Rome was not built in a day, but it was built with methodical planning over time. The inner cities housing project architecture of the United States though, appear to have been created with no architectural passion. What does the building tell the young child who lives there? What can be done to change this paradigm?
These hideous mega apartment constructs seem to be places to pack animals, stacking them ever so high or across large swaths of bleak landscape. One need only to look at America’s urban city centers to see the teeming mass of people stocked into the prison-like blocks to recognize how our humanity has staggered in its progress. The eloquence of city politicians who pledge to fight for the voiceless begins to sound grating under the decades of nothing happening to change these hellish residences.
It is quite obvious that a great concentration of black people on or near the poverty line and largely dependent on welfare live in these. As I think back to when the slavery of people of African heritage ended, almost one hundred and fifty five years ago, it is not hard to see that the black man, the black woman, the back child, is still largely kept down. In the Winter, the hosing projects look most dreadful. The red cinder blocks lose their last remaining warmth, the windows are closed tight, the breath is kept firmly in so that the circulation of smells and odors becomes that much more pronounced. Any vibrancy borrowed from the summer bloom of urban trees is clean whittled away in the cold, leaving a dreariness that resounds the poverty of the situation. Grown men loiter just outside the building never seeming to go away. Children bustle in from school quickly to their domains, there is no backyard play. Around the neighborhood, commercial outlets sell discounted material, brand names are everywhere. The buses are filled to the brim, the laborers walk to and fro, all diligent as they go about their lives. All move with purpose through the streets. Life and activity is felt at the street level on the weekdays, especially in the warm months. Here and there a human extermination facility operates seemingly quiet on the outside.
On Sunday’s, Grace Baptist Church takes over on the corner. The preacher is invigorated and the grandmothers were their ‘Sunday Best.’ Black people congregate on the left and white people on the right.
‘Sunday Best
The children are called out and honored at the end of the service
like treasures and hopes protected for the future
Will these break the mindset?
Will hope remain steadfast;
vision propelling them past chains of air?
A grandmother praised the Lord and told us of how her infant granddaughter walked out of the apartment on fours, crossed halfway to the meridien on the street and sat up solitary with cars and buses speeding by non-stop next to her. A spectacle perhaps seconds away from tragedy, a sign of the blindness in people each on their trajectories, each in their minds, each moving right along unencumbered by what is presently happening. A startled, yet quick-thinking man stopped his car across the meridien to block all traffic before the young one and rescued her, bringing her back to her grandmother.
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- With what foresight where the housing projects built?
- Why do they predominately house mostly black people?
- What kind of expectation of forward social-economic advancement does a person born into a housing project have conditioned into them?
- How is the quality and goal of education differ for children from housing projects and surrounding low-income communities, to those in wealthier, affluent suburbs?
- In a society where supposedly nobody cares, who’s responsibility is it to positively disrupt the social order of a society that continues to enable the foundation of inequality in housing, education and from this, professional achievement?
Some of these questions I will look to answer directly and indirectly. Others are raised for your thought.
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In this essay, I outline how the educational goals can come together for the advancement and detriment of people. I posit that the educational instructional experience and the the physical architecture of the residences and neighborhoods overwhelmingly influence their outlooks on life on a daily basis. Moreover, I put forth that in the most cases, the social-economic equilibrium is enforced daily through the day internal coding of having to live in such a social construct. This leads to a loss or stunting of hope in one’s future, a sense that some human lives matter less than others, and a narrow-mindedness that is learned, creating a feedback loop, locking in the individual with a great, yet not unbreakable force. Finally, I put forth a new vision that is attainable, that of the ‘empathic capitalist.’ A vision that welds academics with social entrepreneurship to capture the enthusiasm and passion children have before it is squashed by the rudiments of their present reality. In addition, I also put forth that this passion, if worked on from an early age following this vision, can be stronger than the reality of the physical architecture many of the children in these urban, impoverished city centers have to live in.
