self-centeredness led to their downfall, and for that transgression I have spent a small piece of everyday for the last eleven years—more than 3,800 in total—thinking about them, wondering, at times out loud,what their lives are like, if I might recognize them if I passed them on the street.

They would be 23 and 24 now. Are they good men? I catch myself wondering. Husbands and fathers?Doctors and lawyers? I guess I can’t allow myself to think of a less idyllic alternate reality, truth be told.That would be too heavy a cross for me to shoulder, I think.

I’m not saying any of this to atone for past transgressions. I know the young man I was at 22—wilful,stubborn, impatient. And I’d like to believe I know a bit better the still relatively young man I am now at 33—just a little less wilful, stubborn, impatient. Anyway, while I’m not Catholic, I’d like to believe I’ve paid mypenance. And even if I haven’t, there’s nothing I can do about it now, is there?

But what I can and will make certain—what we all can and should make certain—is that we learn from pasterrors in judgment. Because just like the nameless, faceless traveler in Robert Frost’s ageless poem, “TheRoad Not Taken,” I’m increasingly afraid that we may have finally come to that ominous “two roadsdiverged in a yellow wood” in our dealings with young black men. And the only thing we can be sure of iswe can’t travel both.

So what will we do? Which path will we take? What will the choices that we make today mean for themtomorrow?

As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself pondered in his 1967 book of the same name: “Where do we go fromhere: chaos or community?”