Day 1: Poverty

"Daughters" by John Mayer

...i know a girl / she puts the color inside of my world / she's just like a maze / where all of the walls are continually changed...

Happy Black History Month.  My, how time flies.  It is already February.

This is the first February in a long time in which I am employed.  And I have the very appropriate job of teaching young Black girls.

When I was looking for a job, I was looking for more clerical and administrative work, thinking I was not qualified to venture into education, although I love it.

My students suffer from the devastating condition of poverty.  The symptomatology of their situations include distracting and destructive environments, young and/or inept parents, minimal monitoring, poor educational systems, cultural incompetence, and much more actually.

I live in Richmond, VA and my students also live in Richmond, VA.  However, by the questions they ask about the simplest things (like where I bought my lunch from, what kind of food it is, where is the restaurant I bought it from, etc.) you would think we live in different worlds.

It may not seem like a big deal that they are unfamiliar with the restaurants I frequent, as I am a diverse eater.  However, because I am in class all day and then report to work immediately after, I usually stop at generic franchises like Chipotle or Qdoba because they are on campus and don't disrupt my travels to the school.

They don't know what Chipotle or Qdoba is because they are prisoners of their projects.  If it isn't in the projects, they don't know what it is.  Many of them come from homes which don't have access to transportation and public transportation in Rich City is unreliable.  Therefore, they don't even travel around their own city.

The Chipotle and Qdoba on the campus I attend school is less than 5 miles from where most of them live but that 5 miles, which seems negligible to us cultured, working, educated adults, is a world away to my beautiful Black girls.

Atop that, they don't know what the food is called.  They don't know what a quesadilla is.  They don't know that there is a difference between Southwestern food (food of New Mexico, Texas, and them) and Mexican food (although, I wonder how many people at all know there is a difference).  The only food they were familiar with was the burrito.

I felt slightly elitist because of the shock I felt at the things they didn't know.  I caught myself continuously saying "How can they not know that?"

But why should they know about that?  They are left in their neighborhoods, alienated and isolated by poverty, a poverty thorough enough to make them culturally incompetent to the culture within a 10 mile radius of their residences.

And when the kids grow up, we blame them, ridicule them, judge them, and shake our heads at them for what they have not seen, what they do not know, and what they do not understand.

But it starts when they are children.  I knew what a quesadilla was at age 10, mostly because I am a fat ass and I love to eat because my parents, the educational system I was in, and the resources I had to access popular culture all helped to inform my cultural competence.  

My parents wanted me to know about other cultures.  When I saw a restaurant I wanted to try, we would try it and I would always love it, and I would add the items of the menu to my vocabulary.  I would then know what was in that particular item and see if their was a correlation between the ingredients and the name.  

For example, the quesadilla is called such because it is queso (Spanish for cheese), cooked into a tortilla, a round, flat bread made of wheat.  Hence the name quesadilla.

Mind you, the process I just described is not an active one in which I am conscious or slightly aware of becoming cultured.  I simply had access to these things and had parents who would indulge my curiosity.  I had no idea I was becoming "cultured", even in this rudimentary example of my introduction to quesadillas.  I elucidated the process for arguments sake only.

If a child is introduced to Mexican food, understands where Mexico is, and understands this food, although native to Mexico, is something the child likes and has access to, by human nature alone, and some education, a child will wonder what other people live in the world and what do they eat?  Who are the Japanese and what do they eat?  The French?  The Hungarians?  The Gambians?  The Egyptians?

These questions don't just elicit knowledge about food.  These questions reveal that the child is considering that there is a world beyond the neighborhood, the city, the state, or the country the child lives in.  There is more out there.

My students are wholly unaware that there is more out there.  And it is not their fault.  They are not stupid.  They are not ignorant.  They are not uninterested even.  They just have no access, no encouragement or reason even to wonder.  And even if they did wonder, how will they learn?  They are stuck, physically, culturally, and intellectually.  Poverty literally keeps them stuck.

They want to know.  They ask me where my lunch comes from.  They ask what kind of food it is.  They ask how it is made.  They ask how I found out about it.

I took knowing about Chipotle and Qdoba for granted.  I, becoming more culturally competent everyday of my life, take it for granted.  I do not even notice I am learning.  And I have forgotten how I was even introduced to these things.  And I assume that we all are introduced to these things.

My story of course is different because I am an immigrant and as such, I am almost inherently interested in other immigrants living in America.  But I grew up with African Americans who, now, are just as educated and culturally competent as I, even without the arguably inherent interest in immigrants and the immigrant experience.  

My best friends, Gwenny & Christina, are just as intelligent as I am.  They know there is a difference between the Chinese and the Japanese, between the Hungarians and the Dutch, between the Nigerians and the Sierra Leoneans (actually ery'body know the Nigerians are a totally different species or something).  I wouldn't be surprised if my students have never heard of Hungary or Sierra Leone or think China and Japan are one nation.

But Gwenny, Christina, and I are products of adventure.  We were allowed adventure by not being confined to the projects and we had some resources.  We saw things that introduced us to the concept of a bigger world, which allowed us to wonder about what we have yet to see, which allowed us to research, either in school or in experience, what else was out there.

And that is how you form a human being.  A human being must be aware that there is more to life and to the world than the small network she knows, the street that she can see from her window.  That's how people become compassionate for experiences other than their own, work to improve the lives of those in a culture/space/country/time in which they don't exist.  You cannot empathize with he who you don't know exists. Duh.

So how do we expect our beautiful Black children to want to participate, professionally or socially, in our society, contribute to their country if they have no idea that the world is bigger than Gilpin Court?

Everyday that we blame the poor for being poor, the children remain ignorant.  They grow up to be ignorant adults who we continue to blame again for their condition, not realizing they were ignorant, isolated, alienated, imprisoned children from day one.

Everyday that we blame the poor for being poor, we miss thousands, millions of opportunities to show children, who are enslaved by poverty, that this is not all they are meant to be.  This is not all they are meant to see.  There is a big world with big problems, with big fortunes, with big chances that they should be allowed and encouraged to participate in.

They say incarceration is the new slavery and I agree.  But poverty precipitates ALL the social ills we speak of: drug use and distribution, teen pregnancy, STDs, HIV/AIDS, health problems and poor health maintenance, violent crime, high rates of incarceration, domestic abuse, child abuse, high school dropout rates, illiteracy rates, generational welfare dependency...I cannot think of a single social issue that we fight about on the House floor, in our workplaces, or in casual conversation that is not found within the parameters of poverty.

I get paid to teach these beautiful Black girls and I have programmed into my job description that they will know more than Mosby, more than Gilpin, more than Highland Park, more than Hull Street.  They will know a world exists for them and there is no reason why they should not see it.