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Habermas, Ju? rgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Cate- gory of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger, with Frederick Lawrence. Cam- bridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1989.
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Haller, Beth, Bruce Dorrier, and Jessica Rahn. "Media Labeling versus the Us Disability Community Identity: A Study of Shifting Cultural Language. " Disability & Society 21 (2006): 61-75.
Hauser, Gerard. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.
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Higgins, Lorraine, Elenore Long, and Linda Flower. "Community Literacy: A Rhetorical Model of Personal and Public Inquiry. " Community Literacy 1, no. 1 (2006): 9-43. Hull, Glynda, and Mira-Lisa Katz. "Crafting an Agentive Self: Case Studies of Digital Sto-
rytelling. " Research in Teaching of English 41, no. 1 (2006): 43-82.
Hull, Glynda, Mike Rose, Kay Losey Fraser, and Marisa Castellano. "Remediation as Social Construct: Perspectives from an Analysis of Classroom Discourse. " College Composi-
tion and Communication 42 (1991): 299-329.
Kantrowitz, Barbara, and Anne Underwood. "Dyslexia and the New Science of Reading. "
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King, Martin Luther, Jr. "Letter from Birmingham Jail. " In The Essential Writings and
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Long, Elenore. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. West LaFayette, Ind. :
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Mooney, Jonathan, and David Cole. Learning Outside the Lines. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.
Morse, Tracy Ann. "Introduction to Symposium: Representing Disability Rhetorically. " Rhetoric Review 22, no. 2 (2003): 154-56.
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? Sophists for Social Change
David J. Coogan
It began almost casually, on a warm summer evening in Church Hill, Virginia, as a conversation among friends looking for something to do. "Do you want to rob somebody? " asked one boy, according to police. "All right," answered another. It ended, Richmond police say, with four teenagers--ages fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen--stripping, raping, and sodomizing an eighteen- year-old Chesterfield woman at gunpoint on a picnic table in Libby Hill Ter- race Park, while the woman's boyfriend was forced to sit helplessly at the table throughout the August 4 ordeal. 1
I found out about the gang rape the day after it happened. I was walking through the park with a visiting relative when I asked the television reporters what they were doing, and they asked if they could interview me. That night at 11:00 I saw myself walking and heard myself saying that the park was well used; that the neighborhood itself had slowly transformed over the last decade, with rising property rates and dropping crime rates; and that yes, I was shocked by what had happened, but no, I had no plans to stay out of the park.
Along with the video footage of fountains and vistas and cutaway shots of nearby row homes, my words helped the journalists articulate commonplaces about progress and community. But when I later read about the rape in the city's major daily, the Richmond Times Dispatch (RTD), I grew a little uneasy. It was clear that the rape shocked the reporters not simply because it was a rape, but because it took place in a "desirable" place with "restored" homes that have "panoramic views" of the James River. 2 The fear of border crossing was hard to miss. Jim Nolan reported that before the incident, "the teens met at a playground near the park," a place that loosely marks the invisible bor- der between the white, gentrified part of the neighborhood and the predomi- nantly poor, black part to the north. The teens then walked three blocks to the "popular stargazing spot" overlooking the James River and found their
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target. "'I don't know, man, white people,' Travon Garnet said at the time, according to his statement to police. "3 Garnet seemed conscious of the diffi- culty here, crossing some sort of invisible line. Nolan seemed conscious of it, too, when he later wrote that "the brutal rape and robbery" had "shattered the tranquility in this historic Church Hill neighborhood. "4 Alan Cooper, a colleague of Nolan's at the RTD, extended that imagery to the boys them- selves: "Only Travon Garnet had anything close to normal intelligence. The others were said to have street savvy, but Kelvin Lightfoot reads at a second- grade level, and Rashard Garnet at a first-grade level. "5 To conclude, then: the teens brought the "brutality" and the illiteracy of the black community into the "tranquility" and prosperity of the white community.
