Guest Author: Briana Keo-Williams

When I was in high school, my Art teacher posed a question: “Why do biracial people always say they are Black when they are half Black and half white? Why not say they are white?” At the time, she asked this question to a predominantly white class. Why? Maybe she was trying to get them to question their world view. No matter her motive, her reaction to my response of, “It is because we are treated as Black. We do not get any other privileges” highlighted her own ignorance. I was the only Black kid in the class and the question pertained to me specifically as a mixed race person. Yet, she ignored me and just walked away like I hadn’t said anything.

            The world has a tendency to not look beyond the surface and accepting perceptions as facts. Personally, I never really “feel Black” until someone or something reminds me that I am. When I was younger, my identity was less about being a Black American and more about being my parents’ daughter. My father is Jamaican and a quarter English, while my mother is Cambodian and Chinese. Thus, I am not new to the question “So, what are you mixed with?” or “Wait, you’re Asian?”. It’s clear to everyone that I’m Black, and it’s clear to me that I am treated as such.

Like so many other Black kids growing up in the United States, I resented being Black for a very long time. I did not have the capacity to question or reflect deeply about what it meant to be Black, all I saw were the drawbacks. Being Black meant my skin and hair were never going to be pretty enough for a magazine. It meant I stuck out in school. It meant that I didn’t look enough like my beautiful mother.  It meant the same people I wanted to like me, used slurs and names that were hurtful. So maybe there was just something wrong with being Black? My skin felt like a flaw, not a part of my identity, so I tried to distance myself and imagine I was anything else.

I encountered the ignorance and discrimination that Black people inherently face. Growing up, I lived in a white suburb where my house was vandalized more times than I can count on one hand. Skinheads would gut animals and throw them all over our porch, they would spray paint “N*gger go home” and swastikas on our house and car.  All the while, tapping at windows and rattling doors. My sister and I were young enough that we slept through these “visits.” I do not remember seeing the men or hateful words. I only remember the police visits in the kitchen while I kept my little sister occupied with barbies in the next room. This was my introduction to discrimination. By the time I was old enough to put the pieces together and understand it, I had become a bit numb to it.

In middle school, plenty of kids assumed I was dumb because I’m Black. I remember my teacher applauding me for a nearly perfect test score and how confused my tablemate looked. Realization washed over his face as he said: “Oh that’s right, your mom’s Asian, that’s why you did so well.” It seemed clear to him that me being half-Asian gave me an academic edge and that my Black half would lack.  Even more disappointing was the fact that I accepted it. Never mind that my father was an engineer with a 150 IQ and my mom never graduated from college, my estimated worth was determined by the fact that my mother was Asian, and I believed that.

These are just some examples, albeit blatant ones, of the way Black Americans are treated at a young age and how that impacts their self-image. I know the term “White Privilege” can get controversial, but I think this is an apt example of it. There is the moment in every Black person’s life where they realize they are growing up differently from their white counterparts. As a kid, I listened to my father warn me about people who would wish me harm and think of me as lesser. He grew up a Black immigrant in the 1960s and having white men with violent intentions on his front lawn was nothing new to him. He had already given my older brother his stories and advice, and it was my turn.  It’s a conversation we wouldn’t have had to have if we were white. He told me that it was more than just people being mean, it was about my safety. My dad has always believed that his job was to prepare his children to live in a world without him. In his case, teaching his children how to handle and respond to discrimination was just part of that.  It hurt him because it was something he could not protect us from. His usually goofy disposition was replaced with a new intensity, his teasing jokes replaced by stern pleading words; in minutes you could see him become a different man. My white peers did not have to dissect and digest that. They did not have to look at their skin in the mirror and remember all the things that have been said to them because of it. They did not have to fumble and find it hard to love.

This is something I don’t think my mother understood or that my father even knew I felt. I struggled with wanting to be liked. I struggled with wanting to be accepted. I struggled with wanting to be conventionally beautiful. I was deeply insecure and it stemmed from how I knew the world saw me and its familiar capacity for cruelty, a collection of feelings and experiences I know so many other people of color share.

