Street roots
5
Oct. 10, 2014
EMPOWERING, from page 4
black students in Portland face are nicely
captured in statistical form. For example, as
far as graduation rates go, Portland Public .
Schools have the worst in the state for
African-American students. Last year,
Willamette Week reported that African-
American students in Portland in 2012-13
faced disciplinary measures five times more
often than their white counterparts, and
most often the disciplinary measures were
suspensions and expulsions that took
students out of school. Nationally, the U.S.
Department of Education Office for Civil
Rights says black students are discplined at
a rate three times those of white students.
Just recently the Oregon Department pf
Education ordered PPS to spend $1.5
million to correct its higher-than-normal rate
of discipline of African-American spècial
education students.
Other challenges are harder to quantify
At BPI’s Parent Symposium earlier this fall,
parents of black and multi-racial children
gathered to share their stories and find
common understanding. Many parents
expressed seeing this as their first chance
to connect with others who could,
sympathize.
Parents, mostly mothers, related on a
number of concerns, from frustration with
some teachers’ lack of cultural
understanding to other administrators’
quickness to suggest medicating a child they
see as disruptive.
“That’s when the labeling begins,” said
one mother, as three others nodded in ,
agreement. There is also the issue of role
models, or the absence of those examples,
in school environments. Though black
students make up about 10 percent of PPS’s
total enrollment, they can easily go their
entire academic careers without ever seeing
a teacher of color at the front of their
realm oi.educatioais essentially a white
Anglo-Saxon Christian one. (Statewide, only
8.3 percent of teachers in Oregon are
nonwhite, according to a 2013 report by the
Oregon Education Investment Board.)
How it plays out is personal. Kimberly
Porter, a staff member at BPI, shared her
own story of false accùsâtion. After her son
went to school wearing new sneakers she
had bought him for his birthday he was
accused by another student, who was white,
of having stolen the shoes1. That day Porter
received a call from the school’s office
asking her to come in and produce a receipt.
“I was outraged,” she said. “They couldn’t
McGEE, from page 4
Portland or even Oregon. Rather, he hails
from nearly 7,000 miles away in Liberia the
youngest of five children of Cecilia and
Charles II, a high-ranking official in the
Liberian government. To understand
Charles is to understand the long
complicated history of Liberia, a tiny West
African nation founded in 1874 as a
homeland for formerly enslaved African-
Americans looking for a place where they
could experience true equality
“I am a direct descendent of those freed
enslaved people who went back (to
Liberia)/ says'McGee. “My grandmother’s
grandfather was one of the founding
fathers of Liberia.”
Instead of equality, however, Americo-
Liberiaris, as the settlers were called,
established supremacy. Over time, the
hostile relationship between the Americo-
Liberian elite and the native African
majority finally broke out into civil war in
.1989 when McGee was only a baby As the
conflict grew more and more bloody, the
McGees knew it was time to leave.
They killed (my father’s) boss.” McGee
says. “He was next in line. The war in
Liberia essentially was about its indigenous
people gaining power and so people like us
had to leave.”
McGee and his family came to the
United States in 1993 with the aid of then-.
understand why I was mad.”
Porter used her knowledge as an
experienced social worker to challenge the
school administrator’s assumptions and
exonerate herself and her son. And the
experience made her want to help other
parents navigate similar situations
effectively. So she went to work for the
Black Parent Initiative.
parents of very young black children and
babies, these early years being most critical
to a child’s emotional, physical, and
intellectual development These parents are
overwhelmingly young mothers
disconnected from the educational system
themselves.
“A lot of our families are coming in with a
lot of intergenerational poverty,” says
Porter. “They’re talking about trauma,,
PI was founded in 2006 by Johnell Bell
domestic violence, limited access to
and Charles McGee, who was only 19 at
resources, that could be food', that could be
the time and fresh off a failed school board inadequate housing, whatever those kind of
campaign. The two dreamed of giving
issues are.” Upon receiving a referral from
parents of black children a network of
DHS, Porter or one of her team of three „
resources to tap into during challenges like
other home visitors immediately responds
those experienced by the Porters.
to the client, and sets them up with a
“We all have the greatest aspirations for
temporary yet safe place to live. “We need
our children,” says McGee, “but the
those parents to be as stable, in terms of
questions becomes our ability to leverage
their housing,” says Porter. “They need to
resources, personal community resources,
have those basic needs met before they can
in the rearing and development of these
really focus on reading to their child and
kids.”
early literacy.”
