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From Sing Sing to Cornell: Upping the State of Black Children’s Education in America
Presented at the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Conference, 2005.
In 1996 Tupac Shakur rhymed to an unnamed girlfriend in his classic hit “I Ain’t Mad At Cha”: “Don’t give nobody my loving while I be locked upstate.” At the time, I was 18 and unaware that, indeed, there could be something more sinister to the term “upstate New York” than the idyllic countryside and middle to upper-crust lifestyles depicted in books I had read or movies I had seen about the region.
I grew up in Illinois, where criminal incarceration facilities are concentrated downstate. Fortunately, my parents never subjected me to visiting relatives housed throughout the sprawling plains and endless acres that we Northerners—even those of us raised on the far outskirts of Chicago—dubbed “country.” I had gathered from countless media references that New York state’s “country” of villages and hamlets, its antithesis to the urban cosmopolitan prototype that is the Big Apple, was located north and not south. Yet my typical American education failed to address such national travesties as the 1970 Attica uprising or national and state economies’ growing reliance upon prisons for revenue; I was unaware this country was also, like Illinois’s, tainted by a huge prison industrial complex. My regrettable middle school obsession with the 1987 cult classic “Dirty Dancing” further played into this unawareness, idealizing upstate New York and its Catskills mountain range as the destination of choice for rich New Yorkers seeking an eventful getaway.
I went on to become an awkward, non-“cultured”, Black, female, first-generation college student at a relatively elitist institution, so I quickly came to understand how class could be conferred or concluded through language, not just overtly through colloquialism and dialect but covertly through context. Yet, I had never experienced that singularity with more force than when I became even more aware of the differing perspectives on a single, loaded word I heard frequently from the mouths of New Yorkers: upstate.
What became clear to me first through a Tupac lyric and even more so once I moved to New York City in 2001 was that for me and much of America, the complete image of upstate New York was unenlightened, inaccurate and distorted. The region’s more acceptable attributes are so famed that the term “upstate” can stand alone outside the state of New York yet still connote its culture and geography: the kitschy resort communities of the Catskill mountains, the prestigious boarding schools Salinger’s fictional Pencey no doubt represented in Catcher in the Rye, the summer and vacation homes of old money New Yorkers in towns like Woodstock. Yet few recognize that upstate New York is also home to one of the largest prison complexes in the world, with all but a couple of the state’s 71 correctional facilities operating there. With over 60,000 inmates it’s no wonder those of the hip-hop generation should need no further explanation when the beat drops on the word “upstate.”
The first time I rode the M7 bus uptown, from my graduate writing classes at the New School in the Village to my apartment on 147th Street in Harlem, I made note of the obvious passenger entrances and exits one would expect when passing through an anything-goes tourist carnival like midtown Manhattan, to the more residential enclave of the upper West Side, to a predominantly minority and underserved area such as Harlem. I could not help but notice the high number of designer bag-toting, huge sunglass-wearing, thick accented native New York women in their fifties and sixties who emptied the bus before it reached the 100’s. Around 86th street, an attractive elderly brunette wearing snow-white capris boarded and loudly greeted an acquaintance she saw sitting towards the middle.
“Oh my God, Charlotte, hey, my daughter’s getting married!” was what she said before hurrying on.
The two women maneuvered several large, showy shopping bags alongside their seats to make room for each other, and for almost fifteen blocks I caught snatches of their conversation as I stared out the window at the cityscape which was, right before my eyes, changing for the worse: Upstate. Romance. Country house with a backyard on the Hudson. The May wedding of a firstborn daughter. I wonder how many prison facilities guests had to turn a blind eye to before arriving at the festivities.
Theirs was in sharp contrast to a conversation I had just had with a friend, a young guy who nightly hung out on my corner. On thrice-nightly treks from my 8-10:30 classes at the New School, his crew kept the promise that they would “look out” for me like they said they would when I became the new kid on the block. One evening I finally asked my friend about the recent long absence of one of his more charismatic, talkative partners from the hangout spot.
My friend simply pointed up.
By then, of course, I had caught on, but cracking this secret code did not alleviate my frustration; instead, it intensified it to the point of obsessive exploration.
I have had the privilege of teaching writing in several programs non-profit programs designed to enrich inner city school students. Despite the dreadful disorganization and bureaucracy which unfortunately plagued many of these impassioned but under-funded opportunities, I sometimes managed to do what is meant to be done in a classroom: teach, and learn a little something myself. I became more frustrated to learn that, too often, what could be otherwise harmonious childhood routines are right now, in New York City, today, regularly and jarringly being disrupted by regular visits to upstate prison facilities.
In my many temp jobs in New York City, I had had co-workers whose race to Grand Central Station each day was fueled by their understandable desire to escape to Westchester homes in affluent places such as Scarsdale and beyond. I once worked with a woman who came back glowing and gushing about her new fiance’s romantic proposal during a weekend Finger Lakes getaway. Again, these are sharp contrasts to many of the weekend updates I received from middle school students I taught writing to in Harlem and later Brooklyn, updates in which some casually and nonchalantly mentioned visiting a close relative “upstate.” While I certainly realized people of my adopted neighborhoods visited upstate New York for other reasons, I knew it was a shame that such a high number actually were being exposed to traumatic prison visits.