I know now I wasn’t alone even during the worst moments. It was the way my friend of ten years urged me to tell our teacher that two boys had been calling me slurs and vandalizing my things. It was the way my 7th grade humanities teacher held my hands and cried when she told me it was okay to be upset. It was moments like these that helped me learn my worth. I was a shy kid who internalized every insult hurled my way, and it’s heartbreaking to think that other young people feel the same way. It was allies like them that offered real time support and validation. It’s musicians like Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce and Solange Knowles that continue to remind us it’s okay to be unapologetically Black. It’s people like Serena Williams, Ryan Coogler and Barack Obama that exude and celebrate Black Excellence. They show us there is not just one way to be Black and that the ignorant do not deserve our admiration. To quote the late icon, Nina Simone, “We must begin to tell our young, there's a world waiting for you. This is a quest that's just begun. When you feel really low… there's a great truth you should know. When you're young, gifted and Black, your soul's intact.” Every Black kid deserves to embrace and cherish every part of their identity, and it’s important we teach them that.

Profile in Service: Livingstone Delali Agbo

 My name is Livingstone Delali Agbo, a graduate of the University for Development Studies, Ghana, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Integrated Community Development. I have a total of five years working experience in the non-profit sector and rural communities.

Throughout my professional life, I always seek to work with people. My passion for youth activism, volunteering, teaching and working with pupils, was first sparked while volunteering with the UK-Government-Funded International Citizenship Service program in the Adaklu district of the Volta Region, Ghana. I worked with a team of volunteers from the UK and Ghana to develop an action-research program for the Adaklu Waya Livelihood Project. I organized and facilitated training sessions with farmer's groups and engaged with the youth and District Assembly to develop market knowledge through research to enhance the livelihood activities of the community members.

I was later appointed as a Team Leader on the Latitude Ghana Volunteers project, where I led a Team of eight volunteers on the Adaklu Waya Livelihood Project. I worked with farmers in rural communities to deliver trainings in good agricultural practices, business planning, marketing, and branding to improve their conditions. I also led a skill training event in Tie and Dye making, which served as an alternative source of livelihood for the community folks. Together with my team, we successfully won a grant of GHS 2,500.00 as start-up capital for five farmers groups we've established. I also took the initiative to raise awareness on the importance of educating the girl child through a door to door campaign to reduce the rate of teenage pregnancy among the girls in the community.

I recently completed a two-year Fellowship Program with Teach for Ghana (TFG), a movement of solution-driven leaders expanding educational opportunities to all children in Ghana. I taught English Language in the Metsrikasa District Assembly Basic School in the Volta Region of Ghana, and served as a mentor for Teacher Trainees. Being on the Teach for Ghana Fellowship Program has influenced my leadership capacity and developed my commitment to bridging the educational inequity gap in my country, Ghana. I have built a strong bond with pupils, parents and the community I worked with. As a teacher and leader of my pupils, I sought to deliver lessons that enhanced pupils’ academic excellence and mind-sets and access to opportunities. I exposed my pupils to the world through a letter exchange programme led by Yo Ghana, a US based NGO in Ghana; they write and receive letters from their penpals U.S. schools. I have also established a reading culture in the school through a reading club I have established, where I engaged pupils three times a week after normal school hours to read. I also led a school painting project, where I painted the JHS block with my pupils and posted motivational messages from some African and European leaders on 48 trees on the school compound. I also led the establishment of a library and computer lab in the school.

One major challenge I faced while working on the Metsrikasa School Library and Computer Lab Project was fundraising issues, and hence could not meet the timeline for executing the project. It was very difficult at the beginning trying to fundraise from friends and family members in Ghana as they did not understand the reasons why they should support such an initiative. However, the enthusiasm and support of the community folks and the Parents Teachers Association (P.T.A) refueled my drive to pursue the project. The community members through the P.T.A levies were able to construct bookshelves, provide spaces for computers, and use their own labor to raise this structure. My colleague Obed Nhyira Sam and I won a grant from Yo Ghana to purchase a three-in-one printer, which has helped in duplicating learning materials for pupils and also printing out the letters they receive from their U.S. penpals. We won a second grant to purchase six computers for the school. Through a partnership with ‘Scholars in Our Society and Africa’ (SOSA), a nonprofit in the United States, we have received over 500 books for the library. We raised an additional 300 books from other sources.

