60 Minutes with CJ Quartlbaum
In 2016, I spent an entire year in a foreign city, the brightest and most vibrant city I have ever had the fortune of visiting: New York. In this messy and rowdy metropolis, I saw more lights on a single street than in the whole of downtown back home. I experienced an overdose of culture and skyscrapers, had the most mouthwatering food, and watched the most incredible shows.
And I met the most amazing people. Claude Quartlbaum (or simply CJ) was one of them, and he has got to be right there in the top 10. He was an important mentor for the bantu project while our team was still stationed in the States, and shared with me at length on his work as a director with Centre for Student Missions (CSM).
But above all, CJ was an inspiring figure. I planned an afternoon with this big man here to learn more about CSM’s work in the Big Apple, but walked away with much more than I bargained for.
Coloured / poor / the spaces in between
There were two reasons why I wanted to meet with CJ.
The first reason had to do with this ‘bantu’ business that I had been involved in since July 2016. bantu was an idea that sought to help NPOs (Non-Profit Organisations) with their volunteer operations, born out of a college project that grew into something deliberate we wanted to realise. As the business lead in a 5-man team back in November, I needed to validate the right problems bantu was trying to solve. How do NPOs currently work with the beneficiaries they serve? What are the operational issues that needed to be addressed?
As for the second reason: now CJ’s what they call a black person. And that’s a VERY new thing for me.
(I’m from Singapore. There are no “black” persons where I come from last time I checked.)
I am not going to lie to you here: I don’t know how to talk to a black person. CJ was not the first black person I was acquainted with, but that did not make it any less awkward for me. I wished it was otherwise.
Learning about a culture and race you see often on social media was one thing, but being confronted with it was a whole new ball game for me. It was going to be a very loaded exercise unpacking my own perspectives coming into this conversation.
But let’s get to that in abit.
The Swallow Cafe
“Hey Josh, nice to met you. I’m sure we’ve met before, but I’m CJ.”
We met at a typical street side café completed with an overpriced menu. He was a married man in his late twenties, and like most people his age, still paying off his college degree from a private university. Previously from the finance sector, CJ walked away from that life to complete seminary school, which was then followed by pursuing his current occupation in a voluntary / mission organisation.
“Alright. Where should we start?”
I started out asking him how he got into this line of work. I dived into the nature of social needs, and posed questions on how his organisation approached the issues in the community and organised itself around them. I talked about the role of social welfare groups in Singapore, and he compared it against the organisations he has worked with, CSM or otherwise.
It was supposed to be a research exercise: I would fire questions on the operational conduct of NPOs, on how governments affected the work of NPOs and the communities in need, on the challenges of an organisation like his when trying to match youth volunteers from across the US to missions here in New York City. He would reply based on his past experiences — with his involvement in many voluntary organisations, CJ was a great candidate to speak to about the clockworks in an NPO.
Barely 15 minutes through, however, the interview started to nag at me. There were nothing wrong with the replies, to be clear; CJ was very forthcoming with any questions I threw his way. But it became clear that the real answers I sought laid elsewhere.
In order to understand the work of an NPO, I had to engage CJ in his capacity as a missions worker and also his past as a volunteer. As I reviewed the narrative, I realised that I had excluded the most important person in the conversation: the disadvantaged community.
And CJ knew a thing or two about that. As a black Brooklyn native, CJ once shared from the pulpit about his experiences as a member of a discriminated racial group. This man was the sum of three persons: the volunteer, the institution, and the victim.
And therein laid the question I had meant to ask: “what does it mean to grow up black?”
But how do you ask a black person such a question? How do you broach the subject without coming across as condescending (which I was not) and ignorant (which I admittedly was)?
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, but somehow mustered the courage to break out the question. With a little more tack, of course.
“Thanks for sharing about your work CJ. I’m gonna branch off into something a little different here; what was it like growing up in Brooklyn?”
Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York
CJ was raised in what you would call a black community: that meant going to a black public school and attending a black church. But it was really about what it was not. For him, growing up in a black community meant not getting the same level of education as a white person in the same city. Or not making a single white friend till college. Or not knowing what he was missing out on as a little boy growing up in Bushwick.
“Back in elementary school, the kids who came from the lower-income families got on the lunch programme. It was terrible how little nutrition was in that thing. I mean, they served pizza as a vegetable on some days man. How is pizza even a vegetable??”
The public schools were clearly underfunded, a fact that still persists today. To make things worse, funding was spread unevenly across the various public schools, a statistic confirmed by multiple other sources when I did my own research. This inequality extended into housing, utilities, roads, and other public infrastructure.
Which was appalling, considering this was New York City. How could institutionalised disparities still be so entrenched there in the 1990s?
“It’s actually still around today. Just look at the neighbourhoods further south of Brooklyn, that should give you an idea of what I’m talking about.”
Or I could head over to the Hamptons and search for the rich white enclaves. There, I would notice something really out of place: a black neighbourhood in the vicinity. Kind of like spotting a slum in the middle of a rich part of town. CJ explained that such an arrangement existed because the wealthier folks needed to have a blue-collar community close by to get things done: gardeners, housekeepers, mechanics and so on.
“That’s not the only one. Segregated communities like this one are all over this country.”
But back to the 90s. As a kid, CJ’s only interactions with a white person were with the rare few white school teachers at his school and the odd person on the street. Otherwise, it would not be until his college days before he first befriended a white person. It had been one black school to another growing up: for once, he was in the minority.
