Swing Back: A Love Letter on Failing

Like most epic stories, there is one definitive turning point in my activism for black youth. And after too many years of unknowingly choosing cultural hate, I have bloomed into the love of my own blackness and agency. It has been a long, constant battle but by August 9, 2014 I knew that I had to leave a job that only afforded me a paycheck and align myself with an opportunity to do for my community what a system tried to keep from me. Like many of our diverse staff, coming to YPNF was a purposeful decision. I decided to come here and I choose to return everyday.

Primarily, my goal was to be a crude reflection of what our brown, black, and poor students could, at the very least, achieve despite our shared personal backgrounds. Had you asked me last week if I had been successful in doing this, I would have unflinchingly said yes.

I would have said yes even though I let Troy Ward* sleep through a lesson that he needed to hear about the world and its treatment of black boys like him because it was easier to engage a class about systemic anti-blackness if one of the few black boys in the YES Prep school system slept through it. Worst of all, within the essay, or as I deem a revolutionary love letter, James Baldwin explains to his nephew that “you were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you are black and for no other reason.” More poignantly, Baldwin spells out to his nephew, Big James, that “The limits to your ambition were thus expected to be settled. You were not expected to aspire to excellence. You were expected to make peace with mediocrity.” Even after this lesson concluded Monday at 4:30, and I recorded Troy’s “50” for the day, I would have still told you that I did my job of being a sturdy foundation for all of my students, albeit I hadn’t at all reach Troy.

So it is only by chance (and misbehavior) that Troy is serving an ISS and I’m in the mood to leave my room and engage him with another love letter; this time by Kiese Laymon on How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others In America. Doubling as the title, the letter pours out the many ways we fail or “kill ourselves” by internalizing how the world feels about people of color and how rarely they are afforded the opportunity to “swing back”. Laymon uses anecdotes, both, personal and national to bring attention to all the things that contribute to the slaying of black youth; that is: physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, culturally, financially, and the many ways these things intersect.

As an easy teachable moment, I question Troy on his decisions and ask him to talk me through his understanding of the love letter to see if he could make a connection to the many ways that he is killing himself. Troy explains the overall theme of the story perfectly. He even highlights a part of the letter that makes mention of Trayvon Martin and juxtaposes it against his own life.

I look at Trayvon Martin and people say that he was a good person or a good student or whatever. I think about, like, where I live and how many police officers are around and I walk home all the time. I’m always thinking, like, that could be. But at the same time, I don’t relate to Trayvon because like I said he was a good student and, I’m not–people wouldn’t say that I’m a good student. I feel like if something were to happen to me nobody would really care.

These words break my heart, but are a direct reflection of me. This is how Troy feels about the staff at YPNF and, frankly, we have made him feel this way. While I don’t doubt that the school would be deeply affected if something were to happen to Troy, it is just not enough to have love if we don’t in every action, interaction, and thought exude it. Furthermore, I don’t want the death of a student to be the time that we decide to actively show our love.

Returning to Baldwin’s ideas on how race in America directs our perceptions of our troubled black students, and also being super transparent, I’m working to unlearn many things I understand as the “correct way” to exist. Though Troy and I are both black there are still huge cultural, generational, and communal gaps that I don’t easily understand but it is my responsibility to meet him where he is most comfortable so that I don’t reinforce the many negative things that our society already thinks about him on the basis of an un-tucked shirt.

Now, this isn’t a woe-is-POC narrative, or a letter to make anyone feel like they’ve not done their job as instructors, and I’m not erasing the many times that Troy has been disrespectful, disruptive, and/or disobedient in my class. I’m merely refocusing a lens for us to observe how our students view us. Personally, I, on many occasions, have looked for Troy to do wrong and each time I have found a reason for him to be wrong. I placed the onus of perfection on Troy, but, as we all know, and as Laymon writes, “black boys can not be perfect in America.” So for every time I have slain him in this way, I have to take into consideration that I’ve likely misinterpreted countless outbursts as everything but the only way Troy might knows how to swing back.

Everyday we are writing letters to our students about how we feel about them. We, the adults, despite their typical teenaged behavior, are sending very clear messages to our students–Yes, even our Troys–­ our feelings towards them. I challenge you to write a letter showing your students that in every moment you are working to create a path not to “save them” in ways you deem fit or respectable but to give them a chance to swing back in spite of the many reasons they have not to.

*Named changed for privacy of student.