At the Edward Jenner Elementary School on Oak Street in Chicago, fire drills are complex affairs. As Daniel Coyle, author of “Hardball: A Season in the Projects,” explains, the school is situated on the boundary between two rival gangs, the People and the Folks. “To compensate,” Coyle writes, “the school [is] careful to keep the students’ comings and goings arranged by gang affiliation, using separate entrances and allowing teachers to divide their classes during fire drills: People out one door, Folks out another.”
Here in the Other America, as social critics have labeled it, gunfire is discussed like the weather:
“Better go shopping early, because they’re gonna shoot tonight. They sure were shooting last night, weren’t they? They was shooting early this morning, but then it let up and I got to go to my grandmama’s.”
Here, a woman named LaJoe spends $80 per month from her welfare check on burial insurance for her two (healthy) sons–ages 9 and 12; she’s uncertain they’ll reach age 18. Here, it is not unusual for 14-year-olds to plan their funerals with the same eye for detail with which brides-to-be plan their weddings.
Even for our hardened, seemingly unshockable society, the accounts of life in the Other America told in this spate of recent books are jarring. Three of the narratives are set in inner-city Chicago. Ben Joravsky’s “Hoop Dreams: A True Story of Hardship and Triumph” (which became an acclaimed documentary film) chronicles five years in the lives of two teenage basketball stars, Arthur and William, who hope to use the game as their ticket out of the ghetto. Alex Kotlowitz’s “There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America” focuses on LaFayette and his little brother Pharoah, who live with their mom, siblings, and assorted relatives in a decrepit apartment in the city’s Henry Horner Homes. Daniel Coyle’s “Hardball” covers the triumphs and tragedies in the 1992 season of the Kikuyus, a Little League baseball team composed of boys 9 to 12 years old from the infamous Cabrini-Green projects and coached by young white suburbanites (including Coyle himself).
Another three books focus on New York City. Jonathan Kozol’s “Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation” looks at a South Bronx community called Mott Haven. Greg Donaldson’s “The Ville: Cops and Kids in Urban America” explores life in the East New York community of Brownsville through the experiences of a local teenager, Sharron Corley, and a public housing cop, Gary Lemite. Darcy Frey’s “The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams” focuses on the basketball players of Coney Island’s Lincoln High School.
BEYOND DIFFERENT
The “otherness” of the America these authors describe derives not only from cruel killings and gang warfare but also from various forms of isolation from much that is common in mainstream society–a pervasive theme throughout the books considered here.
These inner-city neighborhoods are isolated, first, from the institutions many Americans take for granted. Alex Kotlowitz reports that the neighborhood around the Henry Horner Homes has no banks, no public library, no movie theater, no skating rink, no bowling alley. Darcy Frey, describing Coney Island, writes: “On this peninsula, at the southern tip of Brooklyn, there are almost no stores, no trees, no police; nothing, in fact, but block after block of grey-cement projects–hulking, prisonlike, and jutting straight into the sea.”
The people who live in these neighborhoods are isolated as well from the nonpoor. New York’s middle-class subway riders do not cross over 96th Street and into Mott Haven. Indeed, even the pizza deliverers won’t venture there. Taxi drivers won’t answer calls from Cabrini-Green in Chicago. Outsiders simply avoid the “wrong side of the tracks.” Urban neighborhoods that once included families from varying economic classes now are characterized by a disproportionate concentration of the most disadvantaged segments of minority populations. Some “decent” families, those that are hardworking, responsible, respectful of authority, enthusiastic about education, and committed to traditional values, live in the ghetto. But they are under siege, battled by the carriers of “street culture”–the drug dealers, gangbangers, and addicts–and surrounded by the chronically unemployed or underemployed, by school dropouts, pregnant teens, and single-parent households fully dependent on public assistance.
