Once again I find myself in a room full of professional peers smugly blowing smoke about their accomplishments. As we discuss the absence of black males in the entering medical school class, my boss says "So, I saw that the black males in the class are largely first generation. Are they from the Caribbean?" I responded, "And Nigeria and Ghana." Why is that, he asks? I say that it's cultural and that their parents tend to keep a tighter rein on the kids, making them a bit less susceptible to the distractions that capture our domestic kids. I followed by saying that the community notices when meeting our students en masse, and invariably someone will ask, "where is the kid from Homewood?"
What does my boss say to me? What does he say aloud in front of the group? "The kid from Homewood is in jail."
I managed to reply, "Perhaps we can work to help stem the tide." I almost burst into tears right there. At that moment I felt so sad and so deflated by how quickly and casually that sentiment was conveyed, and overwhelmed by the enormity of what we're trying to do. We're trying to nurture a generation of young people so they don't end up as incarceration statistics. To so flippantly toss off that "the kid from Homewood is in jail," was so insensitive, so damaging. My FAMILY is in Homewood. When the majority folk get done using me, at the end of the day, I know that there are people in Homewood who would go to the mat for me and mine. They may not be educated, they may not always play by the rules and they may not always make good decisions (traumatized people rarely do), but they don't pretend to be what they are not. They don't pretend to care about what happens to our community, only to throw the community under the bus when it looks like there's a dollar to be made.
I can't get anyone to invest time and effort in a Nursing Exploring post that might give the kid from Homewood an idea of what else s/he might do in life, but our faculty are running back and forth to and from China like they're going to Shadyside. They'll bring students here from the country with the worst human rights record on the planet...because it pays.
Believe me, if it would put a dime in the pocket of any of these people, the kid from Homewood would get a stellar education, a mentor and a chance at a career through which s/he could cure individuals and our communities. Until then, the kid from Homewood is a punchline.
Thanks...thanks a lot.
