Antidotes for black violence

Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of the most poetic, revered, and important works of oratory in history, the "I Have a Dream" speech. In this partially improvised masterpiece, of which most of us know only a small portion, Dr. King looked forward to the day when all of us would be judged not by the color of our skin but the content of our character.

In King's utopia, Trayvon Martin would still be alive.

What can we say, though, about the content of the character of Demetrius L. Glenn, the 16-year-old who beat Delbert Belton, World War II veteran, to death, or of De'Marquise Elkins, who shot a baby between the eyes despite the pleas of the child's mother? And what of the teens who shot Christopher Lang, an aspiring baseball player, because they were bored?

Of course these people in no way represent most young black men. Few people equate white teens with the shooters in Sandy Hook or Columbine, or the adult white males who dominate the ranks of child pornographers.

Black teen hero

Yet marginalized people bear an unspoken burden: Muslims are prone to suspicions that they are terrorists, gay men that they are pedophiles, black women that they are "welfare queens," Hispanics that they are "illegals." And young black men, far too often, are assumed to be criminals until proven otherwise.

Temar Boggs is a black teen in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who became a hero when he and his friend, Chris Garcia, helped find a five-year-old who had been abducted and sexually assaulted. (Click here.) A group of football players at William Paterson University in North Jersey, most of them black, entered a store, thinking it was open because the lights were on and the door was unlocked, and made a point of paying for items they had come to buy, right down to the tax, even though nobody was behind the counter. (Click here.)

Blaming prisons

Black people are just as morally upright as anyone else—whatever that means. But it's also true that young black men are a greater threat to young black men than anyone else. That said, the almost crushing weight of history can't be ignored either; killing black men with impunity was a way of life in the South for many years. But we shouldn't ignore the mayhem perpetrated by black youths simply because those historical wounds have yet to heal.

On a recent Cable News Network special, host Don Lemon blamed rap songs for glorifying violence. Russell Simmons, founder of Def Jam Records, countered that the real problem is the "prison/industrial" complex. Black youths account for 26 percent of juvenile arrests, 44 percent of youths detained, and 58 percent of youths in prison. Black males are arrested at six times the rate of whites; black and Hispanic men, taken together, comprise 58 percent of the prison population but only 25 percent of the general population.

What inmates learn

According to the Sentencing Project, five times as many white people use drugs, but African Americans are sent to prison ten times as often, serving about the same sentences for drug offenses (58.7 months) as white people do for violent crimes (61.7 months). Once in prison, first-time offenders often learn from other inmates to be truly dedicated criminals— skills they may put into practice when they are released, since black unemployment rates are double those of the general population, and having a criminal record exacerbates the task of finding a job. So Attorney General Eric Holder is on the right track in his efforts to reform drug sentencing.

But reducing sentences for low-level drug offenders might not have prevented any of the crimes I mentioned above. Something more fundamental is needed. People who feel their lives matter tend to feel that other people's lives matter, too. Achieving this goal isn't as difficult as it may seem.

Hope through music

SWAN (Scaling Walls A Note at a time) is a pilot program founded by Diana Vuolo, a violinist and pastor's wife who teaches at Lancaster Bible College, near where I live. SWAN uses music as a tool to help children of incarcerated parents, who are more likely than others to end up in prison themselves.

Consider the case of 11 year-old Bryanna Still, who sang the national anthem recently at a minor league baseball game in Lancaster. Bryanna's father has been in jail since last November for a drug charge, and her beloved grandmother died in July. The voice lessons and mentoring Bryanna has received through SWAN have taught her to set goals and stay disciplined while providing an outlet for her to express herself. (To see and hear Bryanna for yourself, click here.)

White mentor

Or consider the heartening story of Myke Rogers, a retired industrial design consultant in Lancaster and mentor to Burlin Miller, a troubled sixth grader who had been suspended from school for fighting and seemed headed fir the ranks of school dropouts.

Rogers meets with Burlin and other elementary and middle school students on a weekly basis. He doesn't do anything fancy— just reads to them, helps with math and paints with them.

"My sense is that if an adult, not part of the family, takes an interest in a child, it can make a huge difference," he told the Lancaster paper.

Rogers, now in his 80s, is a wealthy white man who lived in Europe for years, working with children in a predominantly black and Hispanic urban public school. He was urged into mentoring by his late wife, Nancy, after he taught a business course at York County Prison. The inmates, he discovered, were eager to learn but lacked positive experiences in their childhood. Rogers realized that early intervention could have made their lives very different.

Common thread

What's the common thread in these stories? Adults who care— and the arts as a means of self-expression. Small, simple steps in the right direction.

Bigger steps are needed as well, of course. If we want to reduce the numbers of young black men killing each other, and others around them, we must build a society where the American Dream is something other than a fantasy for a larger percentage of the population.♦


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