Only the victim, in an interview with Nolan, attempted something broader. She said she felt sorry for the teens for "messing up their lives. " In fact, as Cooper later reported, the teens were tried as adults and received prisons sen- tences of roughly thirty years all together. "I don't know what made them do such an act," the woman wondered aloud. Nolan, however, dismissed this per- ception: "Their reasoning didn't matter to the young woman's mother. 'They belong in jail for a long time,' she said. 'They had choices. And they chose to do what they did. You can't feel sorry for someone who chooses to hurt you. '"6 The next week I returned to the park and, by chance, met my councilwoman, Delores McQuinn7 and Jennie Dotts, the executive director of a local advocacy group, the Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods (ACORN). 8 McQuinn and Dotts were campaigning for McQuinn's reelection to city coun- cil. McQuinn's district not only includes the gentrified area where the rape took place but a much larger, predominantly African American community, which has several public housing developments. We talked about the rape, what the police were doing, and what the two women wanted to do to get to the root of the problem. They suggested that a teen center might improve public safety by compensating for the lack of teen-oriented services and insti- tutions in the neighborhood. ACORN and the city of Richmond, in a joint private-public venture, had bought a campus of three old buildings, made plans for renovations, established a board of directors, earmarked some of the city budget, and surveyed the teens about their interests and needs. 9
After some conversation where I could affirm these values and share sto- ries of addressing similar problems with students and community organizers in a poor, black neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, a place not unlike the east end of Richmond, they asked if I would be willing to help spread the word. 10 I agreed to help advertise the teen center, but I also sug- gested that we enlist the teens in the process of advertising by running a writ- ing workshop over the summer and then publishing their writings in a book that we could circulate around the city. What I saw was an opportunity to position the teens as rhetors in a public more accustomed to news stories in which they appeared as rapists and criminals. McQuinn and Dotts agreed
to this plan. And in that moment, the park I knew had become what Susan Jarratt, in Rereading the Sophists, calls a middle space. And I had become a sophist, in search of social change. A "middle space," writes Jarratt, is a space where diverse stakeholders can reformulate "human 'truths' in historically and geographically specific contexts. "11 In her reading of social history in antiquity, middle spaces were both concrete places and cerebral places where rhetors articulated the "codes" to evaluate conduct, entertain political possi- bilities, and in other ways arrange their affairs.
Though we generally think of democracy as a sixth- and fifth-century B. C. phenomenon, there is evidence that for centuries before this, villagers, each holding under a feudal arrangement a section of land called a damos, met in common space perhaps for the purpose of deciding on questions of agricul- tural practice or on the nature of requests to be delivered to the king and his council. 12
Middle spaces are productive places to question the commonplaces or ideo- logical statements that, as Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee explain in their decidedly sophistic textbook, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, are "literally 'taken for granted,'" but which can "be subjected to invention. "13 That Jarratt finds evidence of a "contemporary sophistic" in liberatory educa- tors such as Paulo Freire and bell hooks suggests some precedent for what will follow here. The community organizing framework that I present differs from critical pedagogies, though--at least those that allow classroom theorizing about social change to take the place of community action. 14 Just as the early Sophists, those first teachers of rhetoric, rejected philosophical debate about "transcendent truths and eternal values" in order to attend to pressing "social exigencies" in the community,15 sophists seeking social change resist "un- masking" power for others, as Raymie McKerrow and others seem to recom- mend in their programs for critical rhetoric. 16 Nor is a sophist seeking social change likely to find it in traditional forums for public debate, such as neigh- borhood associations or city council meetings, which can exclude people sty- listically or substantively, even while professing not to. 17 Coming into the middle also regards issue-oriented advocacy with skepticism, as it tends to suc- ceed not by forming middle spaces for dialogue but by sharpening the strug- gle between "us" and "them. " The heart of what I am proposing, then, if I can borrow a bit from Paula Mathieu, is not a strategic orientation to the public work of rhetoric, but a tactical one. 18 Making a middle space is not generating and then disseminating ideal strategies for rhetorical intervention but gener- ating publics capable of addressing their own social problems.
