Youth Violence and the Language Arts: A Topic for the Classroom

Abstract

Alienated from faltering families, schools, and neighborhoods, young people in all parts of our country are becoming increasingly violent, turning to gangs, deadly weapons, the drug economy, and still more heinous forms of criminal behavior. All of us read about it in the news; for many of us it is an immediate issue in our classrooms. We learn of drive-by shootings, of weapons found in school, and of assault and even murders committed by children barely in their teens. While gangs and drugs are not new, in the 1990s perhaps it doesn’t even shock us anymore to learn that more teenagers are killed by firearms than by all natural causes combined; that three times as many African American adolescent boys die in homicides than automobile accidents; that more and more children in rural as well as urban areas report carrying handguns. As crime has become a major political issue, a national outcry has arisen for increased policing, more prisons, mandatory sentencing, and treating juvenile offenders as adults. But these “easy” answers are shortsighted and ineffective, as law enforcement officials themselves point out. While the number of Americans in prison doubled between 1980 and 1990, giving our country far and away the world’s highest incarceration rate (for black men in America it is five times higher than in South Africa under apartheid), violence, especially among the young, has only increased. What is truly disturbing, even ironic, about the lives of these young people is that their antisocial behavior represents a desperate—if misdirected— attempt to secure their most basic human needs, to establish for themselves even an illusion of safety, respect, and belonging. To understand this fundamental irony of the 1990s youth violence crisis, it is necessary to enter into the experience and perspective of many of our children, to understand the way that intersecting lines of poverty, racism, and shattered family life condition their lives. That investigation can and should be part of language arts teaching, to be conducted with all of our students and in many of our classes. I am convinced that by reading relevant literature, especially contemporary biography and autobiography, by examining film, essay, and even music lyrics, and, perhaps, above all, by listening closely to our own students’ words in discussion and writing all of us can come to better understand and better address the violence in our lives and in our country. To begin I will describe some of what my students and I learned this last year in a lower-division college survey course in African American literature that focused on an exploration of America’s crisis of youth violence. Having been a high school teacher far longer than a college professor, in teaching this class (of half African American and half white students from Detroit and small towns in Michigan, ranging in age from freshmen to seniors), I emphasized actively involving all my students. High school teachers I have been collaborating with in our area are also integrating the same materials and themes into their teaching, and the second part of this article describes their efforts.