I derive my motivation from seeing people's lives change by the little support I give.  Giving back to my community and country has helped me to discover my strengths, weaknesses and skills as a Leader. Volunteering and teaching has helped me to identify my career path and long term vision.

Although I seek to work with people, it has been very challenging working with people with different characters and temperaments. I learned to respect the views of others and not always base my judgements on single stories or hearsay. I believe the best way to know people and to work with them is to develop a personal relationship with them. This strategy helped me in the classroom as I tried to know my pupils beyond the class. As I learned not to please man, I became more expressive than impressive. This also helped me to grow as a Leader and become more confident with my values.

I have served in various leadership positions which have earned me a wide spectrum of leadership skills and achievements on my career path.  I was appointed as the Assistant Departmental Head and Secretary for the Metsrikasa D/A Basic School. I was voted as the District Lead for Teach For Ghana fellows in the Akatsi North District and Project Director for Everyday People-GH, an alumni volunteering organisation promoting active citizenship among the youth in Ghana.

I am also a social entrepreneur and Founder of DEEP Creative Arts (DCA). DCA is a graphic design and fine art firm, engaged in business branding, paintings, t-shirt/screen printing, and skills development of pupils in the basic and Senior High Schools of Ghana.

My hope is to one day become an astute development practitioner, who invests his skills and talents in the lives of others. I seek to do this through youth empowerment, educational leadership, volunteerism and community development.

Why Stories Draw Us

A daily meditation from Frederick Buechner touched me deeply this morning. The widely read novelist and ponderer asks why "stories have such power." Think of toddlers sitting in a half circle and gazing in silent wonder at a picture book or how engrossed we get in a novel or movie.

Buchner believes  that storytellers are assuring us "that life has meaning, . . . . that life adds up somehow," even that stories "may give us some clue as to what the meaning of our lives is."

It seems to me that the meaning of stories have changed over time. For most of the history of humanity, groups had a long list of highly detailed stories that explained why one existed and what the purpose of life is. Stories reminded everyone of shared values.

Today more and more of us life in highly diverse and fragmented societies. Unlike the great majority of our ancestors, we have a great deal of choice over what we choose to believe, why we are here, how we should act and conduct ourselves. That sort of boundless freedom can be unsettling, even terrifying. We don't seem to be wired to figure out what life is for all on our own.

Stories are imaginative, of course, both in the telling and the hearing. But they also offer substance, evidence from outside our lives. Attending to the stories of others breaks through our little bubbles and offers the unbounded sky. The more we hear and the better we listen, the better sense we get of what life might be about, even why we are here.

No Love Without Sacrifice: Karen Armstrong and Warren Hardy

I was nearing the end of Karen Armstrong's fine short history of myth when I ran across an assertion that I knew I had heard before.                                                                                Armstrong points out that our ancestors turned to myth, to stories, for courage in the face of danger and suffering. A good myth was neither a fiction nor a diversion; rather, it reminded them that a good life required sacrifice. An effective myth, she summarizes, "demands action."

Myth, stories that told people how to be in the world, allowed our ancestors to "live with the unacceptable," to act heroically in the face of death and suffering.  We now, she says, commonly turn to drugs, music, and celebrities for a whiff of the transcendent, experiences that at best provide vicarious and pale versions of the sort of stories that inspired our ancestors to risk their lives for the welfare of the group.

This all could not help but remind me of my Narrative 4 friend, Warren "there is no love without sacrifice" Hardy. Warren is at the heart of Helping Young People Evolve in Hartford, Connecticut, an organization devoted to offering hope to at-risk youth.

Life is so much better when we find the Warren Hardys of this world, listen to their stories, and follow their examples.