Underclass life is isolated from the “American dream” of a good education, a decent job, a stable family, and a safe neighborhood. Frey’s and Joravsky’s accounts of ghetto kids with basketball dreams suggest what a Herculean task it is for these youths merely to gain admission to college. For many middle-class kids, going to college is taken for granted, something everybody does. For the young men of Coney Island and Cabrini-Green, it is a fragile dream that can be shattered at any moment.
In the film version of Hoop Dreams, one of the young hopefuls, Arthur, plays in the state basketball tournament at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. One afternoon, Arthur’s parents and younger brother stroll about the campus, marveling. Arthur’s mom comments that the campus “Sure is nice, sure is different.” With wide-eyed wonder, Arthur’s younger brother retorts, “It’s beyond different.” For many young people in the Other America, a two-parent family, a school without guns, a job at more than $5 an hour, a chance to go to college, and a gang-free neighborhood are so unknown, so inaccessible, as to be “beyond different.
TRUNCATED WORLDS
The seemingly insurmountable isolation of the inner city often produces truncated lives. In “Amazing Grace,” Kozol visits a school where the smartest kid in the class wants be an x-ray technician when he grows up. Kozol wonders why he wouldn’t hope to become a doctor. “Many of the ambitions of the children,” the school psychologist replies, “are locked-in at a level that suburban kids would scorn. . . .Boys who are doing well in school will tell me, ‘I would like to be a sanitation man.’ I have to guard my words and not say anything to indicate my sense of disappointment. In this neighborhood, a sanitation job is something to be longed for.”
Greg Donaldson’s “The Ville” best captures the most unsettling expression of the truncation engendered by the ghetto: the reduction of “being” to “having.” This triumph of consumerism emerges in large part from the dominance of television. “The teenagers [in Brownsville] are undereducated in most things,” Donaldson explains, “but they are connoisseurs of pop culture, ready receptacles for the jingles and scattershot imagery of television. Their speech is drenched in the verbal flotsam of television shows. The police are called Five-O’s after Hawaii Five-O. They know the stars of the soaps and sitcoms as well as they know their neighbors. Brand names tyrannize the classrooms; prestige cars are worshipped.”
On the street, being a person of “substance” is defined, ironically, as having a certain appearance or image. Nearly all of Sharron Corley’s actions are directed by his pursuit of this image. It is cultivated by amassing “props”–things that earn Sharron “proper respect”–such as designer clothes, beepers, or a reputation as a ladies’ man or con artist.
Sharron quickly quits his summer job bagging groceries when he realizes it threatens his image. He spends the first 75 dollars he earns from another job on a beeper, in part because it makes him look like a drug dealer. Sharron and his friends “have nothing to do with drugs,” Donaldson reports, “yet they don’t seek to dispel the impression that they do, because dealers have props, and they `get paid.’ ” Sharron also periodically carries a gun and peddles stolen merchandise: such acts prove that he is not a “wuss” but a person of “substance.”
Sharron and his friends call themselves “LoLifes” (short for “Polo Lifes”) because they wear only Polo brand men’s clothing, most of it stolen from department stores downtown. Sharron literally believes that “clothes make the man.” Tragically, in his case, the maxim is chillingly accurate. For despite our growing intimacy with Sharron as we follow him through the ups and downs of school, work, and even prison, when his designer clothes are stripped away, we find virtually no substance behind the appearance. Sharron has been reduced to a mere acquirer of goods and consumer of products. In the most memorable passage in the book, Donaldson comments:
“The world Sharron travels in is pure consumer culture; the LoLifes are more an outlaw consumer group than a gang. . . . The young black men of Brownsville indict society by their total belief in it. They trust what they have been told about image, status, competition, hierarchy, and the primacy of self-gratification. Their faith is lethal, mostly to themselves.”
