UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIOLOGICAL LANDSCAPE OF BLACK YOUTH (Chapter 4 of AMERICA'S PIPELINE TO PRISON)

CHAPTER 4

Education Is The Key

Understanding The Sociological Landscape of Black Youth in America

• A Culture of Violence
• The Emergence of the 80s Generation
• Creating a New Model to Mentor At-Risk Youth
• Using a Hip Hop Based Pedagogy 
• Culturally Specific & Peer-Centered Curricula

Education is The Key

Understanding The Sociological Landscape 

of Black Youth in America

Our most vulnerable in society has always been our children. Child health data from the Center For Disease Control has shown that American children are at risk in a number of areas such as childhood obesity, abuse and neglect, infant mortality, gun violence, juvenile delinquency and recently, rates in low educational performance has become a national crisis. Health care specialists indicate that most of these areas can be lowered through using intervention steps in education.

Education seems to be the key in any given area of concern that affects the quality of life of all people. We begin educating our nation as early as three and four years old. We have a very wide ranging pre-school approach across the country and one would think that our children would be thoroughly educated on key issues that affect their health and welfare, right? Evidently no! Somewhere along the line we’re missing the mark. 

In the State of Michigan there is a Healthy Schools Program that is leading transformations of conditions and systems that lead to healthier children, focusing on changing school menus to include more fruits and vegetables and encouraging more schools to engage in daily fitness and exercise. Michigan is the 18th most obese state in the US for children. It is reported that 32.6% of Michigan children are obese. That number doesn’t include those considered over weight. No wonder then, that Michigan ranks the 10th most obese state in the US for adults. This indicates that obesity rises after childhood and into adulthood.

Today’s Youth Live in A Culture of Violence

Today’s children are even growing up in what has been termed “a culture of violence.” In Detroit nearly three dozen children under the age of 18 have been killed on average since 2000. That’s nearly 500 children murdered in just over a decade. Students as early as kindergarten can explain what a homicide is and perhaps identify someone either from their family or from within their neighborhood that has been killed. Even teen dating violence affects children as young as eleven years old. Violence has become an epidemic that has affected our most vulnerable in society: kids. Bullying is nowadays an everyday facet of children’s upbringing. We have become a generation of “mean.” 

Gangs and drugs have infiltrated the lives of our children as well. Even pre-teenage boys have been known to form and join street gangs. Children have admitted to smoking cigarettes and trying illicit drugs as early as 8 and 9 years of age. One of the indicators of children falling into these self destructive behaviors have been identified as a lack of parental involvement and home discipline. Too, homes that are abusive and have incidents of violence or drug use are environments where children ultimately become exposed to a lack of guidance. In this kind of setting kids are more likely to join a gang, use drugs and even exhibit violence or other aggressive acts of behavior.

It is for these reasons that I work with students. I myself was an at-risk youth in the early 80s. I found myself in juvenile incarceration at the age of 12 for assault at school. That was in 1985 and within five years I was convicted of my first adult felony at the age of 17. I was caught with a .38 special handgun in route to rob a columbian drug dealer. From the age of 12-17 I was involved in selling crack cocaine. I ran with a “crew” of teenagers that all sold drugs. Most of us carried guns. Most of us used marijuana and drank alcohol regularly. Fighting was a norm in our lives. Most of us no longer lived at home. We ran the streets on our own living in crack houses, hotels and with adult women. 

The Emergence of the Generation 

Raised in the 80s

My generation was the first group of kids to find themselves changing the climate of culture in the mid 80s that has now shaped the current landscape of life for todays young people. The system responded to us with extreme measures of mass incarceration and zero-tolerance policies within schools. We became a targeted generation, mostly by stereotype. The juvenile justice system became overwhelmed with arrests of kids as young as 8 and 9. By the time we became adults we were already life long offenders primed for prison. The prison population sky rocketed from a few hundred thousand in the 70s to over 2 million men and women incarcerated in the US, the highest rate of imprisonment in the world.