In September 2002, a friend in Connecticut sent me an article cut from the once-defunct but now thankfully resurrected Savoy magazine which reported this shocking finding of the Justice Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.: as of the year 2001, more Black men ages 18-24 in America were in prison than college. While not eschewing my support of punishment for criminals who trespass against society, I could not help but ache inside knowing how social imbalances contributed directly and indirectly to the steering of so many down the wrong path. Though pundits later attacked the survey for its bias and questionable research methods, I could not deny the element of truth it possessed in relation to too much of what I had seen in my classrooms, on the streets of New York City and beyond: through most likely uncorrectable travesties of the past and even present, the path had been set for an unacceptable number of my students to be sentenced to a crime before carrying a college diploma.
When shortly thereafter I began what was to be my first published novel, about a young man and woman’s correspondence after they are separated by incarceration, writing about the marginalized seemed to be out of style. With the exception of the recently popular and misunderstood “street lit,” most of what hit bookshelves seemed to pivot on an axis of sensibilities shared by the middle class, upwardly mobile, intellectual, glamorous or bourgeois. This noticeable shift in focus for book publishing and other media industries, most likely just one of the many natural consequences of our president’s attempt to foster a “feel-good climate” in America in the wake of his corrupt decisions, had muted the voices of the suffering.
I was aware of a suffering that could not be shared by Charlotte’s friend and my friend on the block, even though they rode the same bus home. I was aware of the suffering on a bus full of women and children which daily departs from Harlem and other New York City underserved neighborhoods for designated stops throughout the upstate prison system. I was aware that the suffering of innocent Black children at the mercy of this system has gone largely unnoticed. My awareness sparked me to write.
What began as a creative concept became a thesis on a word with such ambiguity based upon who you are talking to that it is almost laughable. The writing was compelled by a need to explore a possible, tragic scenario behind a frightening statistic and school conditions which seriously disturbed me. The writing was compelled by the fact that I knew (and in the past had been like) so many Antonio and Natasha’s who did not deserve this world: this world in which a mere, subtle, veiled sentiment of two syllables could predict if they were more likely to wind up at Sing Sing or Cornell. The writing was compelled by my need to understand why the tremendous efforts of so many who waged war in today’s schools were unsuccessful in saving each and every child in New York City and far beyond from making it “upstate”. The writing was compelled by my need to establish necessary intimacy between characters who may or may not be ordinarily nameless and faceless, and readers who ordinarily could not or would not recognize them in a city where everybody closes their eyes.
One of my favorite teaching memories materialized when, towards the middle of the 2002-2003 year, my after-school program director came into my classroom and announced the surprise location of the field trip given as a reward for good behavior and performance. The whole program was going to an upstate ski mountain resort for a rather packed day of snowboarding, skiing and just good old fashioned fun. I will never forget the expressions of excitement on the faces of even the hardest kids, most of whom who had considered our last trip to a Times Square movie theater an excursion. For a few weeks, I had an entirely peaceful classroom as my students made sure to straighten up so as to not miss out on an adventure. It would be nice if one day for all children in New York, upstate won’t mean the home of the invisible disenfranchised whose loudest voice is a Tupac lyric; it would much more mean a peaceful, quiet, rambling bus ride to a day of fun at a mountain ski resort.
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Public Lecture: Loving Our “Best Thing”: Black Women (Re)Write Family and Reproductive Freedom
Presented for the Lane Humanities Series of Northwestern University
January 2006.
Excerpt:
Historically, Black women’s reproductive freedom has been seriously altered and impacted by a myriad of racial, social and economic injustices which have approached Black mothers and their children as everything from property to problems; severe economic and class disparities have prevented Black women from achieving the same reproductive choice and independence as their White counterparts. Hegemonic attempts to regulate, control and prevent Black women from fulfilling traditional roles as childbearers and mothers extends far beyond the obvious and most traumatic collective experience of slavery, in which Black women “bred” their children not for personal reasons or family’s sake but for Whites’ economic gain. In slavery, violence, (along with the law) characterized the horrific, systematic methods of robbing Black women of their reproduction freedom; however in emancipation’s wake, public policy and the law has emerged as the single most important and deadly weapon against the Black mother. From discriminatory welfare codes to experimental contraceptive distribution within poor Black communities, Black mothers and children have been tragic victims of legal systems which have evaluated an entire race of women and children on their economic value and potential rather than their humanity.
This ongoing assault on Black women and the children they bear has had tremendous social, political and biological implications which have only recently begun to be explored under the field of eugenics. While academic, intellectual and scholarly research has admirably revealed the facts and occurrences at play, it is Black women writers who have touched deepest upon the emotional, mental and psychological consequences of what can only be described as biological warfare against Black women and their children. With a title taken directly from the mouth of Beloved’s Sethe, Toni Morrison’s historic character who kills her own child rather than return the child to slavery, this lecture explores the commendable political undertaking of several Black women writers to document the effects of eugenics on women, children and the Black family structure. Drawing upon such historical texts as Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as well as contemporary works such as Sapphire’s PUSH, we can see how Black women have turned around to tell the sometimes heroic, yet too often unfortunate, stories of other Black women who were not allowed to fully love, value or appreciate their own children because of a society which told them they did not have the right to.
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