I gave a keynote speech at a conference yesterday about youth violence and trauma. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to say so I procrastinated until the night before and then tried to put pen to paper. Since I was struggling, I took to Facebook to share my troubles. A friend of mine recommended an interview with Lupe Fiasco that had just been published in the Chicago Sun Times. He suggested that I watch it for inspiration. The video of the interview is below:

This isn’t of course the first time that Lupe has talked about violence in his hometown of Chicago. He got famously choked up just this past summer when speaking on the same topic. It is clear that Lupe takes the violence to heart and that he desperately wants to find some solutions to alleviate it. In his latest statements of a couple of days ago, I was particularly struck by these words:

“You can’t tell them [expletive]!” he says, speaking about black Chicago youth. “You can’t tell them nothing, and that’s the chilling part of it. At this stage in the game, there’s nothing anyone can say, certainly nothing Rahm Emanuel can say. He could take this moment as a point to give up and send in the National Guard, or he could take it as an opportunity to say, ‘We ain’t got nothing to talk about, so let’s go rebuild this community right around it without them even knowing, the same way it was destroyed around them without them even knowing.’ Let’s go build 10 basketball courts without saying anything, throw a bunch of basketballs in there and just leave.”

He thinks for a moment, stares out the window. “You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to go get a bunch of buses, go out into the neighborhood. ‘Hey, man, where we going?’ ‘We’re just going to go to Great America [theme park] today.’ Nothing about it, no pitch, no agenda. Just one day and go have some fun. Sometimes it’s all they need, bro. It’s not about telling them how to live, because then you have to unpack 60-70 years. They don’t know why they live there. I never knew why I lived in the ‘hood. But they’re there, and they got stress.”

There’s a lot of unpack here. It’s clear that Lupe feels despair at what’s happening in our inner cities. The sense that he is overwhelmed by the “bigness” of the problem of violence also comes across pretty clearly. But what I also noticed is that within his words are the kernels for some solutions to violence:

1. “so let’s go rebuild this community right around it without them even knowing.” Here Lupe is making the case that we must invest in poor and underresourced communities. He offers an example of building basketball courts and I see this as a metaphor for the need to attend to the economic development of these blighted community areas.
2. ‘We’re just going to go to Great America [theme park] today.’ Here Fiasco echoes the literature about positive youth development which suggests the primacy and importance of relationships in the lives of all youth. All of us who work with youth know that those who have strong relationships with positive adults do better across a whole set of indicators of well-being.
3. I believe that the best way to counter violence is with love. Lupe’s love for his community and the young people who live in the city shines through every word that he utters in the interview.

So in just a few words, Lupe Fiasco articulates what academics can’t in 100,000 words. What we need to alleviate violence in the lives of young people are: 1. Economic and social resources; 2. Strong relationships between youth and positive adults; and 3. Love (the Agape kind). These are good ingredients and he alludes to a final one. Here he is more dismissive or perhaps pessimistic. Yet this ingredient to counter violence is essential and usually poorly understood. In order to eradicate violence, we have to squarely face the ravages of external and internalized oppression. This is what, it seems to me, Fiasco tries to get at in the words below:

“It’s not about telling them how to live, because then you have to unpack 60-70 years. They don’t know why they live there. I never knew why I lived in the ‘hood.”

Fiasco identifies the fact that young people are trapped in circumstances not of their own making and can’t explain why they live in the conditions that they do. This is a critically important insight and it deserves further consideration. I have quoted Aurora Levins Morales a couple of times on this blog. I think that her work about oppression is invaluable. She explains the importance of considering the impact of oppression in our lives and our work:

“The only way to bear the overwhelming pain of oppression is by telling, in all its detail, in the presence of witnesses and in a context of resistance, how unbearable it is. If we attempt to craft resistance without understanding this task, we are collectively vulnerable to all the errors of judgement that unresolved trauma generates in individuals. It is part of our task as revolutionary people, people who want deep-rooted, radical change, to be as whole as it is possible for us to be. This can only be done if we face the reality of what oppression really means in our lives, not as abstract systems subject to analysis, but as an avalanche of traumas leaving a wake of devastation in the lives of real people who nevertheless remain human, unquenchable, complex and full of possibility.”

It’s understandable why Lupe Fiasco shies away from suggesting that we must all engage in the work of unpacking external and internalized oppression. Offering this as a solution to violence is not a quick fix and people want to find a way to stop the shootings (as though this is the only or even the primary form that violence takes in cities like Chicago). I would submit though that until and unless we get at the root cause of violence which is oppression, we won’t make a significant impact on the problem. So we must devote ourselves to the hard work of excavating 60 to 70 years of oppression. Young people and their parents have to understand how and why they are living in the conditions that they are. The inner city is not a historical accident. We need to create more anti-violence freedom schools in communities across Chicago. This, it seems to me, would be a particular valuable intervention to address the roots of violence in our communities. Maybe Lupe will offer this up as a suggestion the next time he is asked about violence in Chicago…