Originally conceived as a vehicle for
Later, Together We Can reconnects the
community organizing, BPI has evolved into
parents with the school system and
a conversation with Portland’s black
eventually, the focus shifts to exploring
families, moving away from the leadership
community resources and building a support
development classes and tutoring they
network of other parents, families, and
originally offered. To get a full picture of
educators. Those partnerships include
black Portland’s needs, McGee and Bell
organizations such as JOIN, the
hired Davis, Hibbitts and Midghall, Inc., an
Breastfeeding Coalition, of Oregon, and area
opinion research firm, to poll at local black
alternative high schools, among others.
churches.
•
“We went into these places and had
honestly life-changing conversations with ’
second BPI program, Parent University,
parents,” says McGee. “We talked about
also grew from these early interviews.
hopes, dreams, aspirations, barriers.”
Run by BPI’s Velynn Brown, Parent
Cynthia Traylor, a long-time supporter of
University offers classes to the general
BPI, told McGee, “This is all great, but I’ve
public focusing on teaching parents the
got bills to pay I ’ve got craziness happening
skills to help their students succeed in
in my life. Who’s helping me with that?”
school while strengthening cultural identity
McGee describes that moment as a turning-
and pride at home.
point for BPI to move away from focusing on
“I’ll never forget this mom saying; Tgrew
policy change to direct, in-home
up in a community where I had my
involvement.
grandrnotherwnow?re' there to teach me
B
A
“We found th a t before w e s ta rt to go and
do tiiis activist and public policy reform.,
stuff, we have to do deeper w ork within the
community,” said McGee. BPI’s new
direction was galvanized by its 2008 study7
(funded by the Chalkboard Project and
conducted by ECONorthwest) that revealed
that black students in Portland are twice as
likely as white students to move and have to
switch schools, mid-year. Additionallythey
are more likely to attend schools with high
our farnilv historv and our culture and to
talk to me about why things were the,way ,
they were,”’ says McGee. “‘And naw I don’t
Together We Can, BPI’s intensive home-
visit program, was conceived from this early
grassroots research. Headed by Kimberly
Barter, Together We Can primarily serves
have that. So where do I go and get it?’ And
so truthfully when you look today at the
work that we do through Parent University,
it comes out of the story of howdo we tell
our own story in a different way, adding
research and what we know works.”
This fall Parent University is offering two
six-week courses with sessions focusing on
home life, looking at cultural identity and
enhancing communication between the
schools and homes.
■■
Though Parent University and Together
We Can cater to parents in different stages
senator Mark O. Hatfield, and settled in
Northeast Portland. Charles was only 5
years old.
As an Americo-Liberian in Africa,
McGee was part of a minority, and in
Portland his circumstances were no
different. Exfcept that, once in Portland, it
was his skin color that marked him as one
of few. But his parents never allowed an
inferiority complex to take hold of him.
“My parents raised us to he able to
navigate life to know that you’re black, to
be proud of your blackness and your black
skin and what it means, hut to also
understand that we live in a world where
everyone’s different and to embrace it,”
’McGee says. G
Coming from Liberia, McGee grew up
personally knowing black role models in
positions of power, including in his own
family, and race was not a conversational
taboo. “I’ll never ever forget growing up in
my parents’ household and having
conversations about blackness and about
how great it is to be black and they didn’t
put limits on it.”
For Charles^ this room to explore and
affirm his cultural identity translated into a
career of activism and community
organizing that started as soon as he
entered high school. Thai penchant to
verbalize pride in their identity heavily
influences the organizational principles of
the Black Parent Initiative, which operates
on the principle that cultural specificity is a
critical tool in empowering parents. “That
story is a story and that complicated story
is a story that every single day I think of,”
says McGee, of his own cultural history.
