Bishop: It Takes [The] Village [People]
Thursday, August 18, 2016
In the wake of one more black drowning, those who think black lives matter should spend some time at the YMCA
These days the idea of community organizing raises a political specter. Political organization is a great American tradition, but it is separate from community organizing in the Toquevillian view:
“Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations. . . .Americans combine to give fetes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books and send missionares to the antipodes . . . .[A]t the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.”
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTIt may be helpful to think of family as the quintessential community organization. Then the needs of families give rise to these myriad aggregations, not least of which were those aimed at child care and education. It is no secret that political association has ripped those undertakings from cooperating citizens and made of them government institutions in our state. Essentially the latest of the government’s embrace of a ‘Great Society’ that has had the effect of virtually destroying our critical tradition of social capital
I can never forget Keith Stoke’s invocation of slaves in colonial Newport who paid Quakers to educate slave children. To cite the strength of associative undertakings even amongst the most repressed members of early American society is not nostalgia for the repression but for the spirit of community that was born amongst people regardless of their station of birth.
Americans get together to solve problems, not to beg the government to solve problems. This is the critical consideration for our culture that ought to put to rest the incessant bickering when black people drown, over whether this was the parents’ fault or that of the government who supplied the lifeguards.
There has been much cynicism heaped upon candidate Clinton’s invocation of the village raising a child, but largely because Clinton used the concept to promote the big government village. It isn’t that she denied the relevance of the parochial experience of family, faith and friends. Rather she sees the life of clan and community realized within a government safety net that doesn’t necessarily substitute for parenting, but perhaps implies parenting is off the hook until the government has roped off all the pitfalls in life.
We argue not a rejection of the village, but acknowledging that The Village People had the right idea all along. You don’t look to the government for comraderie, you look down the block. Community organizing isn’t a political act, its problem solving. The YMCA isn’t a very sexy organization. But Willis, the Cop from the Village People who coauthored this pop culture phenomenon, always insisted the song celebrated the socializing and personal growth experiences of things like the basketball and swimming programs he associated with the YMCA.
Ray Rickman of Swim Empowerment is less sanguine about the ability of traditional youth service institutions to close the gap of some 80% of blacks who cannot swim. The ‘Y’ is not really integrated in his view and only interested in token black involvement. Still, that is where his charity has sent some 100 black children to learn to swim this summer. He mourns that this notable accomplishment is but a drop in the bucket and remains suspicious of legacy swim.
My experience with the “Y” does not match his understanding. The whiter ”Y” on Providence’s east side is where I first encountered black peers in numbers that were in parity with caucasians. During the tenure of Ray Baker as Director, it stood out in my mind as emblematic of the Toquevillian association: .
“Local freedom . . . perpetually brings men together, and forces them to help one another, in spite of the propensities which sever them. In the United States, the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people.”
While my upbringing was hardly opulent, it was the mark of our family that we learned to swim at the “Y” where we were certainly on the more privileged end of the demographic. Supporting the “Y” as some kind of remote charity was not adequate, it was an association in which we participated.
As charities like the “Y” have become largely taken for granted they become customer oriented for survival – funding facilities that users will pay for. Their amenities that were once scraped together to serve populations that had no other alternative now attract yoga practioners as much as struggling families that need day care and swimming lessons. And the realities of the modern tort system and trust for the motives of adults working with children mean that the days of vans driving down urban blocks collecting children willy nilly for summer camp and swimming instruction are gone. Can they ever return?
If you think black lives matter, it would be a damn good thing if they did. Rickman is not necessarily wrong to be jaded. But he seems poised to move toward promoting some government alternative, citing the imbalance in state recreation spending for upper middle class priorities typified by bond issues that promote investment in nature above investment in people. His frustration in the wake of another black drowning is understandable but the state is not the solution, it is the problem. Perhaps he will join us in voting against such bond issues.
Meanwhile, for youth who are drowning in a flood of gangs and hooliganism, energetic figures like Kobi Dennis have resuscitated midnight basketball in Providence. Midnight basketball is another one of those clichés that invokes government invading the associative sphere. It took an outside spark to restart after a decade of senescence hereabouts. While still a government program to a large extent, it’s current iteration isn’t a top down knee jerk imitation. It would benefit in the long run from better institutionalizing itself as an association of private citizens.
These cutting edge endeavors for youth would benefit from blending their outreach to young people on the edge of unsavory alternatives with the more organic ‘what every family needs’ approach of legacy institutions like the YMCA, the Boys and Girls Clubs, and the Boy and Girl Scouts. Likewise, these legacy youth service organizations need to enter the 21st century and remain drawn to a mission of serving the recreational and social needs that have been sloughed off on government of late.
The perennial debate of keeping Providence city pools open suggests the city ought to partner with organizations that have proven their ability to maintain such facilities and to use them for youth programs that transcend economic lines. Pools are essentially like charter schools, they are what the community makes of them. The city can buy chlorine and hire lifeguards, and ultimately dispute whether they were watching well enough when someone drowned. But the city cannot give life and importance to the mission of teaching black people to swim, and that is not the city’s job -- much less that of Warwick that generously shares its facilities with non-residents.
That no good deed goes unpunished meme runs through the history of minority drowning. In a little remembered incident a decade ago in Exeter, one of many urban Hispanic visitors to one of the state’s public parks drowned. The crowd of outsiders who had essentially taken over this spot were agitated with volunteer first responders because they couldn’t speak Spanish. You don’t have to be an English Firster to say that sometimes folks have to look in the mirror and think about how to solve their problems. There is no excuse for not owning those problems anymore than walling them off because they belong only to an ethnic or economic group not ones own.
And speaking of walling off, that is, ironically, just what happened to the beach at Beach Pond. The drowning was simply the last nail in the coffin for a facility that had trouble maintaining lifeguards because the unruly crowd had taken to pushing over their chairs with the lifeguards in them. DEM said something about erosion. No doubt it wasn’t politically correct to speak about what had lead to an unmanageable situation there. But if we don’t speak frankly about these problems, we don’t speak. It was Toqueville’s belief that the important quality of America was that we did speak about such problems and we crossed lines as people, not as political citizens, to solve them.
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