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Episode #2218 Audience Q&A
2007 North Carolina Black Summit
[APPLAUSE]
B-Brown: Dr. Toms, I’m sorry to have had to interrupt you, but continue what you were saying.
Toms: The only other point I would make is there is a direct correlation between we’re talking about the juvenile issues, the number referrals that come from school systems to mental health, connecting it to health issues. We have to look at this thing comprehensively, but I think the only way we’re really going to have an impact, we have to mobilize people at the community-based level to make sure that they understand the necessity of holding systems accountable; that’s the bottom line.
B-Brown: Right. I’m dying to hear what you guys have to say about this, but a lot of what I think we saw with the Imus incident, we might bring the Duke Lacrosse incident as well, people seem to place some sort of blame on the culture, not a direct one, but definitely indirectly, the culture of hip hop and the impact that this culture has had on our youth and on our society in generally. My question to you is, as a black issue, is hip hop culture really an issue that we need to be concerned about, and if so, who do we blame for the perpetuation of I guess the negative part of the culture. I will start with Rep. Adams, because it looks like she’s got some things to say.
Adams: Well, I wanted to make some comments about the teacher situations and ____. Well, I just wanted to add I’m an educator by training, and we’re going to have a tremendous teacher shortage, and I think the legislature in particular has gotten really frightened about it, and I think we’ve done some things to try to ensure that we have teachers in my opinion by any means necessary. I still question the whole lateral entry piece and who is really entering our classrooms and whether or not they’re prepared, and while you might know your area of expertise, do you know children? Can you interact with them? Do you have the pedagogy and all the other things, you understand classroom management; are you sensitive to diverse cultures, and I think that that’s been some of what we are seeing that’s created I think a number of problems.
We have got to work a little more closely with our HBCUs and other teacher training institutions, because I think there are a lot of people who are interested in teaching and we need good people in the classroom interacting with our children. I’m not sure we have that really today; I’m not sure we have that. It’s one thing to have a classroom where you have young people from all backgrounds and so it’s another thing if you don’t have that instructional leader who really understands those children, and who have great expectations for all of them, so I think that’s some of that, but you want met to yield now and let…
B-Brown: Well, I see Mr. Robinson wants to add to the education conversation, so we’ll come back to you about hip hop. Mr. Robinson?
Robinson: I think there are several things. One thing we talked about earlier, we average about $8,000 per year on education, about $34-36,000 on incarceration. That’s an issue our priorities are somehow askew there. But the biggest issue is, and I’m an educator, who does your child meet in the classroom? And one of the things right now is that we don’t have black men entering the classrooms; our schools are not producing, well, nobody wants to teach them. People always say it’s the money. It was never the money when I was teaching; it wasn’t really about the money, but when you go to a school, you carry your experience with you whether you are a student or whether you are a parent, and we’ve got to look at what public schools are doing to black children, and by that I mean, the number, there were more black children suspended from school last year than there are black teachers, in the entire system. We’ve got to do something to get black people back in the classroom. South Carolina has 10 universities that are offering free tuition to black males who will teach. That tells me they have a priority, they see a necessity, and I think we’ve got to begin to address that because we can’t abdicate the responsibility for educating our children, and we can’t expect people who don’t share our culture and our sense of community and values to educate our kids exclusively. We’ve got to participate.
B-Brown: Okay, where are our values coming from, especially for our kids? Is it coming from the family, is it coming from the parents? Is there a breakdown in the family structure or are our kids being raised by hip hop and all that they see in media? Dr. Johnson.
Johnson: Well, I definitely think that kids are strongly influenced by the media, and part of that is symptomatic of the state of the African American community. When you have larges numbers of kids who grow up in single parent families and the mother is working very hard every day to keep a roof over their heads, food on the table, clothes on their bodies and shoes on their feet, one effective parenting strategy is to tell the kids to stay at home after school, don’t go outside, watch TV, be on the phone, do whatever you have to do. From afar, you might say that’s not a very good parent, but in that context, that is the way, that’s an effective parenting strategy to the best of his or her ability at that point in time, so many of our kids are growing up sort of tied to the television and the like.