Narrative 4 Summit: Meeting Ishmael Beah and Other Inspiring People

Last month I had the great honor of attending the annual Narrative 4 Summit, which this year was in New Orleans. I got to meet Ishmael Beah, the organization's Vice President. I had read his memoir of being a child soldier when my son was required to read it for high school. Now that I regularly work with refugee youth who are telling their own stories of loss and resilience, it was a blessing to receive some counsel from someone so much more experienced in that work. In fact the gathering, like the organization, offered a feast of widely read writers who excel at describing hard-won hopes.

But what I most enjoyed about the summit was being surrounded, every day, by scores of people who were deeply committed to learning from and caring for others. From Tel Aviv, Israel to Tampico, Mexico, to small towns in the Southern U.S. and South Africa to big cities in the Northern U.S. and Northern Italy and beyond, the rooms and the buses were full of people who were having a blast pouring out their lives in collaboration with others to create bonds of understanding and love.

We are constantly told in the modern U.S. that our principal goal in life should be to pursue and expand our privileges, to get and defend our piece of the American Dream, to "have a good time, all the time"--to "live for the week-end" and "grab the gusto."

But there are many people across the world whose lives suggest that a deeper meaning and even happiness resides in struggling to understand and care for each other. Much of the magic of Narrative 4, I believe, comes from inviting people to experience that way of looking at and living in the world. Being with ninety or so people from across the world devoted to that work revealed and confirmed that an empathetic life is a rich life. Thank you.

Video of Two Brave Story Exchangers

It's a story in itself of how Milen and Zeinab, the two Reynolds High School students in this MetroEast Television interview, became heavily involved with Narrative 4 story exchanges.

My dear friend Michelle and University Studies brought Narrative 4 to Portland State late last year, and I loved the story exchange so much that I started doing them in my freshman inquiry class on immigration. The students loved it, too, and in January several of them started working with another dear friend, Debra, and her Reynolds High School students. Some of the Reynolds students started an official story-share club at the school around issues of equity. In June Narrative 4 invited two students (including Milen), teacher Deb, and I to their annual Summit in New Orleans, where we met nearly one hundred youth and adults from across the globe who are also hooked on story exchanges. Some of the PSU and Reynolds students, including Zeinab, are trained facilitators.

In sum, the power of exchanging meaningful stories has caused a lot to happen in a short amount of time. Bridging the many divides at Reynolds, Portland State, and the broader Portland Metro Area seems impossible. But carrying each others' stories has brought to us all a sense of joyful purpose, even hope. We have become friends who know and count on each other.

Each of the young women wears a shirt with the word "blessing" on it. It's been a deep blessing for me to work with these students and others as we strive to care for each other and do the hard, good work of spreading empathy.

Our Kids, by Robert Putnam

The title of this 2015 book didn't really hit me until the last sentence.

Putnam, a widely read Harvard University professor, does a wonderful job of laying out how children from lower-income families have a more difficult path to socio-economic mobility than I did. Two generations ago children from different social classes were much more likely to live next to, go to school with, and marry each other than they are now. The extra-curricular activities that used to be free are now likely to cost money. Income is now a much stronger predictor of who goes to college than test scores are, and children from impoverished families are much less likely to go to church or otherwise have caring adults in their lives than they were in 1970. Many of them have no idea of how to get to college or pursue a career.

Putnam points out that this is a problem that cuts across racial or ethnic divisions. Moving out of poverty is unlikely for white, Latino, and black children. In fact immigrant children often have stronger social structures than native-born citizens do.

There are some policy recommendations in the last chapter that seem sound but, in this polarized political moment, remote. But Putnam reminds us that most of us can do at least a little bit to help at least one of the millions of children who are struggling by being a mentor or, I would add, being a dependable classroom volunteer or otherwise present in the life of a child outside your social circle.

There is so much judgement around children who are struggling. We too readily complain about other people and their children. Yet many struggling parents are working very hard and deserve as well as need our help. In any event, the children certainly do, and shouldn't that be enough? As Putnam points out in that last sentence: "They are our kids."

