Transcript

TEDxPhilly - Nijmie Dzurinko - Challenging negative perceptions of young people

I'm gonna talk a little bit about myself but I work with young people and so we do a lot of interactive activities and so first I want to just do an activity to get to know you a little better and for you to get to know each other and see who's in the audience will you guys indulge me for that for a minute yeah okay cool it's very simple you really don't have to do much it's called stand up sit down so I'm gonna say a statement and if the statement applies to you you stand up notice who else is standing and then have a seat that's all you got to do simple right okay so stand up if you went to elementary middle or high school in Philadelphia so notice who else is standing and have a seat stand up if you are a teacher thank you stand up if you are a college student if you are in college right now okay you guys added the applause in there that was cool great stand up if you are a parent these guys definitely deserve a round of applause awesome stand up if you were told when you were growing up the children should be seen and not heard anybody ever tell you that when you were going on stand up okay cool have a seat stand up if you know someone maybe not yourself but someone who has ever said or who believes that young people are a cause of social problems maybe not be you but maybe somebody you know or maybe you've heard it young people are a cause of social problems okay cool thank you have a seat stand up if you care about young people in Philadelphia if you care about the life chances of young people in Philadelphia all right awesome have a seat and this last one is kind of a trick question stand up if you have been or are currently a young person all right great thank you very much have a seat so my name is nish Mesa Rinku I'm the executive director of the Philadelphia Student Union and if you know our work you know that I'm usually not the person who is representing our work it is usually our young people our students primarily in high school and middle school in public schools many of them in neighborhood public schools in Philadelphia who are speaking and representing the work that we do but I'm kind of switching it up today and I'm gonna be actually speaking on behalf of the organization right across town in Center City one of our young people is presenting on a panel right now at the US Human Rights fund so he's kind of doing that and I'm here I want to tell you a little bit about myself I actually didn't grow up in a city I grew up in a small town in western Pennsylvania and I'm gonna tell a little bit about my story and connect that to how it is that I came to work about work with and care about young people in Philadelphia I started out at the age of five years old thinking how did I end up here that was literally a thought in my head at the age of five how did I end up here with these people my family I was raised by my grandparents I knew something was wrong with them but I didn't understand what it was but I had to deal with the effects of it the effects of class and racial oppression as well as assimilation my grandparents were not happy people I was an only child dealing with the isolation of being raised by older people in a situation where there wasn't much money we grew some of our own food which was supplemented by blocks of government cheese and Bologna slices I remember at the age of five making a choice I recognized that something was very wrong the people around me were dealing with and reacting to situations that were beyond their control and also beyond my control but I made a decision at the age of five to externalize that instead of internalize it a big part of being a young person is wanting to make adults happy especially the adults that are taking care of you so even though I desperately wanted to make my family happy I recognize that probably wasn't possible and I shouldn't believe that there was something wrong with me whatever they were dealing with had nothing to do with me and I didn't want it to affect my happiness I have no idea how I made this decision at the age of five I think it probably had something to do with divine intervention but I distinctly remember having this internal conversation with myself analyzing and reflecting on my conditions and my situation and what I was going to need to do to survive it there was also an X factor in my development definitely the reason that I am standing here today and that was my uncle John John was already grown up and out of the house by the time I came along but he came back to visit and he was the basic reason that I had joy in my life as a child and his message to me was you are good one of the most important messages for a young person to get is you are good because if you don't believe you are good then you are set up for a life of feeling less than of not being sure of yourself of letting people and circumstances determine the limits of what is possible for you instead of believing in your own agency so I made this decision and I had my uncle and I survived not only did I survive but I actually did pretty okay at least I think I've done okay and this is perhaps the reason why so much of my adult life has been devoted to young people like me I know a lot of you care very much about young people you all stood up when I asked you that question you interact with them your teachers you work with young people your parents I have friends in the audience who I know care very much about young people chocka and Rasheed over there care very much about young people others of you and the audience do so all of us who care about young people and want to help have to decide what our perspective is on young people we all have frameworks that help us understand the world but sometimes we're just not aware of what they are and a