From his time in college to landing his first job, CJ experienced first hand what it was like to be discriminated against in a predominantly white environment. Discrimination then worked a little differently: not through racial slurring or hate crimes, but through being judged subconsciously based on the colour of your skin. Because sometimes, racism goes deeper than outward expressions of hatred or fear.
“Your abilities and your character were assumed of you because of your colour. You must be bad at science and good at sports, that kind of thing.”
This was how opportunities were distributed across different demographics, where qualifications were assumed before they were authenticated. It was under such circumstances when CJ signed up for the financial sector after graduation.
His interviewers were taken aback to see a black man enter the room. “They thought I was Jewish or something because of my last name. You should have seen the look on their faces!” He got lucky though; he had seen resumes rejected just for having a black name on it, and his own could have been one of those too.
Halfway through the round, it became apparent that they would prefer him for a different position that was “more suited based on the skill sets listed on his resume.” Which was odd, considering these skill sets explicitly qualified him for that position and not for the other one they were offering. That other position had more coloured folks than the job he was actually applying for. Coincidence?
CJ got the job he wanted in the end. After a long couple of years, he walked away from it to enter seminary school. 3 years later, he would meet me at an overpriced cafe.
It Begins with Your Local Community
So how can we overcome these prejudices?
That’s a pretty loaded topic, but let’s start out with the barriers. For CJ, it is the institutional barriers that are preventing positive change from catalysing.
“This is how the system is set up, ever since the founding of this country. We put votes in the hands of the masses, but put real power in the hands of a few people. And so the fate of the many ultimately are still decided by a disproportionately small group of bureaucrats. You see this pattern replicating itself from the top all the way down to the local offices.”
CJ admits that institutions are made up of people in the end. And this is why we need people to change before systems can move in the same direction.
How, then, do people change? And even if they do, how would changing their perspectives help change the fates of the disadvantaged in this country?
“Well, it must begin in your local community.”
That line from CJ would leave a deep impression on me. To him, the local community was where you would first come face to face with the issues you could actually understand. It was where you played and you schooled and you worked, where you first learnt to put faces to events or things. There, you could actually empathise with the issues because you were very much part of it.
As you are reconnected with your own community, you begin to unravel the systems and institutions that affect it. You begin to wonder how the system that worked out for you somehow didn’t work out the same for these other groups in your own community. You realise that the system needs to change, but it would take more than just you, wouldn’t it?
You, and others like you, would work to make those changes happen. You send a message to people who make the rules, the ones with the real power to catalyse change. Some messages are sent with pickets and letters and secret ballots, others through soup kitchens and halfway houses and other services to the community. And one day, the people in the system just might get your message.
And then I realised: the problems that you can solve would not be found thousands of miles away from home. The problems you can solve are found right where you live and work.
“This is why the work I do (at the Centre for Student Missions) isn’t necessarily about changing lives in New York City itself. When students come over and witness inner city issues first hand, the hope is that they can return to their own neighbourhoods and create a positive change back home.”
Well, people don’t just “reconnect” with their communities overnight, do they? How do you move people from apathy to empathy?
How do people change?
“Through reaching out to situations they are unfamiliar with, or reciprocating when such situations reach out to them. Through meeting real people and listening to their stories. Through having them understand that they are as much a part of the problem as they are capable of changing it. Through really getting to know another person.”
“Through real conversations. Like this one, perhaps.”
Coming Back Home
It has been awhile since that last conversation with CJ. Back home in Singapore, the bantu project has taken off. We had the opportunity to work with real non-profits advocating real social causes, and I am incredibly fortunate to have met a great many fellow entrepreneurs and social work champions, all who have made this journey so fulfilling.
I have always considered the conversation with CJ as one of the greatest references for bantu today. The idea of establishing strong local communities enlightened my understanding of social causes, and its proof played itself out in reality time and time again in the various non-profits I have had the privilege of partnering. As such, it is now part of bantu’s core mission to help promote communities that help themselves. To do this, we encourage volunteers to support local causes through local communities.
But it was his parting words on changing through conversation that transformed me much more personally.
It’s so obvious, but the act of speaking to another person without bringing in your own prejudice or assumptions sounds ridiculously absurd once you put it this way isn’t it? Ridiculously absurd because it is so difficult, and therefore so opaque to our imaginations when it should be otherwise.
Just imagine a dialogue between a pro-life and a pro-choice. Or a black New Yorker and a white man from the Deep South. A homosexual and a devout Christian. Or if your imagination must completely fail you now: a man and a woman.
Our ideas on conversations have always been about putting your point across. But would it make sense for someone to come into a conversation, and rather to engage, to be engaged instead? What if we could meet with absolutely no intent to make our own point, and instead to listen and play the role of the audience?
My personal belief now is that there can be no substitutes for it: no amount of news, of books, of secondary research can claim more knowledge than you on a subject that you have actually engaged in your personal capacity. We need these conversations to happen.
Only when two consciousness meet and interact can problems come alive and catalyse change in people. Only when we are ready to open our hearts to accept a stranger can we finally move from knowing something, to understanding someone.
It is unfortunate that conversations are increasingly rare today. That far too many people are ready to put an uninformed mind into action: fighting for or against someone without even understanding who that someone is. Shouldn’t we do something about it?
Where do we start then? How to we make these conversations happen?
Well, as CJ would remind me: “it must begin with your local community.” :)