I have a friend who is mentoring more than one hundred low-income youth, and he has an extremely demanding job plus several children of his own. Imagine what sort of world we would live in if each of us committed to be there for just one child we don't now know, if "those kids" we complain about became "our kids" that we care for.

A Few thoughts on Selfie, by Will Storr

Selfie: How We Became so Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us is the latest in a series of thoughtful books by journalist Will Storr. I was attracted to the subject because I think that the rise of the "Imperial Self" has done so much to shape and degrade modern life.

Storr examines the modern self through several lenses, such as Esalen ("be what you are"), Ayn Rand, the self-esteem movement and, of course, the rise of social media culminating, including the selfie itself. He points out that our growing emphasis on self-actualization flies in the face of and denies a central reality of life, namely that we control much less of it than we'd like to think we do, that we are flawed, mortal beings living in a fluid, even unpredictable world and that we therefore need each other.

Of course the emergence of the self has been positive, even liberating in many ways, particularly for members of oppressed groups. But the emphasis on self-actualization has been accompanied by a decline in curiosity about or empathy for people different from ourselves and has commonly led privileged people to discount the idea that privilege entails responsibility. A focus on the self is also behind much of the social isolation that is responsible for high rates of depression and other mental-health problems.

You Don't Need to Be "Fearless"

One of my pet peeves has long been the phrase "and I am fearless" used to describe people who have done something courageous.

In the first place, courageous acts are seldom solitary. Courage usually arises from working alongside and encouraging each other. We are at our best in the company of others.

Second, I doubt that many of us actually are without fear when we face a difficult task. If fearlessness is a prerequisite for courage, then most of us have good reason to not even try.

The students in the year-long Freshman Inquiry class I recently completed at Portland State certainly taught me both of the above. We worked together to encourage and support each other as we shared vulnerable stories with each other, confronted personal fears and hardships, and volunteered more than 1,000 hours with vulnerable youth, often helping them to overcome their own fears.

Many of us often confessed, including myself, that we often felt afraid. But, as the adjectives we selected to describe the class reveal, we were also  "courageous," "strong," "caring," "together," and "family."

We don't need to be fearless to do great things if we care for and support each other.

My Promotion and My Mother

I thought of my mother upon recently learning that my application to become a full professor, effective in September, had cleared its last hurdle.

Bessie Priscilla Barber Peterson had a deep love of learning. She had taught for a few years in one-room school house during the Depression, and she made sure that we always had plenty of reading material around. There was always money for books and time to drive me to the library. It also helped that we didn't get a TV until my childhood was more than halfway spent. So I also thank her for that.

Of course my debt to her runs much deeper. I gave up my tenured job in British Columbia nineteen years ago for family reasons, so that we could live in Portland, so my route to this academic honor or accomplishment has been circuitous. Mom didn't like it when I did unconventional things, whether it was growing my hair long, becoming a single foster parent, or giving up any sort of secure job. But she was exactly the sort of person who set aside personal ambitions for the good of her family, so she couldn't really get after me too much about my unconventional academic career or for sometimes defining "family" pretty broadly.

My mother's quiet life suggests to me that our most important contributions come through showing up every day for the people we care about. It made her nervous when her children took risks. But she was the one who taught us and showed us that we could and should do something to help people less fortunate than ourselves. I wish that I had reminded her of that more often. She never realized what a big difference she made in people's lives, directly and indirectly. Most of whatever love I have in my heart is from her.

The committee who recommended my promotion noted that I had an unusually strong record of teaching and particularly service to go with my scholarly production of books and articles and such. Having the mother that I did, it has been difficult for me to do or be otherwise.

Narrative 4 International Summit: A New Story

Along with my good friend Deb and two of her high school students, I had the great honor of attending the annual summit of Narrative 4, which this year was held in New Orleans.

Narrative 4 believes that exchanging meaningful stories can engender deep empathy, not just a deeper appreciation of or care for each other on an interpersonal level, but changed behavior. Certainly I have felt a lot of that over the past year as we did story exchanges first in my Freshman Inquiry class at Portland State and then out into the broader community, including several classrooms. We witnessed empathetic leaps between parents and children, teachers and students, and people with very different political views and ethnic backgrounds.