If they feel that there is hope, if they feel and know that they are working on a clear vision that shows a way to bring about real change, not just promised change, then they will weather the present realities. They will do so willingly, because they know that the power of change is being educated into them. The key to sustaining this is that the students experientially know and understand that they are actively practicing and applying the solution of positive disruption and this solution is the daily scholastic practice of empathic capitalism. A construct that turns them into renaissance men and women with the ingredients of social entrepreneurship, academics, essay writing and public speaking.
Over the last ten years, gentrification has brought in a growing influx of caucasian people into Harlem and new kinds of housing and matching commercial properties have cropped up for them, in effect, creating enclave-neighborhoods within Harlem. This has all been called, the ‘Harlem Renaissance,’ yet the monolith housing projects remain, all the while, the time keeps slipping into the future. As the local political leaders come and go, it seems obvious that we should not look onto external entities to bring about real positive change. Change must start with ordinary individuals thinking extraordinarily. Of those who care and want to bring about positive disruption, this truth must generate from inside themselves and focus on diligently bringing awareness that leads to move other hearts and minds into action. Educators and parents are on the front line of this change because of their vested, direct interest into America’s greatest treasure. Together, a move to adapt academic goals to integrate social entrepreneurship with the application of science, technology and math literally connects the imagination and desires of young intellectuals towards launching local endeavors in the community. Educators and school administrators can have a united front with parents to craft learning as both academic and entrepreneurial in nature. This is how you get kids to be passionate. They don’t want to wait till they are graduated from high school or college to change the world; by then it would be too late. The reality that their youth was focused on studying and acquiring knowledge without the practice and experience of its application in real-world settings will dawn on them at some level of mindfulness and they will realize that they don’t have the extra social entrepreneurial experience and must be ‘realistic’ and go get a ‘job’ instead.
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The alternative reality is not far-fetched, yet it requires the reader to accept that he or she is powerful enough to be a change maker. Parents and educators are the very one’s who mold and shape the children more than any other force. Impoverished neighborhoods were created without much thinking put into them and are the default reality that occurs when nobody cares enough to think critically in a diligent, concerted manner that is organized and leads to local change. The critical thinking parent can coalesce with other parents and approach teachers and school administrators to start teaching social entrepreneurship since first grade. The students who begin early in their scholastic experience to tone the skills to be positive disrupters practice being socially responsible citizens. It is these that begin to ‘think big.’ They have this knowledge and experience base that supports their notion that they have what it takes to organize and launch missions of social good. I call these ‘empathic capitalists.’ These would grow up to be passionate job creators, active in their hometowns, project-oriented and focused on a team-approach to enacting a better way of life.
In this sense, schools would pro-actively raise 'servant leader-business men and women,' trained not only in science, technology and math, but as writers and speakers. That is to say, renaissance men and women; ‘do-gooder’ armies of one. It is in these ways that we quash inequality and poverty. The parents and educators must start the process though. We cannot look on the federal, state or local government to launch such passion.
The application of academics should not be a means to create subjective ‘productive citizens,’ but citizens who have twenty first century skills to match their academic knowledge with this ‘empathic capitalistic’ know-how. We don’t need to create employee thinking, we need to create collaborator and company founder thinking! Grade schools, trade schools, and colleges must value the teaching of financial literacy, entrepreneurship and business. The mindset has to adapt in the parents and educators first, with these emboldening themselves to care enough to organize local movement to call for the enacting of these changes within schools.
Social entrepreneurship can dynamically bring business, entrepreneurship and servant leadership to empathically serve the principal needs of the community. We need droves of empathic individuals who use their chosen expertise to design a new vision and then actuate it into reality. Students can be raised within this alternative educational construct to be the new architects, educators, business men and women, leaders of congregations, and technology professionals raised from within these impoverished neighborhoods and webbing together locally to newly construct realties. It is also wholly important that the solution-makers be generated internally from these very neighborhoods, rather than bring in outside forces to ‘fix things up.’ The passion of people who grew up within the old system, within these housing projects and in the schools teaching them to be workers, has to be harnessed by the very individuals themselves, yet supported by parents and school staff in order to create ‘empathic capitalists.’
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