So how do we combat this crisis? Great question I might add. The problem is drastic, appearing nearly insurmountable. However no problem or crisis is one that can’t be overcome. It’s going to take a lot of serious dedication and determination to change the climate of culture as well as the entrenched laws, policies and current approaches that are either contributing to this epidemic or failing to properly remedy them. The school-to-Prison pipeline is a very real stage coach that is driving our children out of school and into the criminal justice system. Mass incarceration has been the only response from the system. However we have to stand up to this approach and say NO. We will not continue to let the system seek to remedy crime by a single solution incarceration approach.

I believe we must become more involved with invention as early as possible. Parents must be encouraged to not only seek out checks and balances within their own home, but they too must become one with the school system. Our schools need to be welcoming  parents into the classroom. Education is not the sole purview of schools, but rather it is a joint responsibility of both parents and teachers. Together they can mutually provide the essential instruction, love and guidance children need while growing up and becoming adults. 

How I Began Modeling my Work with At-Risk Youth

I began working with students in 1994 at Waupun Correctional Institution while I was serving a 45 year sentence for a wrongful murder conviction. I was selected as a panelists for a two year program called “Teach The Teachers.” Inner city Milwaukee educators would come to the prison for a half day workshop in which carefully selected prisoners were chosen to “teach” an amazing group of teachers about how to help their students avoid the pitfalls we had ourself fallen into. This was followed up with being adopted by select teachers to engage in pen pal writing with students from their classes. I participated in both phases. I was fascinated by the questions these students posed. They held back no punches. They had questions that they wanted answers for. They were determined to avoid the prison life I described in my letters as response to some of their questions about what prison was really like as opposed to Television.

This lead me to work with Asha Family Services, Inc of Milwaukee. Asha was one of the only culturally specific and relevant organizations that dealt with Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault within the African-American community. I was asked by its director Antonia Dew to help develop a program that would treat the batterer as opposed to the survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault. Along with three other prisoners, we developed a program that would be called Ujima Mens Education Program that has now been operating nearly twenty years in Milwaukee and has been modeled by other organizations across the country.

Upon my release in 2006 I began implementing a program through H.A.P.E. (Helping All People Excel) that I created in prison called A.M.E.N. (The African-American Mentoring & Education Network), now called The Academic Mentoring & Education Network 4 Youth. It was designed to fuse mentoring with academics.

The goal was to engage students through a direct mentoring approach by sharing with youth the harsh realities of a life of crime leading to incarceration and even death. Many of my friends were killed while in their teens and many others in their twenties. Most of my other friends are either still incarcerated or have spent considerable time in and out of prison since the 80s. I myself spent 15 years incarcerated for a murder of which I was innocent. The Wisconsin Innocence Project finally was able to convince the then Parole Chairman, Lennard Wells to take a look at my case. He agreed that I should be released and after 14 years, 11 months and 6 days I was freed from prison September 12, 2006.

Today AMEN 4 Youth, LLC operates throughout the State of Michigan but most particularly in Jackson Public Schools, where I use not only mentoring but I developed a literacy program called  S.L.A.M. or Spoken Lyrics with an Academic Mission. This literacy program consists of a series of curriculum workbooks and an engagement program using Lyrical Education to teach not only classroom coursework, but engages students in the most critical topics affecting kids today: child abuse, childhood obesity, drugs, bullying, violence, guns and gangs.

Using a Hip Hop Based Pedagogy 

Just as we were in the 80s drawn heavily to Hip Hop and “rap” music, so too are today’s generation. While Hip-Hop is still undervalued and even more so misunderstood, its preeminence in contemporary culture shows that its cultural significance is vital to the continuation of American popular culture. The power of words empowers those who utter them as well as those who receive them. Educators, Religious leaders, politicians, social activists and authors all used words to effect influence and action in others. In a culture of mass communication, where content and diction merge, those with the most to say through the most attractive medium ultimately prove to be the most influential  in the lives of others.