In New Orleans we had the pleasure of meeting some one hundred Narrative 4 students, teachers, writers, musicians, board members, and staff from all over the world, from Israel to Mexico to South Africa to England, from famous writers like Colin McCann and Ishmael Beah to young empathy warriors who will one day be famous, like Uri and Babsie.

We split into five groups to explore the major themes of Narrative 4 in more detail. I was part of a group that traveled to the delta's edge to experience the land of the Houma Indians, which is rapidly sinking under the ocean. The impact of climate change, pollution, industrial methods of farming, energy extraction, and transportation together with several hundred years of colonialism were palpable. So was Houma grace and hospitality and hope.

Over the next year our group will be trying, from our various corners of the globe, to take their story deeper. We believe that stories can change the world.

Seven of My Students Receive IRCO Award

Very proud of Briana, Jessica, Leen, Ximena, Erik, Brandon, and Dacha of our Immigration, Migration, and Belonging Freshman Inquiry course for receiving Africa House--IRCO's Rising Star Award for volunteering more than 200 hours of tutoring with immigrant teens this year, plus a major research project.

They also undertook a major research project to try to determine how to balance the number of tutors and youth on any given Saturday. This entailed researching the impact of tutoring on immigrant youth as well as creating a mechanism for students and tutors to register their intention to attend and to reward them for using that mechanism.

This seems to me like a good example of authentic learning, a research project in which students are charged with learning academic knowledge and practical skills that will improve the lives of people they know and care about. The knowledge and skills are not, pun intended, just "academic."

"Something Helpless that Wants Our Love."

Yesterday I had an experience with a pair of high school students that reminded me of a quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke:

"How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."

There are students who put others off through their anger, their willingness to argue and yell, to attack. And there are students who take a more passive-aggressive approach, who are interested to see if they can get under your skin and make you back off through sheer "I don't know and I don't care" apathy.

Neither type of student is truly helpless. But they often feel that way, have been betrayed many times by the people who were supposed to love and support them. So when an adult reaches out, their first response is usually to test, to put weight on the hand you extend to see if the hand will fall away or whether or not it will return.

Our job as adults is to care for and love others, especially children, as hard and as long as we can, to see in them strengths and potentials that they dare not recognize until others shine a stubborn light on them. It has been my experience--and certainly was on Monday--that few joys in life equal what one feels when a wounded child offers up her or his trust.

Eluding "The Snare of Preparation"

Cristina Rojas wrote a fine article about the sort of volunteer work that my students and I have been doing over the past fifteen months that just appeared on the Portland State University website.

The great social reformer Jane Addams spoke many years ago of the "snare of preparation" she felt when she was a young adult, the feeling that it would be many years before she would be allowed to do something meaningful.

This year, with my yearlong Freshman Inquiry class on Immigration, Migration, and Belonging, I decided that we would start volunteering with vulnerable immigrant children in the winter term. In fact one of the students started volunteering in the fall, despite her fear of going out at night in Portland, to encourage young refugees. Others were much less eager, at least at first.

The work is not always easy. You may hear a lot of sad stories, situations that seem impossible. Many immigrant adolescents feel, or are tempted to feel, hopeless. If they are happy to see you, they won't necessarily let you know.

But I think what my students and I share in the experience, even after hard days, is the knowledge that we are fighting the good fight, that our work is not simply "academic," as it were. I think of each at-risk child of holding a scale, like the scale of justice, in her or his hand. On one side are all the reasons to stop trying: feeling excluded, struggling to learn English, drugs, gangs, alcohol, the temptation to just "chill" and not take school or life seriously. On the other side is the prospect of a better life and the people who care about you: your family; a teacher or two or three; maybe a coach; someone from your church or mosque. And, if we choose to make ourselves available, us. Volunteering with such youth gives my students and I a chance to put our bodies on the line, to be present in a vulnerable child's life as someone who believes and is invested in his or her success and potential.

