What My Greatest Failure Taught Me (Commentary)

1. What My Greatest Failure Taught Me: Young Black Men
Aren’t the Problem, We Are
sponsoringyoungpeople.org /young-black-men-arent-the-problem-we-are/
Four things that you should all know about me right
from the start. I grew up in a single-parent home, the
youngest of three boys. I met my father for the very
first and only time at age 28. My oldest brother Ean
was shot and killed at age 30—just shy of his 31st
birthday. And it is a scientific fact that I am my
mother’s dumbest child.
That’s the first time I’ve ever admitted that last part out
loud. It’s always been a source of shame, strangely
enough. Even insecurity.
While it’s something I’ve since overcome, I can still
pretty clearly recall those biting feelings of inadequacy I felt growing up in my house, knowing that my
brothers, Ean and Jeffrey—on top of being older, bigger and stronger than me—would always be better in
school, as well.
No matter how many A’s or high B’s I brought home, I would invariably come in third place—or second, on
the rare occasion that either of them were sick or otherwise off their games. Not even after winning a full-
tuition scholarship to college did they completely disappear.
But why am I starting off a talk about the future of young black men with this particular anecdote? some of
you might be asking yourself.
Because it’s necessary to paint a portrait of some of the environments in which many of us grow up that
ultimately lead us to be subconsciously ignorant of—if not complicit in—the plight facing so many young
black men across America.
Most people who know me today don’t know that I once used to be a middle school teacher. They don’t
know that I was accepted into Teach For America—what many consider the most selective teacher
training program in the country—immediately after graduating from college.
They don’t know that I taught 7th and 8th grade Language Arts at the Warren Street School in the
Newark Public School system. Moreover, they don’t know that I stayed in my position for a mere two
months before quitting. Throwing in the towel. Giving up.
Just two short months in, I, being all of 22, had judged the young black boys in my classroom—and it was
almost always the boys who were a “problem”—unsalvageable. There was nothing I could do for them, I
thought. I had had enough of their “rudeness,” their “laziness,” their “indifference,” I decided. I was there to
teach, after all, not babysit.
I’m embarrassed and ashamed to say that it’s taken me a decade to realize just how wrong I was in my
own rude, lazy, indifferent rush to judgment, my rush to prosecute them without examining all of the
evidence.

2. The young black boys in my classroom who were dispassionate about education weren’t the problem, I
now realize looking back on the 10th anniversary of my submitting my letter of resignation and walking
away from the first real job I had ever held as an “adult.” Neither was it their problem or their fault that I
responded to their reluctance with frustration and—on more than one occasion, I’m not proud to admit—
anger.
Again, it wasn’t their fault. It was mine.
By being born the way I was, raised the way I was, I had unwittingly and foolishly become party to a
system that took a seemingly laissez-faire attitude toward black male achievement. I naively assumed the
young boys in my class would simply come into this world ready to learn straight away—fully-equipped
with their pencil sharpeners and protractors as I had been.
I was wrong.
Our young boys deserve much more than that. They deserved better than what I gave them. Our society
can’t afford to make such costly mistakes any longer.
We must begin to see our boys as boys. What’s more, we must begin to see them as early as possible and
never allow our eyes to stray nor our attentions to wander. Not unlike families with financial means, we
must begin to construct intricately detailed blueprints that outline the destinies of our sons so that they
have a road map to follow into and through life.
We must encode into their very DNA make up the notion that higher learning, if not higher education
necessarily—whether that means college, technical, culinary or art school—is not only their birthright but a
form of fighting back. After all, education serves as arguably the most durable shield against the countless
falsehoods that we all too easily recite about black boys before they are even old enough to stand.
To combat this constant bombardment of preconceived notions about their race and masculinity that they
are bound to encounter—both from members of their own community and the greater society—it’s
incumbent upon us to cultivate in young boys a sense of open-mindedness to accepting new and
counterintuitive concepts. This is why such activities as regularly reading to and with children when they
are young are so extraordinarily important.
It’s only via the vaccination of education, through a premium placed on the importance of learning for
learning’s sake, that we can protect them from the many harmful messages they are victim to each and
every day.
“Black men don’t speak ‘white.’” “Black men don’t go to college.” “Black men don’t study poetry, art or
STEM” (science, technology, engineering and mathematics.)
But it’s important that this work begins from Day 1. We can’t just leave them idle and to their own devices
until they stumble aimlessly into manhood, burdened—and at times angry—with a sense of abandonment.
If I have learned nothing else over my seven years as a teacher in Newark, counselor at the Illinois
Mathematics and Science Academy, and librarian for the New York Public Library, it’s that education,
while always awe-inspiring in its power, is very rarely an interventionist enterprise. Indeed, for education to
truly be transformative, it should be planted as early as possible and given time and space to firmly take
root and blossom.
The plight that young black men face today isn’t a result of them merely being born; it’s a result of a
seemingly endless procession of supposed grownups in their lives who don’t appear to be all that
concerned about them until it’s very often too late.