What was taken for granted as commonplace in the reporters' associations between race, class, illiteracy, and violence was subjected to invention by me, Dotts, and McQuinn. Building a teen center to reduce violence seemed to me a reasonable conjecture--not to mention good campaign rhetoric--and something I would now characterize as a sophistic approach to public life. 19
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It persuaded not by dispensing "facts" but by projecting shared values, which we might loosely collate here under a liberal interpretation of equal opportu- nity: the idea that every American has a right to pursue knowledge for self- development and that collective action is needed to ensure that this happens for people who have traditionally faced barriers to that development. When we proceed this way, with conjectures about what we share, we proceed not from the university but, as Eli Goldblatt puts it, "from the activist's ground . . . learning before we act, developing relationships and commitments before we organize classes and set up research projects," and only later, once we have helped community partners "identify problems and transform these problems into issues" that can actually be addressed, do we consider "how students in courses fit in and what university resources could be helpful in addressing the issues. "20 What my community partners wanted, at this point, were handbills, banners, and posters announcing the East End Teen Center. They needed relationships with people who could make this kind of public.
The next week in the park, I saw my neighbor John Malinoski, a graphic designer who works with me at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and who happened to be teaching a service-learning course that links graphic design students with community-based organizations. Malinoski knew about the rape and quickly agreed to a meeting with the teen center advisory board and his students. At that meeting, we learned from the teens' representative-- the project manager for the East End Teen Center--that the teens, in a collab- orative brainstorming session some months earlier, had renamed the East End Teen Center "Teen City. " Malinoski and his students, seeking clues about their collaborators and their audience, perked up.
What the teens were telling us with Teen City was they were not clients in need of specialized services in the East End. They saw their teen center as a place to redefine themselves in relation to fellow citizens. The city, they seemed to be saying, belonged to them. Too often, writes McKnight in his cri- tique of social service providers, there is a "failure of integration. " This failure "clearly limits . . . the lives of the labeled people themselves. But the exclu- sion also limits the experience of local citizens. " What is needed in situations like this one, McKnight argues, are not more community services but more "community guides" who can "bring the individual into life as a citizen by incorporating him into relationships where his capacities can be expressed; where he is not defined by his 'deficiencies. '"21 Now I do not want to ascribe firm motives to either the teens or the woman who interviewed them. Teen City was not elaborated as an argument. And the woman who related it did not claim to be a community guide. Yet the phrase was publicly addressed: the teens were asked to name their organization, and it circulated from the "counterpublic" of the neighborhood to this emerging public of college stu- dents, politicians, activists, and professors. As Richard Marback explains, the act of naming a place--"placemaking" is his term--is "a material act of building
and maintaining spaces that is at the same time an ideological act of fashion- ing places where we feel we belong. "22
Placemaking and community-guiding are especially potent in counter- publics. Those who may be identified with counterpublics, Michael Warner elaborates, are "counter" not because they share essential traits or can be lo- cated physically in a particular place but because they are aware of their sub- ordinate status to the dominant. For these groups, "it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative, not replicative merely"; that the aesthetic and cultural dimensions of their rhetoric will "transform" public assumptions. 23 If the twenty-five teens who were surveyed can be safely char- acterized as a counterpublic, then we might go on to see Teen City not only as placemaking but as "poetic world making. " In Warner's terms: an attempt to transform the way the dominant construed them (as truants, criminals, clients), not only through proposition but through style. And so far as I can tell it worked. The phrase enabled us to reflect upon who the teens imagined themselves to be, which, according to Warner, is what makes public discourse public:
Public discourse says not only "Let a public exist" but "Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way. " It then goes
in search of confirmation that such a public exists, with greater or lesser success--success being further attempts to cite, circulate, and realize the world understanding it articulates. Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes. Put on a show and see who shows up. 24
Teen City was "confirmed," as Warner might say, when the students chose to advertise the center by designing a mural. During that brainstorming meet- ing, I began by reading from the East End Teen Center mission statement-- "to create a non-faith based sanctuary where young people will have an opportunity to grow, develop, and acquire life and job skills in a nurturing, safe, and secure environment"--and the word that stood out to the group was "sanctuary. " They wanted to paint that word on the building. Months later they did along with half a dozen teens in the neighborhood.
