Do any of you remember the 1980’s comedy Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure?
There was a scene in there where Keanu Reeves introduces Socrates to the
audience, and says “like Ozzy Osborne today, he was accused of corrupting the
young.”
The scene illustrates how even reluctant young people can
learn. What they need is something they can relate to, as in the case with the
teenager in Bill & Ted. The Ozzy Osborne analogy says something about how
we view the problem as well. All the paranoia today about hip-hop inspired
shootings; there was similar hysteria about heavy metal in the 80.’
A Search Past Silence
is about how teachers can reach young black men, as long as they can find a “hook,”
or some kind of common ground that will entice the learner. In the first
chapter, a teacher looks at a kid’s rap lyrics and says “why can’t you write
like this in class?” Now that’s exactly what any well-educated teacher would
say. The problem is that the teacher doesn’t understand how the kid thinks. He
doesn’t find his high school English class terribly appealing. The usual
“you’re not living up to your full potential” speech doesn’t work on ANY kid,
let alone fatherless black boys.
Professor David Kirkland writes the story around Shawn and
Derrick, two boys who’ve inherited a mess. Their ancestors fled the deep south,
with its racism and hopeless economy. They ended up in a lousy inner-city
neighborhood full of bad people who used drugs, good people who came back crazy
from Vietnam (an uncle came back on heroin.) What do they have to show for it
now? Bad food, bad air, the fear of white men in white robes is replaced with
cops who beat them. The kind of message that a morals-spewing teacher has for them,
they won’t care. The kids will read-Malcolm X, Assata, black street
literature-they know it’s there, but expressing themselves through writing is a
problem.
There are solutions to these problems. Years ago, a high
schooler interviewed me for a school paper, and he was bewildered by my teenage
experiences. He was like “yo, you actually liked Nirvana? You though torn jeans
were cool? No wonder you white people dress like shit. Why did your school need
a dress code if the Five Towns had no gangs?”
It seems that Kirkland blames the problem on communication.
First, they’re taught English as some kind of foreign language, and when they
get to school, the things the teacher says don’t sound right to them. Second,
the media creates the image of black boys as malevolent troublemakers, and that
same image encourages the boys to act macho in order to get attention. Lastly,
the police allow themselves to be insulted when a black boy disobeys them, and
they avenge all insults with roughness. If the boys have weak families at home,
and the authority are seen as being against them, what are they supposed to
think about life?
Give these kids a chance to write about themselves. It’s not
like they’ve had no adventures in their lives. They just don’t know what to
compare their lives to, because they don’t know what’s out there. Think of it
as color-blindness; if you only see browns, how will you know if there’s a
brown object in the room? You need another color to see the difference. Unless
the students have a chance to see the rest of the city, and all the other great
things out there, they won’t think enough about their lives to write about
them.
I applaud Kirkland’s efforts. He made a great effort to tell
this story in an unbiased manner, with no judgments or prejudices. It’s not
just black boys that have the problems we see in this book; white people have
this problem too. Watch the documentary Dream Deceivers, where the parents blame a kids’ shooting on heavy metal
music. They even sue the band and the record company. Too many of us look to
blame something for our problem-guns, music, video games-but the cure is going
to depend on the way we communicate to the kids.
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