A Sense of Self

It’s good to read about an initiative that has proven to be successful, in bringing young people with a common background and shared problems together. The thing is, together they can thrash out the problems that seem to trouble them, and attempt to understand why they’re happening, and learn, with the help that numbers often contribute to a situation, how to overcome the challenges that come their way.

A high school teacher and a handful of her friends, witnessing the obstacles that their black students often encountered in social situations they weren’t always able to control, thought of something they might organize that might prove useful. And so was born Black Youth Conference Day, with the entire school day given over to one hundred and seventy-five students who attend Woodroffe High School engaging in spirited conversations and debates.

The idea was to assist these young people in their search for identity and self-confidence. “We started the conference as a response to comments from the community”, said teacher Adrienne Coddett. “Organizations would call me to a meeting about youth programming and there’d be no youth there.” The fact appeared to be that black teen-agers absented themselves through a wish to “stay invisible because they don’t see a place for themselves.

“I don’t know the answer - if I did I’d be front row at an Oprah Winfrey show. But I can venture a few guesses. It’s not necessarily only feeling unwelcome, sometimes it’s a lack of role models, or invisible barriers, plus a whole lot of very complicated things.” Some of which can be the inner knowledge of just how endemic has been the history of discriminatory black suffering in a largely white society.

The engaged teen-agers attending the conference make a transition from listener, to participant, to activity. This is a conference tailored specifically toward the needs of young people. Young black people. Although it is not meant to be exclusively for black kids; anyone who is interested is invited to attend. It’s an opportunity to ventilate one’s apprehensions, express one’s fears about events, about the future, about one’s place in society.

A place too where hopes for the future can be explored, and commonly-experienced events, both good and bad, can be discussed objectively, put through a fine lens of critical observation, and synthesized for potential responses and outcomes. It’s a place where a whole lot of young people can come together, make useful connections, feel a vital part of an enterprising socially cohesive group, and that’s empowering, comforting.

A game was set up with the students divided into halves, an imaginary blank space between them, and a series of questions thrown out at them. They were coached to “step forward” to single themselves out if they could respond affirmatively to a statement. When the statement, “Step forward if you feel safe at school” elicited no action, this produced a response for reasonable discourse. And the teachers present knew there was a serious issue to be addressed.

On one occasion, the students were invited to step forward if they hated their black heritage. One girl of mixed heritage stepped forward, thus expressing her personal difficulty in representing the world of black, the world of white, and thinking of herself as belonging nowhere. As evidence of the shock the others felt on appraising the girl’s revelations, she stepped back again, to join the majority.

Which prompted the girl beside her to impetuously reach out to hug her in compassion and sisterly understanding. And it seemed, observers claimed, that everyone present there shared her pain and wanted to help her discover her true identity.