From the point of view of a sophist, the question that the mural raises is not whether it is "true" that this place will become a sanctuary but who believes it and why. To look at this mural (see the dust jacket of this book) is to ask how it happened, what it means, or even if you are implicated in its vision. Anyone can do that. The stakes are rather low, because, as Warner points out, a public can be "constituted through mere attention. "25 It is worth noting as well that this mural was not made through a timely process of rational delib- eration, but through a diffused process of cultural interpretation, linking the reported speech of the teens to the materials about the East End Teen Center provided by McQuinn and Dots and then to the painted brick. To Warner, of course, this diffuse, textualized process merely reflects the underlying reality
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that a public is a "space of discourse organized by discourse. " It is misleading "to think of a discourse public as a people and therefore as a really existing set of potentially numerable human beings" who meet and then decide. 26 To conceive of publics this way, as deliberating bodies or parliamentary debaters who have the power to alter reality, is to limit the style and substance of publics and in some ways miss counterpublics all together. What is liberating about public life, Warner argues, is not its accessibility to outsiders--its capacity to integrate newcomers neatly and share power equitably--but its anonymity.
To actually make a sanctuary for at-risk teens, of course, you need much more than a public. You need people. Middle spaces cannot--and should not--take the place of traditional forums for organizing people. Just the same, we need sophists to envision inquiries that challenge people to extend their self-interest in the name of a public. That, arguably, is what happened here: the teens needed someone to affirm their vision of themselves as citizens; Malinoski's students needed projects to hone their skills as community-based graphic designers; Malinoski and I both wanted a positive way to respond to a crime close to our homes; and the East End Teen Center needed artists and writers to help it elaborate its mission, gratis.
What I have shown in the making of the mural is how the motivating exigency of the rape created a kairotic moment in the public work of rheto- ric. Out of the commonplace reasoning in Nolan's and Cooper's reporting, which effectively escalated a fear of contact across the borders of race and class, came sophistic reasoning that invited geographically and culturally dispersed participants--VCU students and professors, neighborhood teens, and commu- nity activists--into a "middle space" of public life where it became possible to imagine an alternative future unfolding.
Although the resources that made "sanctuary" possible--Teen City's own- ership of the building, the work of the advisory board, and the cost of paint-- were essentially in place before the collaboration with VCU began, resources for the writing workshop I had envisioned months earlier had to be created.
Teen City is a fledgling organization with uninhabitable property (in the midst of a renovation) and no operating budget for programming. When I fell in with them, they had no resources to run a writing workshop. McQuinn, there- fore, invited her colleague, Ernestine Scott of the Richmond Public Schools Title I Program, to choose thirty African American students from one of the middle schools in McQuinn's district to participate in the workshop and to pay for those students to be bussed to VCU. Scott provided two college-student assistants to tutor and financial incentives for the teens to attend each class. She also paid for course readers, printing, disks, and notebooks.
VCU supported the workshop, too, but again, its pathway into the project had to be constructed out of existing mandates at the university--through tactical rather than strategic planning on my part. One mandate came from the Honors College, which had launched a Summer Undergraduate Research
Program (SURP) that paired one faculty member with one student over a six- week period. I applied to this program, outlining my research questions about writing and social change, and was assigned a student who served as a re- search assistant, classroom tutor, and workshop organizer. I then took the pro- gram prospectus to our Office of Community Programs, which was designed to offer meeting spaces, programming, and computing to the predominantly African American community in the Carver neighborhood, just north of cam- pus. I explained the project I had helped put together and asked if we could use their computer lab to teach writing to African American teens from a dif- ferent Richmond neighborhood. They agreed, only pausing to tell me to bring my own paper and disks. We now had resources to work.