One of the programs that we run, we do time diaries with kids, and I ask them when they come into a program, I say, “I want to know everything you do from the time you get up in the morning until the time you go to bed at night. I want to know what you’re doing, where you’re doing it, and with whom you are doing it.” Our kids spend on average 17 minutes on homework, 240 minutes watching TV. Sixth graders go to between eight at night and two in the morning. We got real challenges, but they’re not all about the TV thing; it’s a larger kind of context that we have to address these issues. First of all, we need to understand their behavior, and the context in which that behavior is occurring, and then develop a set of proactive strategies. Your question is about hip hop; I think kids are strongly influenced by that, but taking hip hop off TV won’t solve all the problems we have; that’s part of the problem.
B-Brown: Ms. Harris.
Harris: I had this argument, this conversation with younger folks that are around, and I have to acknowledge that not everything about hip hop is bad now. Not everything about hip hop is bad. For those of us that are a little older, we had our time too, so ___ hip hop.
[INDISCERNIBLE] [OVERLAPPING]
Harris: At that time, people didn’t think what we were all about back in the day was that good as well. But I think that we do have to look at the fact that you can’t put everything, even that which is negative about hip hop, we can’t say that it is the sole contributing factor to everything that may not be good that’s happening with our children. it may be a factor, and it may be a significant factor, because of the extent to which it is marketed to our young people. Our young people do not control the marketing. Even some of the faces we see the messages that are not positive, are not controlling the media. Now we do have some responsibility, because personally you can decide that I am going to do this, or I am not going to do this, I’m going to use this language or I’m not going to use this language, I will do this and I will not do this. But we have to stand up at some point and say “Enough.” And I think our organizations have to stand up and say “Enough.” All the leadership must say, “No more.”
Here’s what we expect from our young people. They don’t know what we expect anymore, and we are all at fault in that regard, so I don’t want to put it all on hip hop, just as you mentioned lacrosse. If I were to look to back at that, I would salute the work of the attorney general. But I would also say, who benefited? The media. Because all the young people were victims; everybody was a victim, but who benefited? It was the media. It may have gotten us off-track to some extent. I don’t know what happened or what did not happen, but I know that some papers that may have been selling all the print they wanted, sold more, you know. So when you look at-where are the dollars? Somebody else said something about following the dollars-we need to follow the dollars. And when it comes to hip hop, we need to follow the dollars, so where does this lead? We have lots of young people that may be making a lot of money, but who’s making more than they’re making? But they are still young and we have a responsibility to still teach and settle standards.
B-Brown: Absolutely. Dr. Toms.
Toms: Well, ditto everything you said. One key thing that both of you brought out _____, I think from a leadership perspective, we have not done the social marketing research that we need to do about how we address our kids. If a business is going out, you’re going to do your social marketing. You’re going to want to know what the market looks like. You can kind of anticipate this thing. You started describing the amount of time the kids were spending watching TV, and what about texting? No talking involved, but the texting, doing all the texting? We have to figure out where they are, because when you actually sit down and start talking to kids, Richard Hooker and some of the guys down in Cleveland County, they’ve had these male/female groups that they work with students? They’re getting feedback and getting information so now you can design programs and strategies to meet these kids halfway. I thought it was interesting yesterday, I was down in Burlington, and I saw these two kids and I dropped something; it was three young brothers and those brothers stopped, “Sir, can I help you?” Now, where is the camera?
[LAUGHTER]
These were young brothers, 13, 14 years old, I didn’t know them. They said, “Sir, can I help you, help you pick this stuff up?” I said “That’s cool.” Now, we have to be open to that, and we have to find a way, what kind of programs and processes we can put in place at the local level, because we don’t offer them an alternative. We talk about what they’re not doing when it comes to putting an alternative in place, that has their input in it, we, from a leadership perspective are a long ways from that.
B-Brown: We just want to pause for a moment and invite any of you who have questions for our panel of guests to make your way to the microphone, and as you do that, we’ll continue with our panel. Mr. Robinson?