We don't need a PhD to do that.

Putting Privilege to Use: An Example

Narrative 4 Story Exchanges have been a wonderful medium for applying or practicing how to put one's privileges to work in a way that create opportunities for people who are less advantaged.

Educated and comfortable white people are often so busy feeling guilty and embarrassed about our privileges that we spend little time thinking about how to use them. We have access to money, time, and resources that less fortunate people do not.

I have found the story shares to be a wonderful way to create situations in which people with less power can find their voices, even become leaders. Story sharing entails having people pair up to hear each other's stories. Then everyone shares the story she or he has heard to a circle of about ten people.

Sharing and hearing each other's stories--and hearing one's own story through someone else's voice and filter--is very intense. One's sense of self starts getting punctured, infiltrated, as it were, by other people's lives. It is like living many lives.

Many youth are highly motivated to dive deeper into the process. So far I have trained about twenty people, most of them much younger than I am, in story facilitation, and I find that they tend to be much better at it than I am, certainly when they are working with youth.

I have the resources to learn about tools such as Narrative 4, pursue training, train others, and carve out opportunities for them to grow into larger and larger roles as facilitators and leaders. I guess that is what one of my friends who teaches courses in development would call "capacity building." How do we use our power in ways that creates power for those who lack much of it?

Doing Real Work at University

At a symposium yesterday six first-year students at Portland State University, my twenty-year-old son and I constituted a panel on the impact of story sharing for radical empathy on our class and in working with at-risk youth, I was asked whether or not I thought such young people were ready for such responsibility. Perhaps I misunderstood the question, but it puzzled me. Most of the first-year students I've worked with at PSU have gone through a lot to get here; they've learned to be extremely resourceful.

I also believe that what our youth and young adults hunger for is not less responsibility, but more real responsibility to be invited to work in contexts where they can truly make a difference. Certainly I've noticed that my own students are adept, flexible, and poised when, for example, confronted by a group of ninth-grade students who don't want to talk about their feelings, their lives, or their stories.

We tell our students that if they work hard in school for seventeen years--or maybe nineteen or more--some day they may get to be an adult, become independent, maybe even do something important, maybe even have a sliver of a chance of making a difference. In the meantime, mass media demands that they be passive consumers, eat and drink empty calories, consume banal entertainment, play interminable video games. Many never make it to the finish line of school or the threshold of adulthood, and many who do are exhausted, jaded, or both.

They want more than that, and they are ready for much more than that--not to mention that the world we are handing over to them requires much more than that.

When the "Strangers Drowning" Aren't Strangers

A very thoughtful book that came out a few years ago, Strangers Drowning, by Larissa MacFarquhar, seems more and more relevant to our world. The author argues that some of us are so sensitive that when we put a dollar or two in a vending machine, for example, we perceive the starving child that money could have fed standing next to the machine. Or if we hear that a child in our community needs a home, we believe that the child's needs are so compelling that they trump whatever inconvenience might come our way by adopting another child. In other words, pace the book's title, such people take the drowning of people seriously and feel responsible for doing something about it.

In our increasingly interconnected world, it has become more and more difficult to pretend that not just strangers but people we know or should know are drowning. I facilitate letter exchanges between roughly 2,000 students in Ghana and the Pacific Northwest, and some of them are so very sad. Talk to most any school teacher across the globe--certainly in the Portland Metro Area--and you will hear heart-breaking stories. If you start volunteering with vulnerable students, you will start to hear such stories for yourself. People all around us are drowning, if drowning is understood to be struggling with poverty, abuse, fear of deportation, and other tragedies.

Does being human entail knowing these tragedies and comforting those afflicted by them? Does it entail seeking to understand and, if possible, correct the causes of that suffering? What does it mean to live a good life in the midst of so much suffering? What do we owe each other?