I offer these details about the material conditions of our partnership not because they are especially interesting but because they demonstrate in a con- crete way what community organizing really organizes: the opportunity to do rhetorical work. In this second half of the essay, I show more directly than I can with the mural how rhetoric emanating from such arrangements can actually impact material conditions, how the indirect movement of public inquiries can move people to change more than just their beliefs. I do this by describing the writing workshop that I taught for Teen City and some of the publicity that the students' writings generated. I offer this not as a formula for generating social change but as an extension of what William Hart-Davidson, James P. Zappen, and S. Michael Halloran characterize as the "sort of 'vernac- ular pedagogy' . . . that recalls, and perhaps, re-imagines, a Sophistic tradition of situated learning, challenging, and broadening the borders of the polis. "27
Sharon Crowley, Debra Hawhee, and Susan Jarratt help me generalize such a pedagogy: to darken the lines that I have been drawing between rhetorical inquiries, associational life, and placemaking. Throughout the workshop, I freely mixed genres--news clippings, literature, speeches--again, taking my cue from the Sophists, who Jarratt locates at the intersection of logos and mythos, between the active and rational experience of logos and the uncriti- cal, cultural experience of mythos. Jarratt rejects this dichotomy, which was made even more rigid by critics who linked logos with print literacy. She argues, instead, that the early Sophists who met in the damos did not simply nod to the beat of the bards but questioned the way they were placed--politi- cally, ethically--and what they might do to move out of that place. Within a community-organizing framework built on placemaking and poetic world- making, rhetorical techniques for invention such as the common topics are foundational, then, because they enable rhetors to respond from their places: to denaturalize discourses that, left unchecked, will continue to construct them.
My assignment to "describe what you see in your community--people, places, things, events," for example, was based on the common topic of pres- ent conjecture, which asks rhetors to name what exists, what does not exist,
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the size or extent of what exists, and what might exist in the future. Because commonplace reasoning largely determines which things get identified, these questions do not merely elicit description. They provoke--or I used them to provoke--an evaluation of the scene, as we can see in Jennifer Tillery's essay about Church Hill. She said it is a "good place to live," though maybe "a little too quiet for me" because "where I live no one ever comes outside. " In fact, her "neighborhood isn't bad because shootings don't happen there as much as they do in other places. Yes, there are some shootings, but there aren't a lot. When I hear a shooting I don't get scared or anything, I just hope that no one tries to run into my house and hide, especially if my family and I are home. "
I told Jennifer during a conference that what she described sounded stress- ful. She just looked at me, blankly. I explained that knowing someone might run into my house during a shooting would stress me out. How could I feel safe? She listened patiently then turned to her screen and started typing: "I know that this sounds stressful, but to me it isn't because I don't worry myself about things like shootings. I know that I am going to die some day. " Now it was my turn to look blank. I had expected that the rhetorical power of the teens' writings would be rooted in the cross-cultural dialogue that the com- munity organizing framework foregrounded. But I had no idea how that power would feel. I grew up without gunplay in an upper-middle class suburb of Connecticut. If I had fatalistic ideas at fourteen, they were not rooted in expe- rience, but in moody rock music.
I was surprised by students' determination to articulate their values in this assignment, even when their own evidence seemed to contradict their claims. Sha'keilia Allen, for example, admitted that some might see her community as "dirty, violent, noisy, and boring," and while all this is true (except the noise) she nonetheless insisted that she liked her community. It is true, she conceded, that "some of the kids in my neighborhood make trash" but it's not like the trash collectors never come. In that same spirit, she warded off what some might mistake as a problem with public safety.
There are some weird people who live where I live. There is a man who spies on the ladies and girls. But this doesn't make me afraid to go outside and have fun, because he is in this thing that looks like a wheel- chair but it's not really a wheelchair. I know that he can't get me because his house has steps and, in order for him to get away from his house, one of his family members would have to bring him out on a ramp. But if he does try to get off his porch, then I will run right home.