 

This phenomenon is most visible in rap music, arguably the most influential art form emerging through popular culture. Because rap found it’s genesis in urban America, out of the poverty and social disparity of minorities, the voice of rap has embodied all the forms of deliverance. While using music as a vehicle to preach to people otherwise unable to freely express themselves, rap has effectively functioned as Pastor, Lobbyist, Activist, Poet, Entertainer and lastly and most importantly, Educator.

It is at this point that I use Lyrics to educate, inspire and motivate students. They simply love to use words in rhyme and song, particularly when they have the control to harness their words into a song or rap that they know everyone who hears it will like. Hence, I use Lyrical Education as a platform to engage students with classroom coursework and important topics that otherwise get left out. We take subjects like math, science, history and english and pull out relevant educational information from those subjects and create songs, poems and raps. This gives students not only a chance to learn key information about these subjects, but it gives them a greater sense of connection with those subjects as they become creators or teachers of that information through their lyrics or raps, what I call Lyrical Dissertations.

This kind of engagement and instruction has demonstrated effectiveness in inspiring students with a greater interest in classroom coursework as well as help students in their retention of information. They learn not only oratory skills, but there are specific mechanics of writing they learn through using the SLAM workbook. This workbook covers areas such as identifying key literary words, building vocabulary, how to organize ideas and finally they learn how to present information in both prose and poetic formats. When you combine these instructional elements with Rhyme, the very same results occur as when we use them in early education as with Dr. Seuss and other nursery rhymes. The process can be continued on into higher education. SLAM Lyrical Education clearly demonstrates this.

Creating Culturally Specific Programming (CSP) 

and Peer-Centered Approach (PCA) Curricula for Today’s Students

The lessons taught and created from my work with two sets of 5th graders from the the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 Fifth grade class of McCulloch Academy ultimately formed the basis of two of my workbook models. In the second of these workbooks, titled Lyrical Education: Students Who Use Spoken Lyrics with an Academic Mission, student poems are organized around the key topics that affect todays youth, namely Child Abuse, Child Obesity, Drugs, Bullying and Gun/Gang violence. These four topics are prefaced with facts and statistics about each, highlighting how critical these problems are in the lives of our students today. Important Vocabulary builders follow, allowing students to discuss key words and definitions from these topics.

Students poems are then followed, each speaking directly to not only their peers but importantly to Adults; those teachers, parents and perpetrators of such social ills. Although I didn’t ask them to write about drugs, they were very adamant that drugs was a big problem overall in the topic of Childhood Health and Welfare and they in turn wrote about how this affects them as well. 

The goal for publishing this book was two-fold. First, I wanted to give these students a voice. A Voice that is the missing link in discovering a remedy to these important issues affecting the lives of this generation. Secondly, I wanted to give both teachers and parents a workbook that would allow them to not only learn from, but to utilize in their classroom and homes to engage their kids. Kids have tremendous insight on all matters that affect their lives and when given the opportunity, their contribution will and has shown to be extraordinarily powerful, impactful and essential to the discussion of solving some of the most critical issues of todays youth.

This I call a peer-centered approach or PCA, giving youth a voice and an opportunity to contribute to their own education and that of their peers. Models like this have been shown to inspire students to work work harder to achieve greater. When given the chance to have their insight and perspective valued and utilized in the process of intervention, we have seen that students perform better and the educational climate is improved. 

Excerpt from AMERICA'S PIPELINE TO PRISON: Mass Incarceration & The National Education Crisis Among Black Youth, unpublished manuscript, Crampton, Hakim Nathaniel. AMEN 4 Youth, LLC. Jackson, Michigan. 2015

A Fresh Look at Ebonics: How are contemporary Educators dealing with Black Vernacular English in Schools Today

In 2012 I was presenting weekly “lyrical education” lectures in an AP English class at Jackson High school. My lecture was based on a research article I’d written in 2001 for a manuscript I was compiling. The topic was Ebonics or what is termed Black Vernacular English. While most of the students actually spoke Ebonics, none knew what it consisted of nor that they were speakers of a distinctive  dialect that has actually been classified by linguists.