“And every single day inspires me to do
the work that I do and to believe what I
believe- in, because it is both that
complicated history that I believe that
blade people need to recognize and own as
part of the fabric that makes us the beings
that we are, but also inspires us to be
greater.”
McGee’s passion and ambition runs in
his family. His older sister Charlene was
elected the president of the NAACP’s.
Portland chapter in 2007 when she was
only 24. She now travels hack and forth
between Portland and Liberia, raising funds
and awareness for victims of the Ebola
epidemic.
Though BPI arid its founder are both
quite young - McGee started the
organization at age 19 - he came to the
project with six years of community
activism and organizing under his belt By
the time McGee graduated from Franklin
High School in 2004, he had already built
an impressive extracurricular resume that
induded spurring a system-wide
conversation on race when, during his
sophomore year, he presented to the
teacher turnover rates.
of stability, both, operate with a focus on
cultural specificity.
“Traditionally, social work and social
services have come and worked with
families from the viewpoint, ‘ We need to
rehabilitate you. There’s something wrong
with you.’ Which is always problem-focused,”
says Porter. “So we come from the
perspective that we look for the strength,
and where yon come from in terms of being
a person of color, and we go from that
tradition. We meet you where you’re at and
teach you other skills.”
In BPI’s programs, cultural specificity
may mean connecting a young black parent
with an African-American therapist,
instructirig a white parent on caring for
their biracial or black child’s hair, or
introducing parents to children’s books with
black protagonists. One series of dasses
covers teaching black children how to
navigate instances of racism in school. BPI,
for ttiany, is the only place to access such
resources.
“Honestly, I really believe that the world
is at a really interesting place where people
are tired of black issues,” says McGee.
“First of all, we’re turning the page from
Ferguson already? If you notice the news and
everything else, we’re on to the next drama.
I think America does in very interesting
ways sort of says to us, ‘When are you
gonna be OK now? You’ve got your black
president, you got Oprah, what else do you
want?’”
Most recently, BPI has increased its
offerings to biracial children, and black
children adopted into white families as the
number of biracial students enrolled in PPS
has increased steadily since 2006, when the
district began including “multiple specified”
as a category in their enrollment
demographic reporting. *
In recent years, PPS has made visible
efforts to improve the cultural sensitivity of
its faculty and staff. M o st notably has b e en
the widely publicized Courageous , ’’ ¡I®
Conversations. More recently, PPS
implemented Restorative Justice, an
approach that, according to the PPS
website, emphasizes accountability rather
than punitive measures that take students
out of school.
But BPI fills a role not addressed in
schools. “We know we have the skills to
work with our people and that’s what we’re
cloing,” says Porter. McGee agrees, saying,
“As we began to do the work we truthfully '
started to respond to these parents who
said, Look, here’s what I need. Here’s what
I want to see. And we’re doing i t ”
school board a petition of more than .200
signatures calling for race sensitivity ,
training for Portland Public School
teachers. In 2005, McGee was stiil
navigating his freshman year at Portland
State. University when he ran for .the Zone
4 School Board seat on the platform of
increased student involvementin district
decision-making. Even though he didn’t
win, he channeled his drive to create
change for Portland’s underrepresented
students into starting BPI with his friend
and fellow activist Johnell Bell.
In many ways, BPI is McGee’s way of
imparting the gifts he had in youth with
other black kids in Portland, giving them
the cultural knowledge and pride that he
believes, will be the vehicle for beginning
to heal generations of trauma endured by
Portland’s black population and getting
black Portlanders to engage differently and
more fully in their home, school and work
communities.
Now, married with two young children,
McGee has the same passion and drive
that first inspired him not that long ago.
“Being a parent has made me a better
person,” says McGee. “It has made me
more reflective. It’s made me a bit more
humble, I think. Parenting has made me
walk slower.”