When I first read this scene, I could not help but wonder what was really happening--or may have already happened--to girls in that neighborhood. I was concerned. But then I reread it and imagined it visually: an athletic- looking fourteen-year-old girl outrunning a man in a wheelchair that is not a wheelchair. That is when I noticed the placemaking. I was unprepared in so
many ways: I had forgotten, quite frankly, what fourteen-year-olds like to do to each other, for sport. And I had no idea how race fit in with all of the other topics of teasing. Iman Clayton complained that "the boys at my school call me names such as ugly, black and crispy. I would like to say that this doesn't hurt me but it really does. " She then interpreted the boys' conduct and mod- eled an alternative. "In anything I do, I will love myself and continue to tell myself that I am beautiful in spite of what some mean boys may tell me. Some boys will probably always expect me to be lighter, but that I cannot change. I just expect myself to be a nice person and to get far in life. One of the things that makes me a nice person is that I care what people say and do, but in a good way. "
By modeling "a good way" of caring about color, Iman transformed the private experience of racism into a public disposition. I see this as the differ- ence between what Crowley and Hawhee have called the modern concern with personality--an amalgam of private perceptions or feelings--and the ancient concern with ethos or character, knowable only through the repeated actions or habits of public life. Iman has created new terms for being "accepted, even by people who are the same color as me" and, as Warner might say, in doing this made a world, poetically, one that I believe many would want to inhabit.
Trevon Blakely did something similar in the revision of a passage where he characterized his community as a violent place and later admitted to having "an anger problem. " When I asked about this "anger problem"--if it meant that he, too, was violent--he shot me a quick squint and asked why I thought that. I explained how "violence" and "anger" seemed similar, then asked if he agreed. His revision--a new opening sentence--addressed the confusion head on: "Although I do get angry, I am not violent like others in the neighbor- hood. " Violent people, he went on to explain, shoot off guns on the Fourth of July and not just "to celebrate. " They are "downright mean and cruel. " Their public disposition, to be clear, is indefensible. Trevon's "anger problem," by contrast, was about having to babysit his siblings when he would rather do his own thing. The bulk of his essay was about making good grades, lik- ing basketball "more than anything in the world except life and the Lord," and acting "like a smart person and not someone who doesn't care about life and goes around being a fake thug or whatever you want to call it. " In this revision, Trevon not only distinguished what Crowley and Hawhee would call his habitual practices of caring and learning from those of the violent people and the "fake thugs," but he also invited his readers to understand that there is more to his community than violence.
There is a subtlety in these students' essays, publicly addressed, but very much rooted in particular places and experiences. We see Iman, Sha'Keila, Trevon, and Jennifer in the midst of that life, constructing their characters aes- thetically and rhetorically, in ways that readers can judge. From the vantage
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point of character, it is harder to generalize on the issues. For every student who complained that there was too much pressure in school to fight, as one girl put it, "over stupid things like a pencil or a boy," there was another tes- tifying that some students "help other students by tutoring and staying back after school to teach them new things. " The facts were always open to coun- terfacts. Darrius Bolling wrote that "some of the teachers can be your best friends because of the way they act by just being themselves and not trying to imitate or act like someone they aren't. " But "one day," Trevon confided, "my teacher gave us a test on material that we never even learned. Sometimes she gives us stuff that she doesn't even know. " One girl wrote against the idea that "young ladies" should not compete in sports, get sweaty, or "do the more 'manly' steps in Step Dancing. " But another seemed to affirm that sort of tra- ditional gendered role, dreaming about opening a hair and nail salon so that she could "make people feel happy and to help them to stop thinking nega- tive about themselves. "
If all this seems like making the worst case look better, as the usual case against sophistry goes, it also meant honoring Protagoras's dictum that the human is the measure of all things. The task, after all, was not to get it right-- to generalize the state of inner-city school teaching, the cleanliness and safety in the neighborhoods, the real causes of racism or gender stereotypes--but to crack the hard shell of commonplace reasoning as it actually functioned in each rhetor's world. Honoring individuals this way has an obvious humanistic value, but it also adds value to public inquiry itself. The day we talked about achieve- ment, for example, I began by asking questions about a news clipping they had read about the problems with Richmond public schools. I asked them if they knew what a truant was. They did. I then asked them if they knew what the truancy rate was at the high school that they would be attending in the next year or so. It was just over 60 percent. I would like to say that that quieted them down. But it didn't, at least not until I read aloud Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "We Real Cool. " I asked if the kids in that poem were actually cool for skipping school, as Brooks slyly suggests in the first few lines. "It depends," they told me. What they wrote that day elaborated why. They did not talk about standardized tests or tracking. What they were following was far less complicated, but more profound: school was cool when people were nice to each other.
