Words Beats & (My) Life

After 17 years of leading what began as a university student groups project, there is so much I have learned about strategies to promoting individual and community transformation. The fact that we began Words Beats & Life as a conference, hosted by multiple student groups is important because those college years shaped much of what I believed was possible and necessary in the larger world as I graduated. Words Beats & Life is a hip-hop non-profit. I chose to build an organization rooted in hip-hop for a range of reasons including the fact that Hip-Hop is the reason I went to college. Not because I am an MC or even consider myself to be an artist except for the occasional love poem in college. Hip-hop put aspects of my life story at the center of the discussion and has done the same for multiple generations and ethnic communities and nationalities.

When I was enrolled at Arrowhead Elementary School in Largo MD, the principal created detention just for me. Every day I was sent to the principals office. The principal once told me it was for my own protection, because my homeroom teacher Mr. Waters was concerned that he might put me though a wall if I continued to come to his class.

So this was my first experience of receiving special treatment, I had a desk in the principal’s office. Eventually, he decided that I needed a room all to myself so he created in-school detention in what was an empty classroom. Once I was in this room, the school decided this would be a great place to send other problem students. I continued to find myself in administrative offices in Kettering Middle School and then in Largo High School. I was sociallypromoted out of elementary school, diagnosed with a learning disability in the final year of middle school and stuck in remedial classes for the first two years of high school. I was special. I am sure this is why I love “special” children so much. When I visit schools, I almost exclusively talk to the students in the back row and even as an adult, I still sit in the back row myself.

Recently I have come to see this special educational experience of isolation as one of the greatest blessings of my life. The institutions set up for my education failed me, and rather than create a system that would actually make my success and the success of others, mostly black boys, they chose instead to warehouse us in their walls with detention or in-school suspension. We were not allowed to attend class, but we were still expected to do the work, so we had to teach ourselves, which honestly was fine with me. I was always my favorite teacher and that has continued to this day.

School administrations decided early on that they would not fulfill their responsibility of policing our bodies, rarely challenging us to tap into our collective brilliance, so I had to challenge myself. Most of us had no aspirations beyond some future where we would be out of school. Where adults would have no say about what we did, or thought, how long we could play or what we had to eat. I remember the greatest goal many of my peers had, was to be done with school. Not to be educated or knowledgeable. For what? Why would we want the approval of people who had such clear disdain for us? Sadly, this has not changed. Black boys often get suspended, expelled, put in remedial classes, or receive individual education plans and the expectations for our lives are always just a little better than survival.

To me it’s interesting that I did not have this experience in the inner city of one of America’s cities. All this happening in Prince Georges County, the richest, majority Black county in the United States of America. Looking back, it’s clear that the only reason I actually graduated from high school was due to sports. I found a way to train my body, build my community and develop a different kind of intellectual dexterity. Like most Black or Brown boys, my talent was celebrated in games. I was fortunate enough to have had a coach that had gone to college. As I think back he was one of maybe two or three adults employed by the school that talked to us about college, but a more central influence was a peer, who was applying to college and when she asked where I was going, I had to figure it out. Fortunately, to play sports, I had to maintain a 2.5 GPA, which basically made it so I qualified for all the schools I applied to. Yep, I was a solid C student athlete in a majority black county in a majority black school.

I was a graduating senior from Largo High School and received my acceptance letter to one of the four schools I applied to. Rejected from Bowie State, Howard University and Morgan State because when I applied my applications were not complete. Somehow though that same information got me into the flagship university of the state, the University of Maryland. However, I had decided that college was not for me, mostly because I never felt like school was a place for me. I cut school all the time beginning in elementary school. I left early, was in detention or was suspended for most of my 4th grade-10th grade education. I had some good teachers, but I was always more interested in what was going on outside than what was happening at the front of the classroom. I still remember my Spanish teacher in Largo high school who told me I would never be somebody, and that she thought less of the University of Maryland for enrolling me.

How could she understand what mattered the most to my education were never the topics of discussion. For me,school was a 12-year experience of adults telling me what should be important to me, but never actually asking me. I still remember the first day I first got excited about learning in a school based setting. It was about four months after I graduated from high school sitting in on a class at the University of Maryland, Blacks and Popular Culture, African American Studies 202.

The teacher was a woman named Eva George, and the topic of discussion for the day was assigned reading from Dr. Tricia Rose’s first book, Black Noise. This book was about hip-hop, but mostly about how music from a particular era incorporated the soundscape of New York City, into the music. This was especially relevant for me having grown up listening to way more Luther Vandross than LL Cool J, because I spent my summers in New York with my mother’s side of the family, the Puerto Ricans and the Venezuelans. This lecture was the first time my lifeexperience was at the center of the dialog. This one experience is what I like to call a signpost moment. In some parts of the ancient world, travelers would find signs that offered direction to the next city. Those signposts were pivotal in guiding folks along their journey. I like to think of signpost moments as points in time I can point back to and show how it changed the direction of my life.

This was the beginning of what would be a truly transformative 6-year college experience making my way through multiple majors and ending up as an English and African American Studies major. One of the first things I did was get involved with student life on campus, work at a Black Cultural Center, co-found four students organizations, writing for the black student newspaper, running for and losing twice and finally winning an election to be president of the largest Black student group, the Black Student Union. The following year I became a Brother of a Majority Black Greek Lettered Organization, Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Inc. All these experiences were sign post moments and in their own way, each colored the way I thought about education, community transformation and the role of culture in transforming individual lives and whole communities.