Reflections on Writing, Teaching, and Mentoring

A few weeks ago the History Department at PSU kindly hosted a reading at which I shared some thoughts about and from my recently published African, American: From Tarzan to Dreams from My Father--Africa in the U.S. Imagination. It was my seventh book and, like all the other readings I have given, it was lightly attended. And all signs point to the conclusion that this book, like the others, will be lightly read. As with my other books, a few people have told me that they have profited from reading it and found it useful. But it is very hard to avoid the conclusion that I have spent a very large fraction of the past thirty years working on books that have had a substantial impact on just a handful of people.

At the reading, however, I also invited immigrants from Africa whom I work with at Portland State or Reynolds High School to talk about their lives. Over the past several years I have found myself spending more and more time with students, from speaking to classes as part of my work with the Yo Ghana! letter exchanges to sitting with particular students in my office or at their schools to encourage them, to assure them that they have powerful stories worth sharing. Watching them share those stories was the best part of the evening.

Academics are trained and socialized to believe that we possess or will possess special insights that will change the world. It would be more accurate to say that we are in a position to nurture and encourage thousands of students who can and might well change the world.

Our Story-Share Workshop

My spouse and I had the great pleasure of working with the peer mentor and two students from my PSU Freshman Inquiry class on Immigration, Migration, and Belonging Friday and Saturday in Seaside. We did a workshop on story sharing. Christina did a wonderful job laying out the process, then Meiling and Paola shared each other's stories in front of about sixty people to give them an idea of what the process could be like, and it was such an incredible experience.

Story sharing entails telling a meaningful story to someone, then they do the same with you. Then the two of you join other pairs in a circle, and everyone shares. The point of the process is to build a sense of radical empathy. When you try to embody someone else's story, the walls that separate us strt to crumble.

That certainly happened at our work shop. There were so many stories of suffering and redemption, and the high school students at the workshop resolved to go back and start a story-share movement in their school to bridge the many divides.

It was the courage of my young students who really made it work, another reminder of why I so love teaching at PSU in general and this class in particular.

Actually, President Trump, We Need More Africans

OregonLive just published my opinion piece on why the U.S. would benefit from more rather than fewer Africans. It is scheduled to appear in the print version of the Oregonian on Sunday.

I've come to believe that most people learn empathy through interpersonal interactions with diverse people than through what anyone might write, but at the very least I'd like the countless Africans in Ghana and the U.S. to know that many white people in the U.S. appreciate Africa and Africans.

Thank you for so deeply enriching and informing my life and the lives of many others in the U.S.

"I finished the book!" Why We Should Volunteer with Youth

The Oregonian recently published an alarming article on the decline of mental health among Oregon teens. Although many of the large number of commentators focused on the evils of cell phones, much of the reaction fell along political lines. Conservatives tended to blame youth's emotional fragility on liberal permissiveness. Liberals pointed to conservative economic policies.

What I have observed in my thirty years or so of volunteering with children in classrooms and other venues is that youth need caring people in their lives. I was stunned to learn a few months ago that in a city festooned with signs proclaiming that "refugees are welcome here," refugee children who are desperate to learn English lack sufficient tutors. But it's not just refugees who are suffering. In the past couple of decades class sizes have gone up and the stability of many homes have declined. On average, Americans of all ages have fewer close friends than we used to. Many of our youth trust no one.

Most of us can do something about this--and I don't mean just blaming the other side. Start by checking with your local school about volunteer activities. You can play a crucial role in a child's life, and in spending more time with youth you will have a much more informed opinion on what sort of larger political, economic, social, and cultural changes would help youth. You will also be pushed to develop larger reservoirs of patience and empathy.

One of the many times I learned that lesson was about ten years ago, working with a boy with severe behavior problems. He had just been allowed back into a classroom, and I spent an hour each week helping him to work his way through a book. He tried everything he could think of to get me to read the book for him, and he seemed incapable of reading more than three or four words at a time without kicking the wall, staring at the ceiling, stumbling over words, and bitterly complaining about the cruel task at hand. I think I hated the process as much as he did. I was discouraged. But somehow we inched our way through most of the book before my time with him mercifully ended.

About a month later, he came jetting toward me on the playground yelling: "I finished the book! I finished the book!"

I don't know if he remembers that achievement, but I'll never forget it.