Their statements about their futures were also narrated along these lines, as a contest between people who help and those who do not. There are some people, Jennifer Tillery wrote, who "tell me I can't--and I will not--make it because I will not try hard enough. " She told her readers, however, "people like this I call haters," and they are "probably" the ones who "won't make it in life" because "they are so focused on my life instead of their own. " Jennifer wanted to make it as a doctor, "to help little children like me," because "three or four years ago" she got bitten by a stray dog, and even though she had to
have "four or five needles inside the dog bite" and she "started screaming and couldn't breathe," the doctor was really nice. And so while she admitted it seemed like a "bad experience," it actually was enabling. Denise Alert's desire to have her own hair and nail salon could also be traced back to a desire to contribute something positive to her community. She explained simply that she liked to "make people feel happy and to help them to stop thinking nega- tive about themselves. " When she described herself and her friends walking through the park encountering "mean people who talk about others" and who "might not like you," it is plain to see that her goal is to get rid of that nega- tivity.
Positive human relationships were the heart of it. A jock confessed what he learned from his coach, after he and his friends were laughing at a boy who could not catch the ball. "You never tease a fellow player. He's a part of your team! " Another jock confessed that while he likes to "show off in football to boost up" his self-esteem and confidence, it hurts him to hear people say, "You suck. " He realized that he does not have the self-esteem he thought he had, and moreover, that the true source of his confidence was not in sports, but in "becoming a scientist. " What he wrote about was that moment when he knew: looking through the microscope with one eye and, with the other, at a career in chemistry or gerontology. "In this writing," he confessed, "I am taking off the mask. " Like the girls who untangled themselves from gender expectations--LaVarsha Griffin wrote with some resignation, "People always expect me to clean up"--DeJohn separated himself from the masculinity he felt compelled to perform.
Publicity Effect
I had high hopes that these essays might stoke these stases in public dis- course, and so by the end of the summer, Malinoski and I created a book of the teens' writings that they chose to call Two Sides of a One Track Mind. This fit their sense of humor and, from my point of view, their dissoi logoi. Many months later, the book was published and distributed to the teens and their parents at an awards ceremony put together by Councilwoman McQuinn. Before that ceremony, which was in the fall, McQuinn released a few of the students' essays to the RTD as a press release about the workshop. And that created a middle space of some size and capacity.
Shebony Carrington Dear Friend,
I don't know where you live or what you do, but I do know this: you don't want to live where I live. You don't want to see what I see every day. I live in Fairfield Court and I am going to tell you how I feel about it.
It's true the houses are very nice looking. They just put new ovens in, and a while back they put in new refrigerators. But the place still isn't
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? "Where I'm From to Where I'm Going. " Front page, Richmond Times Dispatch, August 12, 2005, reprintedby permission of the Richmond Times-Dispatch
right. Some of the houses are dirty, and they are only cleaned when it's time for inspection. After that, they go back to being dirty houses again. The people in my neighborhood don't take pride in how it looks.
Some people feel comfortable sitting on their porches, but now they can't because of the shooting and the crazy people around the neighbor- hood. No matter what happens, there are always people arguing. There are people that walk around the neighborhood looking stupid. In other words there are people who drink too much liquor and beer and walk around bent over, smelling like alcohol. That's not a good sight.