Robinson: ___ I am glad that you used the term “marketing.” Hip hop, if you think about it as a narrow term just simply music, you miss the mark. It is a subculture. When it started in the ’80s, people were saying they’re just doing their thing. Well, they weren’t just doing their thing, they created a language, they created a dress, they created an attitude, and we never had anything like that before coming at us. But a subculture is a choice. We are not marketing an alternative, and I think if you look at your communities, and I’ll use my community for instance, we must have in a small town of 10,000 people, 25 black churches. We have not a single black Boy Scout troop. Do we really have the social infrastructure necessary to raise successful children? That’s not white folks, that’s us.
B-Brown: Rep. Adams.
Adams: I was going to say, I’ve worked with students for about 36 years, a college for women, and I just don’t think that we really have the time to dialogue and engage students as much as we should. It’s easier to stand back on the outskirts and the peripheral and complain and criticize what they do, but it’s another thing when you stop and listen to them and get some feedback. I think we can learn a lot, and it might help us to formulate some strategies to really help them move forward. Sometimes when I was growing up there were things that I had to eat, and I didn’t particularly like to eat them, but my mother said they were good for me, so you ate them. I think sometimes we’re kind of letting our young people take over, and we’re not stepping in as individuals who have some knowledge that they can use to really put that out there for them.
Again, there are some things that are good for them that we need to provide and we’re not doing, so I think we’ve got to take greater responsibility, but more than that, we must involve them in this process and engage them, because we can learn from them. I learned from the young students every day, and I think if we have sit down-and they’re quite intelligent. I’ve always been impressed with things that I’ve heard and learned from students and from young people in particular, and again, I see a lot of young men who are as courteous as those that you met, but again, those are not the things that get recorded. But we need to acknowledge that and let them know that they are valued and that I think that’s really important.
B-Brown: Let’s go to our first question. Sir, please state your name and title and go on with your question.
M: Charles Evans [ph], city councilman from Fayetteville, North Carolina. The question I have is addressed to Rep. Adams. You have mentioned that you have talked about the resolution that was presented to legislative party; I want to know why did it make it “sort of interesting” that the Caucasian senator, Sen. Rand [ph], presented this resolution? And also I would like to know, you mentioned that you will see in the coming months what happens. Do you feel that you and the other black representatives should be held accountable to hold this senator and others in the legislative body accountable to the concerns and issues of African Americans as well as the elected officials that are black?
Adams: Well, yeah, I think we have to hold everybody accountable. We are state legislators, and so are the other members of the legislature who don’t look like me, but I think we all have a responsibility to make sure that we strengthen what needs to be strengthened in North Carolina, and if that means we have to put additional resources in our communities, because we know that typically that has not been the case, so yes, I think we have to hold not only African American legislators accountable but our colleagues as well. As far as why the senator may have done it, I don’t know; could have been just for political reasons, may be his heart was in the right place-you don’t know. But at the end of that discussion, at least in the House, some of my colleagues were approached by the press, and asked questions about, “Does this mean you’re going to vote for certain things and do certain things?” Basically, are you going to do what’s right? And some of them said no.
So you see, they had no intentions of doing what’s right. But I think that not only do the elected officials those of us who serve in the House and Senate have that responsibility, but each of you out there have the responsibility to make that happen, but I think greater than that, we have to hold the members of the House and Senate who don’t look like us accountable as well, because it’s been many people who look like this who are responsible for the fact that they’re sitting where they’re sitting today, and oftentimes we don’t-people call me all the time about the African American agenda, but that should be an agenda that all people who are elected to North Carolina, particularly as we pass laws for the state, we should all be responsible for making that it happens.
B-Brown: Yes, ___?
M: I’m throwing this question at both Andrea and Jim, any of the panelists can answer. You also eloquently talked about the challenges that face the state of North Carolina and some of the work that needs to be done. However, at the same time, just last week, probably most of you know, right where we sit, and most of you sit and live, Black Enterprise magazine ranked Raleigh/Durham community as the third best city for African Americans. How does that ranking either hurt or help the work that needs to be done in our community?