Inner-city residents like Sharron are hardly alone in their materialistic ways. Consumerism is a shared disease, characterizing mainstream America as well as the Other America. The difference is that the disease’s effects are amplified in the ghetto. The inner city’s isolation drowns out voices that could engender skepticism toward the nihilism vigorously promoted in popular culture. Many mainstream Americans have an idolatrous faith in materialism, but it is tempered by the opportunities they have (educationally and vocationally) to build their identities on something other than their appearance. While they too are consumers, they have the opportunity to become more than mere consumers. By contrast, Sharron and his friends cannot or will not access such opportunities. Consequently, “meaning” gets hollowed out of their world and replaced with “image.” In this shrunken existence, kids literally kill each other for gold chains and leather jackets. Donaldson is right: the kids’ blind faith in consumerism is fatal.
ENLARGING WORLDS
“Urban Sanctuaries: Neighborhood Organizations in the Lives and Futures of Inner-City Youth” is a helpful book to read alongside the sobering “ethnographic” accounts by Donaldson, Frey, Kozol, and others. It profiles six organizations from three cities that are effectively overcoming the ghetto’s isolation. They do so by offering opportunities to travel outside the ‘hood. They introduce ghetto kids to new experiences and ambitious life aspirations, encouraging them to broaden their self-image beyond the stereotypes common on the streets and in the media. As Keisha, a young woman in the Girl Scout troop profiled in the book explains, “Outside [on the streets] it’s like we’re not ladies.” The men on the street view girls as trophies: “It’s like they [are] markin’ down how many babies they got and each girl they got pregnant.” Inside the Girl Scout troop, Keisha and her friends gain a new sense of self-worth “in opposition to the largely negative images fostered by many boys and men.” They also begin to see themselves as “givers,” by participating in community service projects organized by the troop’s leader.
Christian community development organizations I’ve visited in Chicago, Detroit, and Dallas are also overcoming the isolation of the ghetto by relocating middle-class families into impoverished neighborhoods to model the everyday commitments on which stable families and communities are founded. The Reverend Carey Casey, the African American pastor of Lawndale Community Church in Chicago, remembers talking with some neighborhood kids after he and his wife moved into the community a couple of years ago. “We came out of the house and were talking to some little children,” Casey recalls. “They asked my wife, `What’s this ring on your finger?’ And my wife said, `That’s my wedding ring, I’m married to Pastor Casey.’ And they said, `You’re married? He’s your husband?’ It was as though we’d told them we’d come from the moon.”
Casey’s family and others from the church are now sprinkled throughout the neighborhood–and the kids are watching them. They now see daddies getting up every morning and catching the bus or subway to work. They see families sitting down together for the evening meal. They see homeowners caring for their houses and lawns. According to church staff, this visible witness of simply living “normal” lives is just as important as the church’s multiple education and job-training programs.
The faith-based community ministries I’ve visited, and the organizations profiled in “Urban Sanctuaries,” demonstrate that the isolation of the inner city can be overcome. Readers of these books, though, will want to know how urban America got to be such a mess in the first place. Unfortunately, few of the books offer explanations.
Daniel Coyle does the best job in “Hardball” by chronicling the decline of Cabrini-Green. When the red-brick row houses there were first built in the 1940s, he reports, the neighborhood was integrated, and “applicants were carefully screened to ensure two-parent, one wage earner households. Unseemly behavior such as littering or walking on the grass was punishable by fine.” Throughout the 1950s two supermarkets, a department store, a restaurant, and a bank were established in the neighborhood.
In the late 1960s, however, racial tensions, mismanagement and corruption by city housing authorities, well-intentioned but problematic legal reforms, and ill-conceived government intervention initiated the community’s breakdown. Riots in Chicago following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., left large numbers of African Americans homeless. Many–even those with known gang affiliations–were quickly moved into available units in Cabrini-Green. Lawsuits by the ACLU had crippled the housing authorities’ ability to screen potential tenants. Then, a 1969 congressional act fixing tenants’ rents at 25 percent of their income drove working-class families out of the projects into cheaper housing in the private sector. By the 1970s, snipers from rival gangs were shooting each other–and innocent bystanders–from the rooftops of the complex’s drab highrises. Cabrini-Green became a national symbol of urban decay.
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE
May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 2
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