In my neighborhood there are some streets that are clean, but there are some streets that are nasty looking. The area that I live in is clean because there is always someone picking up the trash. On other streets there are just people who throw trash on the ground. There are some people that just sit around and drink and leave their beer bottles/cans on the ground. Another problem is the drug dealers. They sell drugs and urinate in front of the children. They just don't care what they do, so they're just going to do it.
I don't think that the negative things in my neighborhood are going to stop me from being what I want to be in life. I see the negative things in my neighborhood but I'm not involved in them. I feel that being on the outside of the situation looking inside makes me want to help peo- ple. I feel really bad because of the people that are being hurt and bruised from getting beat up. Just because I'm in the neighborhood around these
things, it doesn't mean that anything is going to stop me from accom- plishing my goal of being a doctor. When I grow up I want to become a General Practitioner. That is a doctor you go to for everyday needs like if you have a cold or if you are sick. I want to become a General Practitioner because I like to help other people. Darren Thomas, the preacher from the Temple of Judah told me, "To be somebody you have to help some- body. " So I'm going to be that person to help somebody.
What might be in my way from accomplishing this goal is my nega- tive attitude toward some situations. What I mean is that someone may come across the wrong way by getting smart with me or getting frustrated with me and I might not know what to do or say to them. Then, I might get an attitude with them. However that's not stopping me from being me. What I mean is that there are some people that expect me to be a young lady and not to play sports. They would rather see young ladies dress up and wear heels and also keep their hair and nails done. But me, I just want to be comfortable for myself. It doesn't matter how I look as long as I'm clean and comfortable. I am going to be me no matter what.
Media General, the owner of the newspaper, later told me that over 9,000 people read the essay online and that it got more hits than any other story in the entire history of the paper online. The editors had also created a blog where roughly 100 people wrote comments, nearly all of them positive. Read- ers responded well to this strong voice emanating from public housing. Of the ninety-six recorded comments, roughly one-third (twenty-four comments) addressed Shebony's placemaking directly. "You go, girl! " one of them wrote. "Don't let your present dictate your future! " Readers liked the idea of some- body beating the odds of doing well even in public housing. An even greater number of the readers (thirty-seven comments) liked Shebony's Christian sense of how to do it. Some did this simply by telling readers "this child is blessed" or by closing their note, "God's speed. " Others offered advice to the writer-- "I would like to say to Ms. Carrington, 'Trust God. ' He will be there for you as long as you have faith and trust in Him. " Readers carefully noted that Shebony had already taken good advice and praised the advice givers: "I also attend Temple of Judah," wrote one, "and its good to know that you took what the minister said and ran with it. "
The Christian discourse of redemption through service, along with the defiant appropriation of American bootstraps, warranted the otherwise harsh juxtaposition between herself and the "stupid people" who "just don't care" about the greater good of the community. Shebony does not choose to rise while her community slides, but to make her success her community's suc- cess. Ultimately, it is not the drug dealers or drunks that she worries about, then, but the people who spark an attitude in her: "There are some people that expect me to be a young lady and not to play sports. They would rather see young ladies dress up and wear heels and also keep their hair and nails done. "
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Her own expectation, to be "clean and comfortable" and "to be me no mat- ter what," suggested a contemporary alternative that concretized as it gener- alized. Who doesn't want to be clean and comfortable? Who doesn't want to steer clear of unreasonable gender expectations? Who doesn't want to help somebody? Who doesn't want "to be me"? Hart-Davidson, Zappen, and Hal- loran, in their work with young African American teen writers in Troy, New York, noted a similar resistance to "traditional gender roles. " But they also saw them temper self-confidence "about themselves and their futures" with "contemporary social and family values," including those found in "the mass media. "28 In this rhetorical performance, however, just as it was in many of the others I discussed in the preceding section, Shebony cut through those commonplaces.
Not everyone was so sanguine about the power of self-determination and faith overcoming structural barriers. The remaining third of the commenta- tors shifted the ground away from Shebony and her situation to the difficult environment of Fairfield Court. One characterized "this young lady" as "just one example of what our City youth experience day to day.