There Are Solutions For Today's Troubled Youth

Three years ago, while volunteering at a weekend mentoring program for high school students in Newark, N.J., I got an education of a lifetime. During the mentoring sessions, many of the students often discussed what was going on in their lives. They talked about gang activity at their schools, drug problems in their neighborhoods and personal problems at home.

Most of the students were from struggling, poor or working-class communities. Their limited skills spoke volumes about the quality of education they were getting. Their unlimited dreams challenged us mentors to find ways to harness our young charges’ ambitions and channel them into something tangible. None of the students’ stories were particularly unusual or shocking to me, after all I was a copy editor at The (Newark) Star-Ledger at the time. But getting to know the faces behind those stories, and seeing firsthand the impact they had on the teenagers’ lives, made the stories all the more real for me and gave them context. I began to believe that perhaps by helping others make that connection, especially those within and outside their communities with the power or ability to help bring change, I could possibly help facilitate collective solutions.

We see the headlines and hear the television newscast teasers: "Drug Use Up at Local High School," "Little Girl Shot Outside Home in Gang Crossfire," "Student Test Scores Lowest in Region" and "Teen Pregnancy: A Rite of Passage." These news stories seem to repeat themselves in bits and pieces, but they offer little, if any, comprehensive look at why these events occur and often overlook larger socioeconomic and historical issues underlying them.

My project, Ghetto America, www.ghettoamerica.com, gives a wider audience to the voiceless, providing a larger forum for disadvantaged urban and rural young people around the country to discuss their plight, share solutions and, hopefully, destroy social marginalization.

Nearly the 40th anniversary of the report of The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission), the mainstream news media has failed to make good on its promise to produce balanced reporting in our nation's underprivileged neighborhoods. It is difficult to gather from their coverage how events shaping the lives of this nation's poor are interconnected with forces outside their control. Instead of tapering instances of sensationalism and distortion, the mass media has gone in the opposite direction. Reality shows and randy TV talk shows have become our obscene look into the causes and consequences of our societal ills.

When dealing with the human condition, there are no scientific techniques that unearth definitive answers to perpetual family-structure threats. Our strongest tool is the accounts of those living in the conditions we are studying. That, coupled with concrete statistics and actual instances, helps us toward understanding. Ghetto America digs into broad social debates like education's role in reducing crime and drug abuse and in providing long-range opportunities to poor urban and rural youth. The effects of drug-sentencing laws and federal budget cuts on anti-poverty programs are also topics in need of questioning.

This project’s eclectic cadre of rural and urban teens acts as interrogators as well as witnesses, their disheartening homes, schools and general living conditions the evidence that leaves an imprint on the audience's thoughts during deliberations. Each person's success is determined by a complex equation of opportunities, efforts and timing, but there are external traps that snare ambition and hard work, even unwavering determination. More than questions of culture and environment, pragmatic issues like teen employment programs on long-term job skills development and the influence of abstinence programs on teen pregnancy rates oftentimes hold more importance.

Ghetto America works to bridge this country’s many social worlds through the rich and textured tableau of interesting people and the events that shape and alter their lives daily. In the spirit of This is My Country, John A. Williams' 1966 cross-country exploratory book, Ghetto America examines the stereotypes and generalizations that routinely accompany discussions of race, culture and class.

The crux here is the acknowledgement that finding root causes to problems, challenging conventional notions about the people experiencing them and gaining new solutions won't necessarily come from lawmakers in Washington or university professors but from the very people living with these problems or those working to resolve them.