What About Our Children?

I wrote this essay in 2002 so it is a bit dated but it's still relevant today.

Living in the City--- What about our youth?

When was the last time you visited Crown Heights or any of the once predominantly black communities of New York City? Have you seen our new neighbors? Maybe you’re wondering what happened to the old ones. What happened to those happy little girls who played double-dutch on the street and the little boys who always opened the fire hydrant on a hot summer day? What about the old man with the pipe who sat puffing tobacco all day on the stoop with his buddies, or the women who used to bring their lawn chairs out in front of the building to deliberate over the latest news in the community? Who are these strange people taking over Harlem and Crown Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant? Last time I checked, white folks didn’t go past Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum on the Brooklyn bound #1 and #2 trains or 96th street on the Manhattan side. Now why have they decided to sit all the way to the end of the train line?


We wonder why our youth are so angry and so defensive nowadays. We wonder why their faces are so grim and why they all seem to have attitudes. Some blame it on the rap lyrics, but that’s for the ignorant, uninformed bunch, who write books and novels that define a race they have no part in. Our youth are angry because they are tired of fighting. They fight for territory, they fight to eat, and they fight for mental and physical survival. Look at the environment in which we are living. Some of our youths have never inhaled a breath of fresh country air. But who will take them to the great outdoors if we are all stuck in our offices in our sophisticated suits? Why is it that our inner city schools have no technology when you, my friend, sit and mingle with IBM and Microsoft all day long surfing the internet that schools are too poor to offer to our own children. There’s a wealth of information out there and they can’t get it, simply because they’re poor. Yet we live in the city with one of the greatest skylines of all time, boasting the statue of liberty as its backdrop. Our city is one of the most segregated in the country we just don’t acknowledge it. If you ride the subways long enough, I’m sure you’ll see segregation at its worst. At least in the south you know they don’t like us, and vice versa. Here, they are in power and they suppress us, subtly. A professor of mine once posed the question “why would the colonizer educate the children of the colonized the same way he does his own children?” I ask of you, what are you doing to educate our children?


We think that children don’t notice when things happen around them. “Why isn’t so and so living next door anymore?” “Why can’t I go to such and such a school like those other kids?” These are their thoughts, but who gets to hear them when everyone is so busy trying to earn enough for a condo or a new Range Rover? Where are those young Black men and women who have climbed out of these communities into institutions of higher learning? What have they come back to do? We criticize white America for taking over our homes and our culture, yet we as young educated adults, sit back and allow them to do so. What have you done for a teenager in your community lately? When did you take time out to speak to one of the young men or women on the corner? Do you judge them as you walked by, or do you stop to change a life by inspiring them with some positive words? You went to college, got a fly degree, but what have you done to change the future of our race? How are you helping?


I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of hearing Martin Luther King’s name every Black History Month. Dr. King didn’t dream that one day our youth would outnumber white boys in jail. Dr. King didn’t dream that one day we would educate ourselves and leave the future to perish because we’re too busy making a dime. Dr. King didn’t dream that Black girls would be getting pregnant at age 13 with no baby fathers. That wasn’t Dr. King’s dream. We pass our children on the streets everyday on our way to work in the white man’s world. Again, I ask you, what have you done for a child lately? Our children are fighting daily for survival in a world that doesn’t belong to them. “That rap music is poisonous to the mind,” they say, but what other role models are we giving our children? How easy it is for little boys all across America to wear bandaids on their faces because Nelly is wearing them, or to sport Jerseys all summer long because it’s that rehab they call ‘Fabolous’ style. How about the good old Alicia Keys braids that guys and girls are rocking nowadays. Why has everything become such an easy trend to follow? They have nothing else to look at. They have teachers who couldn’t care less about their education, people moving into their communities and causing them to become displaced, and a society of educated young Black adults who don’t give a damn about them. What, I ask you, is the future of our children, and when will you stop in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the city to hear what stories they have to tell? In the words of the great Mahatma Ghandi, “the future depends on what we do in the present.” $.02