3. Through a mixture of our own apathy, lethargy and—yes, I’ll admit—frustration and anger, we simply bide
our time ineffectually. We go through the motions long enough for our boys’ voices to deepen, for their
muscles to grow sinewy and intimidating, for the first wisps of manhood to sprout on their faces.
Because only when our boys become men do we appear willing to truly see them. And fear them.
After all, how else could a young man get to the 7th grade while only being able to read at a 4th or 5th
grade proficiency level? Consider for a moment how many people had to fail him before he ever got the
opportunity to fail himself. His teachers. His counselors. His parent or guardian. To steal a well-worn
baseball euphemism, we all had to have dropped the ball.
Still, we can comfort ourselves in the knowledge that it’s rarely ever too late to pick it up again and atone
for our past errors.
It’s almost never too late to begin again. As the Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett once said:
“Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
(I, for one, try to fail better a little too often probably.)
But we must first put aside our preconceived notions about black boys; we must issue each and every one
of them—and the ones who are yet to be born, above all else—the equivalent of a “fresh start” slip, as we
referred to it in my library days. We must assume that they each enter this world as unbruised and ripe for
the picking as any other child.
During my time with NYPL, I got the opportunity to volunteer with inmates at Rikers Island Correctional
Facility—the vast majority of them black and Hispanic and around my age.
Here were the spectral manifestations, over a decade later, of the young men I grew up with—who sat
behind me in homeroom, who lived down the hall from me, who I regularly played basketball against at
Claremont Park in the South Bronx.
There, but for the grace of God, go I, I thought each time I walked the halls of the GRVC unit at Rikers. I
saw myself in the faces of these young men, and I secretly wondered whether or not they saw themselves
in me.
I know this much is true.
I failed the young men in my class a decade ago. I failed them because I couldn’t somehow understand
why they weren’t like me, why they didn’t get to school well before the first bell each morning and stay late
long after school let out each afternoon.
I based their fate on my presuppositions about who they were, what they should be like, and what they
should and shouldn’t know. I didn’t think about the teachers in 5th and 6th grades who failed them. I didn’t
factor in the fathers who may or may not have been present in their lives, much less the overburdened
mothers who were so busy toiling, trying to keep food on the table, they very rarely, if ever, prioritized
reading, writing and arithmetic.
My self-centeredness led to their downfall, and for that transgression I have spent a small piece of every
day for the last eleven years—more than 3,800 in total—thinking about them, wondering, at times out loud,
what their lives are like, if I might recognize them if I passed them on the street.
They would be 23 and 24 now. Are they good men? I catch myself wondering. Husbands and fathers?
Doctors and lawyers? I guess I can’t allow myself to think of a less idyllic alternate reality, truth be told.
That would be too heavy a cross for me to shoulder, I think.

4. I’m not saying any of this to atone for past transgressions. I know the young man I was at 22—wilful,
stubborn, impatient. And I’d like to believe I know a bit better the still relatively young man I am now at 33
—just a little less wilful, stubborn, impatient. Anyway, while I’m not Catholic, I’d like to believe I’ve paid my
penance. And even if I haven’t, there’s nothing I can do about it now, is there?
But what I can and will make certain—what we all can and should make certain—is that we learn from past
errors in judgment. Because just like the nameless, faceless traveler in Robert Frost’s ageless poem, “The
Road Not Taken,” I’m increasingly afraid that we may have finally come to that ominous “two roads
diverged in a yellow wood” in our dealings with young black men. And the only thing we can be sure of is
we can’t travel both.
So what will we do? Which path will we take? What will the choices that we make today mean for them
tomorrow?
As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself pondered in his 1967 book of the same name: “Where do we go from
here: chaos or community?”