[INDISCERNIBLE]
Johnson: I think the Triangle and Raleigh/Durham are great places to live for some people. Many of you in this room. I like living here. But at the end of the day, we still have some real serious problems in our community, and understand that rankings are relative to other places; a lot of other places are worse off than we are, and so I think that if we want to continue that ranking, if we want to maintain that ranking, we have to deal with these seemingly intractable problems that we have today. I was talking to a major corporation, the CEO of a corporation about six months ago, and he told me that the number one site selection criteria for them today in deciding where to locate and to open their next plant is the incidence of obesity in the local community. Now if you look at our communities, we don’t look good on that indicator. I don’t know what Black Enterprise is using, but we don’t look good, because what they’re using that is as a surrogate for healthcare costs and productivity, and if we don’t begin to deal with obesity among our kids and among everybody else, we got some serious problems, so I wouldn’t read too much in those kinds of rankings. There are lots of communities that come out highly ranked on all kinds of indicators I don’t want to live in, because they’re not sympathetic to who I am as a person, so I wouldn’t read our press clippings too much there. We need to deal with the gang problem, we need to fix public education for our kids to make sure that they can graduate and go on to college and have access to college and things of that nature. Nobody’s talking about the majority of kids under 18 in the African American community are growing up in families that earn less than $30,000 a year-they have no shot at college, none. And yeah, it’s a great place to live, but you’ve got to deal with those issues.
Adams: And I would just add, everybody knows how the Triangle is growing, and what’s happening is, just as there is a continuing growth in the overall population, than there is a growth in the African American population, whether people are coming here to go to school, whether people are returning to the South, whether people because of jobs; most people come here because they think there are jobs. Now whether or not we have the same economic opportunities as others is another story, because we all know that African Americans in the Triangle have not benefited because we are in the Triangle, the same ways as others have benefited economically. It’s not necessarily made as much of a difference in our economic health as it has for other communities, so the question is, what metrics are Black Enterprise using, and again, a lot of that has to do with the fact that this is part of the growing economic region, and people fall into jobs, just as I would often say, North Carolina marketed itself as a state, you know, years ago, you know ___ as a state of no unions, cheap land and cheap labor, and we lost because when companies can find cheaper land and cheaper labor, that’s where they went.
[OVERLAPPING] [INDISCERNIBLE]
I’m serious. Now, people are looking for the intelligence, Dr. Johnson is talking about, “People want the intelligence” and if we don’t invest in education, it won’t make a difference what’s happening and where we rank right now, we’re going to be on the losing end.
[OVERLAPPING] [INDISCERNIBLE]
F: My name is _______, and I am not an elected official yet. But I’m a student here, I’m not the only student here, I’m a recent graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, currently working on my Master’s in public administration at North Carolina Central. There are a few of us here, as we sit here listening to the conversations going, a lot of people say, “So what are you going to do with your degree?” And we all have answers, we all have these nice statements, we know what we want to do, but I would like to know, in the panel’s professional opinion, what do we need to be doing? I’m 23 right now, I don’t have any children, we always want to say, “This is what parents need to be doing, this what people who are 18 need to be doing.” I know what I want to do once I finish, but I guess my question is, what do I need to be doing in order to make some of your dreams coming to fruition when I am at the age that some of you-I didn’t mean that y’all are old-
[LAUGHTER]
But, when I am in the position, I need to set myself up now and be equipped now. I’m coming to these conferences, but I need to have the right mindset and already put the wheels into action as to what it is that I need to be doing. So just in your professional opinion, what should we be doing?
Adams: I’ve got one answer [INDISCERNIBLE]. One, we have a report coming out soon on this data of the economic impact of African Americans on North Carolina’s economy, and naturally we contracted with Dr. Johnson to do that, so hopefully, we can look inside that report and see where there is tremendous need and tremendous opportunity. Secondly, though, what I’d ask of any person is in undergraduate or graduate school right now, I’d ask you to do something for yourself and that is to not put anything else on a credit card. That’s right. Not to order another pizza and put it on that credit card. I don’t want you paying $75 for two slices of pizza. I want you to watch what’s happening with these student loans. I want young people to stop signing on the bottom line with these student loans and to remember that in this country, if you experience difficult financial times, and elect under the new bankruptcy laws that you have to file bankruptcy, excluding your residency, only two instances a day will not consider [ph] will be child support and student loans; they will take your student loan.