Being an African American as well as what Dr. Robert T. Nash, Ed.D called being bilingual, for my ability to articulate standard english as well as Black Vernacular English, has given me a unique opportunity to examine how language modalities and variances in ethnic vernaculars shapes the social and intellectual reality of African Americans. Over the last 5 years, I have been teaching an English Language Arts alternative literacy pedagogy using Spoken Word, Lyrics and Hip Hop to mostly low literacy performing minority students. In creating curriculum to engage this population using this unique approach, I not only had to make it linguistically relevant for students, but I had to make it clear and articulate for other educators.

While preparing for my lecture at Jackson High School, I compared my research from 2001 with my current work in English Language Arts alternative literacy, and began wondering how teachers today are dealing with the issue of Black Vernacular English among their students and how this was affecting or influencing their classroom instruction. In teaching Lyrical Education, I use specific language vernaculars to help bridge the gap in standard english communication. It serves as an essential and logical tool to aid in communicating intended language concepts that allow students to articulate their learning in a way commonly understood and received by society.

According to John R. Rickford, author of Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, “Ebonics simply means ‘black speech’” (Rickford). From its phonemic segmentation, you can easily tell it derives from a blend of the word ‘ebony,’ in reference to ‘black,’ and the word ‘phonics.’ Together it translates into black speech. As a distinctive vernacular in specific reference to African Americans, Ebonics is a dialectical form of speaking english that is non-standard and varies across urban populations. (Wolfram) 

Differences or variances among African Americans from multiple southern States of America after the Great Migration gave rise to a blending of vernacular patterns and speech norms now typical within African American youth culture (Wolfram 111). It is at this point in the work I do with students in teaching an alternative literacy approach that I find this question most important. How are today’s teachers dealing with the challenge of teaching English to a population of students whose everyday home and social language is considered a nonstandard dialect which many educators consider to be mere slang  and a hinderance to communication norms? 

Because there are very critical issues at the heart of literacy among African Americans within our educational system, I also wonder how the apparent correlation between low literacy achievement and black vernacular dialects, (Wolfram 112) ultimately shapes the socio-cultural success of blacks in America. It is clear to me that language and communication are two key components that any person must master in order to move through society successfully and be able to navigate the social and cultural norms with ease. For African Americans, whose language and communication historically have been impeded by slavery and this countries disinterest in educating its slave population, the challenge is a daunting task to find methods to bridge the gap for black students to learn and apply standard speech concepts in both written and oral communication.

While this issue has arisen several times throughout American history, particularly in the 1960s when linguists began identifying some of the language issues affecting the American educational system as it related to the academic performance of the African American population of students (Wolfram 112), it arose again with great interest in the late 90s. In 1996 the Oakland School  Board addressed Ebonics head on. They boldly declared and implemented a policy directive that essentially recognized it as the primary language of its students, the majority of whom are African American (Rickford).

Not only did this cause a big controversy within the Oakland School district, but the debate swept across the nation. Teachers were now confronted with the question of how were they relating to their African American students, how were they implementing instructional methods of teaching these students who spoke nonstandard english, and lastly how familiar were they with their students language (Perez). Although these questions have not been answered in tandem, they have been thoroughly discussed and examined and given me sufficient reference to understand how todays teachers are currently dealing with this topic.

In trying to further understand this issue in order to help me with my own instructional techniques in communicating language concepts to students using my Lyrical Education approach, I spoke with Dr. Davonne Pierce about his dissertation on Ebonics. Dr. Pierce was born with a highly acute speech impediment. Combined with being an African American and raised within a social community of Ebonics speakers, Dr. Pierce was poised to have great difficulty speaking, communicating and navigating through the academic world. Dr. Pierce ultimately overcame his speech impediment and mastered standard english. His dissertation examined speech evolutions within African American urban populations and how those vernaculars affect and shape the world view and education of Ebonics speakers. 

