​It is Monday, June 13th when I am receiving a text from my ‘fav’ student asking if I’d be in class today. I had been missing-and-actively pursuing career goals outside of the classroom. My plight as an art-educator is struggling to break into the industry amid creating opportunities for student-artists to exercise their gifts. Both callings are equally important to the success of my community and require an enormous amount of energy from my creative soul. At TWENTY8 I am still learning how to balance creative and professional energies so to become a master of my gift and not a slave. However, I’ve had very few perfectly balanced creative or professional experiences. Everything and every work seems to be ever in development; and when something succeeds something almost always fails. It was the beginning of a Monday but the end of a chapter; and I had been working to accept the failure of my career in secondary education.
 
I’m sitting at my desk grafting a blueprint of a new work I’m writing exploring the massacre in Orlando when seven students are bursting through my door! When I immediately order them to behave they are defiant and adamant about surrounding my desk. Then proudly one student hands me a card and another slams cupcake on my desk. Thoroughly moved by their effort to congratulate me on my acceptance to the MFA Dramatic Writing program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, I am thanking them and reading the handwritten notes on the card aloud. Amid three years of what I perceived to be inadequate service my effort to educate was not in vain; And of the hundreds of students I struggled to teach while juggling my artistic pursuits seven returned to wish me good luck and say thank you! Blessed.
 
There has been something oddly spiritual about my experience teaching at my alma mater in inner-city New Jersey. I walk the halls each day shedding the weight of my adolescence here. Here… in this very high-school… I was an overweight introverted poet without a voice or an opportunity to explore my gift of writing. As an educator I am seeing and hearing the gift of my students and wondering why no one saw the talent budding inside of me. The things we (the people) ignore grow. The things we (the people) ignore remember. In remembering, I am faced with the truth about the condition of the inner-city school district.
 
There is a war going on in the inner-city public schools. How big is the war? The war is enormous! It starts in the home… crippling the hopes of every mother… and crippling the dreams of every father. Then it creeps into our school districts… stifling the minds of our scholars. The war is poverty… and its rapid progression from one generation to the next is seeking to stagnate what it cannot corrupt. The war is propaganda in the media, music, and entertainment our scholars consume… and it is seeking to contaminate and define their identity. My students are in this war. I was in this war. The war against the inner-city suffocates purpose until one discovers information about himself. We have to get information and get it to our scholars. What is the information we need? This cupcake/card is telling me I got information to seven students who will continue to pursue their craft of acting. When there is purpose beyond the war we are victorious even when it looks like we’ve failed.
 
 

“Where’s the rest of it?” is a line of dialogue from my web-series I thought would work as a title for this blog because I am asking Hollywood the same question about the stories it produces about inner-city black youth.

My web-series, the Miseducation of a First Generation College Student, is a dramedy that navigates the struggles of an inner-city first generation college student through the fictional character Lavor, but is a semi-autobiographical retelling of my experience(s) in undergrad. I attended the historically black college Delaware State University in Dover where I met a variety of interesting characters who I will try to recreate in the series. Although more importantly I believe being the first in my immediate family to attend college introduced some unique and oftentimes laughable learning curves suitable for dramatic storytelling.

Whereas Hollywood will produce inner-city stories about black males the narrative is limited. And this is why I want to tell my story. From John Singleton’s ‘Boyz n the Hood’ (1991) to Rick Famuyiwa’s ‘Dope’ (2015) a single parent struggling to raise an incredibly gifted athlete or genius who gets caught in a drug war is only part of the inner-city reality. As there are many two-parent homes struggling to raise children who never interact with drugs or gangs but must still overcome the challenges of their impoverished communities. There are different options in the ‘hood’. There are different people. There are different stories, problems, fates, and solutions. The drug dealer lives next door to someone who is devoutly religious and, though economically deprived, they are refusing to live morally corrupt; and next door to this staunchly religious neighbor there is someone different. And so if there is variety in the ghetto it should be reflected in the stories we tell. Otherwise we continue to glorify one part of the ghetto and what message does that send?
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Dope was an amazingly well-crafted film but there could have been another obstacle in the main character’s life besides a bag of drugs. He could have had a father in the house and still struggled to get out of his poverty stricken neighborhood. There are entire families in the ghetto. There are blended families in the ghetto. We have to look at this. We have to know why Hollywood continues to produce stories about our inner-city youth from broken homes that involve the selling of drugs. Film is a powerful medium that helps to shape the identity of today’s youth.
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It is difficult to defy the stereotypes mainstream media adamantly continues to produce. My web-series is one story about an inner-city black male who comes from a struggling two-parent home. He is not an athlete. He represents the ‘other’ part of the inner-city that successfully avoids selling narcotics. We love John Singleton. We love Dope; but we need to tell the rest of our story. The drug dealer is NOT the main character in every ghetto and some of us lived in two-parent homes. All of these images are important because we want to see the truth, but when part of the truth escapes us we remain ignorant about our diversity and potential.
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