We are at a point now where the rate at which our young people, and all young people and especially African Americans are signing on to the student loans, because you know what we do, we go to school, and now we say we want to move off campus by the sophomore year we move ___, junior year we want to move off campus, because they added housing allowance to the terms of the student loan, and then we get that refund that we say we’re going to use to pay the rent, and all y’all pay the rent, and they spend the refund, and then we end up with young people who have so much debt that they have to spend the first one-third of their working lives paying off the student loan.
So I would say if there is something that young people in this generation can do right now, it’s stop charging and don’t get another student loan.
[APPLAUSE]
Johnson: I would add to that, all people, all young people should recognize the fact that the social contract between the firm and you as an individual is no more. That the whole notion of an individual, African American or any other color, working for a single firm for 30 years has gone the way of Freddie in the Superfly movie; it’s dead.
[LAUGHTER]
What you can do for yourself that is most important is what we call in business personal branding and image marketing. You have to understand, and what I mean by that is not-I encourage all of my students to develop their own website, That Person, Inc. And that doesn’t mean putting a pretty picture of yourself and your résumé on the website; your resume quite frankly tells me what you used to do; I couldn’t care less about that. What I want to know is, what value add can you bring to my firm or my organization, so it’s that value-add that’s very, very important, and that’s how you have to market yourself in the years ahead, so if you start thinking about marketing yourself, putting together your own website of whatever your value-add is in the marketplace, I need to know that up front. What you’ve done in terms of education and prior work experience is only important to me to the extent you can tell me in 25 words or less what value you bring to my firm. That’s a different way of thinking but it’s the way and it’s going to be the key to the future in the years ahead. Personal branding and image marketing, because you can’t expect you’re going to have a job with IBM or anybody else; I mean, those folks are laying off people at a breakneck speed these days and education is not necessarily going to guarantee to you an opportunity with those firms. I want to leave you with one statistic that will tell you how important this is. Between 2000 and 2003 long-term joblessness in America, defined as six months unemployed or longer, increased more rapidly with people with some college, a bachelor’s degree or higher than it did among people with a high school diploma or less. Having a college degree does not guarantee you that life is going to be good for you in the global economy of the 21st century, so you have to think about it in a different way.
Toms: The only other thing I would add, I would say, think about, as Jim was saying, what you want to do, find someone, it could be in this room, that you want to connect with that can give you that other value-added experience or skill because it will make a difference down the road. I remember when I was trying to get into doctoral programs, you apply and get turned down by four or five, most people just kind of quit. And I said, “I want Howard, I want Wade Borkin [ph]” found Wade Borkin, got in Howard. Got trained. So think about that. If you’re at the stage that you are right now, you ought to think about there are some people you really want the skill and talent that they have just to get in the room and learn because it almost becomes-it’s tacit, it’s unspoken what you’ll get; it’s not those 1-2-3s, it’s all the stuff you don’t talk about that you get that makes you, puts you in the position for the value-added piece that Jim is talking about.
B-Brown: We only have a little bit time before we’re going to have to wrap all of this up, so what I’d like to do is take both questions; I need you to keep it very brief and then we’ll allow our panel to close us out by closing out.
Dunston: Thank you. Angela Dunston with the North Carolina Justice Center. And my question is really geared toward Dr. Toms, but anyone can answer it. You talked about community engagement and leadership development, and as I look around the room I see many prestigious silver foxes, as they say, who are in many prestigious positions; you have what I’d say arrived and maybe found yourselves. May question is, how is black North Carolina preparing to create the next cadre of those of you on the panel, and those of you around the room. I see a void in leadership, as I go to some of our older individuals and say, “Can you help mentor me, can you help me determine what I need to be doing to take on that next realm of the civil rights agenda in North Carolina and across this country?” And what I’m finding is that people either are avoiding me or don’t want to discuss the issue. So my question to you is, how do we start to create some sort of leadership development programs? How do we start mentoring younger folks? How do we keep the need that is there and fill the void in leadership in North Carolina?