Dr. Pierce believes that you have to meet students where they are at in terms of their intellectual insight, which is shaped by and derives from the communication process. If black students aren’t given correlational tools to understand the standard vernacular of english, they will not be able to navigate American society and participate at an equal level in employment, education and inter-social relationships. Language barriers between blacks and whites have kept a wall of social segregation in effect. By understanding Ebonics as a vernacular, teachers will better be able to utilize their knowledge to help African American students learn and master standard American english (Pierce).

Most of the teachers that I’ve worked with over the years would agree with Dr. Pierce. However, not many of them have the foundational knowledge to attempt an aggressive approach to remediating the problem of Ebonics speakers’ difficulty in learning and mastering standard english. As I was presenting to this high school AP English class, the classroom teacher commented that he has never met someone such as myself addressing this issue among African American students. This particular teacher had taken a class in his Masters program that dealt with African American communication and language modalities. It was a topic and issue he was well aware of but had not found a way to implement alternative instructional methods to help black students learn and master standard english writing and oral communication.

Other teachers that are working on bridging this gap to help students obtain the requisite knowledge of english, have identified several specific features educators need to know. First, they should become knowledgeable of the distinctive characteristics of Ebonics or Black Vernacular English. Secondly, teachers should then create curriculum for instruction in the classroom, particularly among educators directly familiar with Ebonics. Lastly, students must also be willing to learn alternate instructional methods of  speaking that they will ultimately use within their life (Perez).  

I think the points Dr. Pierce made to me are very valid, particularly as they relate to and from his own personal experience as a language learner over coming a speech impediment. Coupled with speaking a minority race vernacular, he found a way to bridge the gap. He says that every language and race of people speak an “ebonics” or “slang” within their culture. Dr. Pierce’s insights are were influenced by his Master’s Dissertation mentor, Terry Secret. She is one of the foremost proponents of Ebonics being recognized as an official Second Language. Secrets and other supporters of this effort went before Congress to push for official recognition(Pierce).

As an instructor using my own developed methodology of teaching relatable language art skills to African American students, I find that while there are few teachers directly working on ways to use Ebonics in the classroom, todays teachers aren’t much further ahead than their earlier predecessors. Ebonics or Black Vernacular English is still a complex language variant. Few experts in the field make it less familiar to a multitude of educators teaching African American students daily across this country. However, it is a subject still very open to public debate within the social and academic circles of linguists, educators, and socio-cultural theorist.

In my book Hip Hopology 101: A Student’s Guide to Understanding The History, Art, Influence & Politics of Urban Culture, I mention some of the language components of Ebonics as it relates to the power of lyrics and rhyme that the Hip Hop generation has so vividly expressed through words conveyed through Ebonics (Crampton 14). I also made the assertion that Black Vernacular English could be considered an actual element of Hip Hop (Crampton 31), which can be described as today’s contemporary youth culture Wolfram identified (Wolfram 113).  I believe todays teachers and those in the future will continue to find this issue a very real and important problem to confront. As Dr. Davonne Pierce found a way to cross the bridge of a language barrier, black students will also have to find their own way through this complex maze of language communication and with the help of conscientious educators familiar with the complexities, these students will ultimately have to embrace this challenge alongside their teachers.

Works Cited

Crampton, Hakim Nathaniel. Hip Hopology 101: A Student’s Guide to Exploring the History, Art, Influence & Politics of Urban Culture. 2nd ed. Jackson: AMEN 4 Youth, LLC, 2014. Print.

Perez, Samuel. “Using Ebonics or Black English as a Bridge to Teaching Standard English.” Race, Class, and Culture. Classroom Leadership 2.7 (1999). Web 19 Nov 2014.

Pierce, Dr. Davonne. Personal Interview. 20 Nov 2014.

Rickford, John R. “What is Ebonics (African American English).” Linguistic Society of America. 2012. Web 19 Nov 2014. 

Wolfram, Walt. “The Grammar of Urban African American Vernacular.” Diss. Winthrop University, n.d. Web. 19 Nov 2014. pdf