lot of my work is helping people to explore their perspective and to claim it I haven't been doing any slides cool great and decide for themselves whether or not they think it gets them where they want to be so you have a choice so I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the common perceptions of young people I'm sure you've heard some of these before there's a perception that young people are apathetic there's a perception that young people don't want to learn that young people are violent and lazy that young people aren't capable of critical thinking and problem-solving why is it so easy for adults to believe these kinds of things about young people but we've seen young people some young people become apathetic towards school we've seen them react violently in certain situations we've seen them make some bad choices I'm gonna challenge you to think about these behaviors as manifestations of young people's oppression I believe that if we recognize that young people are an oppressed group we can take strides toward young people's liberation that will help liberate our school system our city and our country but if we fail to stand up for the liberation of young people we risk colluding with forces that see Philadelphia's young people as surplus humanity with no place in our society oppression is the systematic mistreatment of a group of people based on who they are by another group or by the society as a whole the oppression of young people in our society is normalized by tradition and by the feeling of it's just the way things are it manifests itself in a lot of ways adults not taking young people seriously not listening to young people not trusting young people and seeing them as unintelligent let me give you some exam the way I've seen this play out in my work in one of our comprehensive neighbourhood high schools there was a late room policy if students came late to school they had to stand inside a little box masking cake to the floor with all their belongings between their legs and if they stepped outside of the box they would be immediately suspended this was the policy it wasn't a nice big X like this it wasn't in front of a crowd of loving wonderful people beaming at you it was in a crowded room with masking tape on the floor and it was a situation essentially of corporal punishment so one of our members a member of the Philadelphia Student Union got some videotape on his phone of this practice we got it to some influential people and the practice was ended and of course we got kicked out of the school as a result another example speaking of the city is the curfew policy right which is essentially collective punishment it's taking the actions of a few and then imposing a policy on the many on all of the youth in our city investments in education versus prison our governor recently invested six hundred and eighty five million dollars of public tax dollars into a prison expansion for three new prisons while cutting one billion dollars from education statewide this is what we call the school to Prison Pipeline where in our state prison beds are estimated based on third grade reading scores this is how prison developers look ahead to the future and think about how they're gonna fill up these prison beds and I know this is about the city but if you think that this is just a problem of the city that wouldn't be true in Luzerne County where per capita income is less than twenty thousand dollars a year and ninety five percent of the population is white between 2003 and and eight - judges accepted 2.9 million dollars in kickbacks from the developer and owner of two private for-profit juvenile facilities in exchange for placing young people in these facilities through the juvenile court process in a scandal that came to be known as kids for cash I want to tell you though that an essential facet of overcoming oppression is to recognize it and to recognize the internalized part of it and to route it out and that is what we do in the Philadelphia Student Union that's why I was successful in what we do so when young people are able to come together and to work together to break down barriers to identify issues and to take concrete action which no matter how much you're gonna hear and I challenge you to think about this today that that is what people want that's maybe what our political leaders want that is not always the case that's not always the case so when they are able to do this though they can come together and they can come up with solutions they can implement design and implement Student Success centers for example they can envision what a non-violent school would look like and create a campaign to implement non-violent schools in Philadelphia they can get together with young people all over the country and for the first time ever get Congress to create a national youth caucus inside of US Congress which we did thank you so I'm gonna leave you with something that marquita Hudgens one of our former members graduated Overbrook high school she's now in college said she was talking to me one day about this idea of deja vu and she said before I knew what this was I thought I was crazy I was having this feeling of being somewhere before hearing something before and I didn't know what it was and I really thought that I was going insane and then she said she learned the term deja vu and all of a sudden she had language to use for her experience that helped her put it into context and understand that she in fact wasn't crazy that that's a very common experience that lots of people go through and I think that that's what I would like to leave you with as well but the idea of young people's depression is putting language on something that we see happening around us every day and what I want to ask you to do is recognize it and commit yourself to young people's liberation thank you