Some Teens are Not Smart

On Tuesdays, I tutor Somali refugee kids in Seatac. I do it for selfish reasons - I get to learn a little about the Somali community by osmosis and the students benefit from my help (unless there's high school math in the mix, in which case they're on their own). It's often fun and always interesting.

I've been intending to write about civic participation by the Somali community in South Seattle. After spending a few months interviewing leaders of Seattle's East African community I started to feel like I was getting press-release generalities. I was asking them to tell me, a stranger, about how their lives work. I'm sure my questions weren't particularly insightful. In short, I got the insights I deserved.

I came to recognize that I couldn't expect to know the Somali community unless I was willing to meet them on their own terms. As a tutor, I have the advantage of not needing or expecting to learn anything in particular. The likelihood of gaining the trust necessary for real sharing between people is increased by my willingness to give up a couple of hours a week to help out.

I snatched up my first gem a couple of weeks ago at the orientation class for new tutors. The instructor offered the following example, from an essay on street gangs written by a high school senior, of the difficulties of cross-cultural communication:

Some teens are smart. Some teens are not smart. That is why they need help not to join gang.

"What did this mean?" she asked. Somebody speculated that the student was making a connection between lack of education and crime. Others danced around this idea that it's stupid people who join gangs. Of course, this was all wrong.

What the student meant was that it's perfectly fine for people to join gangs as long as they know how to handle themselves. Imprudent teens who don't know how to keep themselves out of serious trouble are the ones who need to be saved from the gangs. They'll be the ones going to jail and killing each other. In this way of thinking, gangsterism is kind of like skydiving: it looks dangerous to the uninitiated, but with the proper expertise and preparation, it's perfectly safe.

This explanation met with general disapproval. A fellow trainee raised his hand, "As tutors, if we hear something like this, should we tell them that what they're saying is wrong?" I didn't catch the reply, I was off somewhere daydreaming about smart skydivers.

The high school essayist, who no doubt would fit neatly into the "at risk youth" category, was conveying some real, insider wisdom about the calculus of gang membership. But upstanding adults, always ready with our wisdom and righteousness, aren't prepared to hear it. We'd like to edit the faulty reasoning out of a term paper, as if that will make it disappear from the world.

Instead of answering gang violence with repression and violence, Seattle has settled on watching certain kids as much as possible to make sure they're not doing wrong, dissuading them from joining gangs, co-opting them with better alternatives. The idea of hanging out with teens more and reasoning with them informs every part of the the Mayor's $9M "Youth Violence Prevention Initiative". What's missing, I think, is a real understanding of the course of action we're trying to lure them away from.

Short of following the rabid advice of the readers of our local newspapers - encouraging young men to kill each other, shipping them all to Venezuela - solving our gang violence problem is going to require of us adults the humility to sit down with surly, hormonal teens and learn the math that puts them in a gang.