Toms: Okay, that’s a good one. I’ll get some help from these folks, but one of the things we were talking about in the earlier session, I think we’re going to have to be much more intentional and tactical about creating the vehicles to reproduce the leadership. We’ll have an institute here, institutes and programs there, but how do we connect the programs that train folks to at the state level to come in and play versus at the local level to go in and hold school boards, boards of health, mental health boards, accountable? That’s the kind of core group leadership, and then connecting it with the tools, using technology, using media when we do bring people together don’t send them home and say, “Okay, go do something,” send them home with the tools and the resources to reproduce another group and then bring them back, bring them back to take them another level and the only way we can do that is that we have to put together something that is measurable and outcome-based. It can’t just be in general.
B-Brown: Mr. Robinson, do you have a response to that question?
Robinson: Well, yes. I think there are two pieces to it. The young lady who said, “What should we do?” The first thing is, don’t move to the suburbs. Come back to our neighborhood and help us connect, join our organization, become a part so you learn. What you learn in school is great; every often it’s been revised to make it palatable to other people. You need to associate with some of those people who have been in the trenches in our community and we need you there, and as far as Angela’s question-would you repeat a bit of it?
Dunston: I just would like for us to think about collectively how do we start creating younger leaders who can come and step into some of the roles that you all, and I mean all of you in the room now have, so there is not a void in leadership and we have another 30 years before we get back to this point. How do we avoid that from happening?
Adams: I want to add, one of the things that we’re missing, we need to get back on our college campuses, particularly our HBCUs, we need to open up opportunities for young people to serve on boards and commissions. This is a great opportunity for you to network. One of the things that I know, students are always looking for internships, those kinds of things, paid experiences, but I can tell you that leaders like me, we’ve been in it a long time, we’re getting tired, and we do need to set some examples for other people to follow, and so I think we have to go where these young folks are and bring them into these folds, establish some sort of model institutes in places and communities, in our churches, I mean, if we don’t, then we’re all going to be losers because you see, I’m going to be depending on the young people because when we move out of this, then we’ve got to have someone to carry on. I think we’re missing great opportunities when we don’t tap into those existing venues that we have like our colleges and universities. We really need to do that. There is a lot of leadership being developed there and they do need to be nurtured, and I think we have a responsibility to form that network, those of us who are here, those of us who are not here, to make sure that happens.
[INDISCERNIBLE]
B-Brown: We have to take this last question and then we will move back to the panel. Yes, ma’am.
Sullivan: Good afternoon. I’m Donna Sullivan with the ENC Authority and I represent technology for most of you who know me. My question is to any of the panel members. Dr. Johnson, you stated earlier that it’s our business to ensure that our community is equipped with the tools that are needed for this global society, and without technology, there is no global society. We have a lot of technology issues in our community, and so may question to you all, and a challenge for everyone in the room is, when do we address the technology issues that exist here in North Carolina. One example I can give you is that North Carolina lieutenant governor Perdue just made an announcement about an online public school that just recently opened. We have four counties in eastern North Carolina heavily populated with minorities, African Americans, who will not have access to that public school online because they don’t have the technology in place there, so my question is, when does technology become an issue and should it stand alone? I’ve addressed the NAACP, I’ve talked to legislators and somehow everybody wants to group technology under communications, under public relation, all these other committees, and I’m saying technology needs to stand alone and we need to address the technology issue.
B-Brown: Thank you, Ms. Sullivan. Dr. Johnson?
Johnson: I think it’s a great question. My view is that the technology piece has to be an integrated component of a broad or overarching strategy of how our communities are going to be competitive and sustainable in the years ahead. It is not a standalone; it is a tool and it is the key to linking us to the global economy as you say, so it has to be a core component of any agenda to make us competitive.
B-Brown: I want to thank our panel of indeed distinguished guests and experts, and thank all of you for participating and being such a wonderful audience, listening and asking some important and significant questions.
[END RECORDING]
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