OUR KIDS ARE DYING
Luis J. Rodriguez, poet-author-activist, delivered the keynote speech in February at the Sonoma County, California, ACLU annual dinner. Appearing with him were high school students who had written winning essays on school censorship. Their appearance together was not coincidental. Rodriguez' acclaimed autobiography Always Running had been banned in nearby Santa Rosa schools.
The book depicted gang life as a suicidal lifestyle. Right-wing groups complained about its violence, unfavorable depiction of law enforcement, and description of a sexual encounter. A couple with no children in the public schools convinced the School Board to remove it from the approved reading list and ban teachers from using it without Board approval. In response, the ACLU chapter purchased copies of Always Running for each Sonoma County high school and established an essay contest on school censorship.
Rodriguez' talk is especially appropriate in the wake of the Littleton massacre, providing some insights into issues to explore further in understanding why such a horror could happen-and what steps parents and teachers can take to reduce the chance of it happening again.
I HAD NO IDEA of the controversy that "Always Running" would bring because how can honesty be wrong? We're short on honesty in government, we are short on it in literature, we are short on it in many ways. We have got to encourage people to look at themselves and look at the world and honestly--eyeball-to-eyeball--say what is wrong and ask what we can do about it.
A list came out recently of the hundred best books ever written in western civilization. That list sorely lacked women and people of color and a different sexual preference. But books considered classics have gone through this censorship and worse. People have burned books, kept them out of the schools. In fact, the number one book on that list was James Joyce's Ulysses. When that book first came out, it could not be published in the United States, but had to be published in Paris by Sylvia Beach. And the first 500 books that landed on our shores were burned by the U.S. Government. Now, less than a hundred years later, Ulysses is considered the best book in the English language.
I want to raise this point because literature has to be a challenge to the lives we are accustomed to living. It has to show us something different than we're used to. Otherwise, it can't contribute to a vibrant, real literature in the lives of our people.
I'm aware that my book is not for everybody; I'm aware that it has a graphicness that may not be appropriate. And I hope that people can find the best way in which to address the issues in the book with the young people that are reading it. Teachers are as good as anybody to determine its appropriateness. Parents of course, should have a say-so, and many young people, too, because we don't give young people enough credit. They know what's going on in this world.
"Always Running" is the kind of book that sells by word of mouth because young people spread the word. People buy it because they have seen very few books in schools and libraries and bookstores in which they could see their own lives and their own dilemmas. Somebody once told me that publishers try to bring out books that cater to the older, white women in Iowa. That's why you see a lot of books on gardening, a lot of mysteries, a lot of romances and so on. I'm not against all this stuff, but I think they're underestimating these older white women in Iowa. I also think we have to look at other demographics. This country is vast, it's diverse, it's rich in stories and experiences; we have to touch every life. We cannot afford to keep some people invisible.
Invisibility is another kind of murder. When you can't see your history in the books, when you can't see the faces of your family, the faces of your ancestors, in the books of which people say, "Here is literature," "Here is history," "Here's the life of this country," we're murdering a spirit. If anything, we need more of these young voices, more people's stories, more books, and even more graphicness because we are not going to address the realities that we face unless we can look at them.
I'm particularly moved by the so-called "gang youth," the barrio youth who have made this book happen. Kids who had never read another book read my book. And I'll tell you a continuity here because that happened to me. I was a street gang kid, prepared to die for very little in this world. One day I walked into a library--libraries are the great equalizers--it was a small shack in the flatlands of my neighborhood that said "Public Library." I walked in there, and I remember how hard it was to find anything that was meaningful. One day I looked up and found a few books: Claude Brown's "Manchild in the Promised Land," the "Autobiography of Malcolm X," "Down these Mean Streets" by Piri Thomas. If those books did not exist, I would not exist. These are books of people who went through the same thing in and out of jails, on drugs, in the streets, but somehow they transcended those experiences enough to tell their story in vivid, beautiful literature. That's what we've got to get people to do. Make beauty out of this ugliness. Make something creative and lasting out of whatever is tearing them down.
People are dying at an astronomical rate, not just in the streets, but by suicides. Why do our young people sacrifice themselves? Do we set it up because we won't do what we have to do to fight for them, to make sure that they have purpose in their lives? They're sacrificing themselves because we're not recognizing them and giving them something meaningful in their lives. We can't abandon these kids. Their life is not everybody's life. It's not every Mexican person's life. It's probably a small number of people, but every year we find more and more kids gravitating to the gangs, suicide, drugs until now there is no community immune to it. How are we going to handle it? With prisons? By throwing kids away? By throwing them out of your house? Zero tolerance? That only contributes to making things worse.
We can handle it by recognizing the beauty, creativity, and intellect that young people bring into the world-their own gifts, their own passions, their own attributes. They all have something to contribute. There is no useless life in this world, and we have got to stop saying that some lives are useful and some are not. My whole life I was told I could never do it. I remember teachers who actually said, "You will never amount to anything." I don't want to put down teachers because they have been the heroic front lines of keeping literature alive in this country. But just as a good teacher is so memorable that you will never forget that teacher--the one that paid attention, made sure you really learned something--so also you will never forget that teacher who tore you down. That's how important teachers are. When my teachers said, "You will never amount to anything" in a litany, almost every year, "You will never amount to anything, you will never amount to anything," it took me a long effort to decide that I would not believe it.
I have four kids now. When my oldest son got kicked out of high school, I went back to the school and I told them, " I don't want him out in the streets. Find a way to keep him in the school. If he did something wrong, sure, there should be consequences, but don't throw him out." And I remember this one teacher turned around to him and said, "You will never amount to anything," and right away my heart broke, and I turned around and said, "Don't you ever, ever, say this to any kid ever again. It's wrong!"
We have a power, I believe, of life and death over our children. When you have kids you know how easy it is to snuff that life out. So we must make sure we do everything we can to NOT do that, to keep that life going, to protect them, to guide them. But the same thing goes for anybody who deals with our kids. If we put our kids in their hands, they've got to see the same responsibility: "This is a life I have to keep going."
My son has paid a big price for it. I know I have. And I'm tired of it. If my book opens up somebody's eyes--even just one person--then I have achieved what I wanted to achieve. But we have more work to do. All of us. We have a common ground now. Our kids are dying. Their souls are being diminished. They don't know where to turn. We have to tell them heartily, "Turn to us." Can we say that? If there is a moral issue here, it's that you have to start learning how to make a moral decision in the face of a moral dilemma. That's morality--not just some precepts you throw around. When my son joined the gang, I was facing a moral dilemma. I had to decide: Am I going to be a father for him? Am I going to be a father for these kids? Am I going to be a contributing member of my community? And my moral decision was to write Always Running, and that decision meant I had to be as honest as I could be, no matter who was going to be offended, because that was the moral thing to do. The sexuality is not immoral. It's immoral that we close our eyes to it. The drugs are not immoral. What's immoral is when we walk away from it. The gangs aren't immoral. What's immoral is when we allow prisons and police and other people to determine whether this is an issue or not. It's not good for police; it's not good for us. It hurts our kids.
I will challenge anybody who says that my book is immoral. And I will challenge anybody who says that I did not make a moral decision here. I believe in morality. There is a crisis, but there is also opportunity. The ACLU saw a crisis in this town and made a beautiful opportunity out of it. They made a moral decision that everybody can stand proud on. Keep doing that; the kids need to know that there is courage in this community. They need to know that people will stand up because they want to be courageous themselves, and they don't know where to look. So let's be that for them.