A summer youth program in Philadelphia provides the context.
Young people take the time to articulate their understanding of what violence has wrought on their lives and in their local communities. It is riveting — and even heart-wrenching at times. And definitely worth a look.
The film isn’t glossy. There aren’t any fancy, high-end special effects. But the piece’s unpretentious storytelling style allows us to see and hear things that might otherwise get lost in the gloss.
The six minutes of images and sounds don’t constitute the “final cut” of a documentary film. The filmmaker is still trying to structure her narrative. And this piece is just a “trailer” for that soon-to-be completed film. But it does provide a powerful sense of how teens (in this case, mostly Latino youth who live in an urban neighborhood) characterize the violence they have to negotiate in their everyday lives.
Professor Shaun Harper (from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education) and I are co-sponsoring an 18-month conversation on “African American Males Transcending Urban Disadvantage.” It is funded by the Penn Institute for Urban Research and begins with an opening lecture provided by UCLA’s Tyrone C. Howard. Howard is going to talk about African-American boys in urban classroom contexts.
Like this film-short, the point of the series, we hope, is to do more than just engage in crisis discourse about contemporary urban problems. Instead, by listening to folks describe their own experiences (including some positive and encouraging outcomes), we hope to begin unfurling a coherent narrative about the kinds of success stories that demonstrate some of the ways in which young people find wiggle room to succeed even and especially in the face of great odds.
We all have such stories. Expressing them might help others to construct their own political, institutional, and individual solutions to common social problems.
