GEIS-新闻详情

Everyone is talking about D.C. teens. A new book lets them be heard.

2023-11-05 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

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In a room inside Anacostia High School on a recent afternoon, as students around him discussed their fears, their frustrations and their hopes, Keveon Graves said nothing. He listened. He absorbed. Then, only after everyone else finished talking, he spoke.

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“I feel like people are always talking about the future and what they want to do when they get to it, but what’s the point of talking about it when we’re too busy killing off the future?” he said. “Why are we killing off each other? Why are we killing off adults? I feel like us kids should be letting each other grow up.”

Keveon is 16 years old, but he speaks with the thoughtfulness of a person who has spent years considering the life he has and the life he wants.

“Before we even think about talking about the future, we should make sure our future is confirmed,” he told me. “I want us to be back in a world where we’re able to walk outside and interact with our neighbors and our friends.”

“You don’t feel you can do that now?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. “I don’t feel I could walk outside or walk anywhere without being paranoid.”

Right now, a lot of adults are talking about D.C. teenagers and in particular D.C. teenagers who, like Keveon, live and attend schools in neighborhoods that have been disproportionately affected by youth violence.

Youth curfews make adults feel better, but fix nothing

Keveon and his peers know this. They know that members of Congress, D.C. officials and people across the nation are concerned about the carjackings and shootings that have been committed in the city this year by teens and kids who are too young to be teenagers. They know that those adults are now discussing, debating and disagreeing about what actions and legislation are needed to reduce youth crime and increase youth achievement. They also know this: Many of those adults don’t understand what young people in their neighborhoods have experienced, because they haven’t taken the time to listen to them.

That’s what makes a book launch scheduled for Wednesday morning at the University of the District of Columbia significant. The event will mark the public release of a book that is filled with poems and reflections from a group of students who attend Anacostia High School in Southeast Washington. The book was created as part of a summer internship program that exposed the teenagers to nature, and in those pages, they write about that experience. They also write about what they have endured, what makes them unique and the futures they deserve.

“What you don’t know by looking at me is that,” student NeKaeyla Roach writes in a poem, “ … I come from a neighborhood where/ we don’t know the difference/ between fireworks and gunshots;/ between what’s supposed to be fun/and what’s trying to kill you.”

In that poem, she recalls running as a child on the Fourth of July, then stopping, turning around and seeing everyone drop to the ground to avoid getting hit by bullets. She fell down so hard and so fast that day, she writes, that she expected a knot to form on her head. She ends the poem by explaining how pressure forms diamonds and how she is a diamond who wants to attend Spelman College “to become one of the best Black women lawyers.”

Caroline Brewer, a children’s book author and literacy consultant, developed the curriculum for the program, led the writing instruction and edited the book, which is titled “Through My Anacostia Eyes.” It was created through a partnership between UDC, Conservation Nation, the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Justice 40 Summer Internship Initiative at Anacostia High School. Brewer described the finished product as a “profound work of self-expression by Anacostia’s youth.”

She recalled a powerful moment that occurred when the students worked together to compose a poem about the Anacostia River. The last stanza begins, “If I were the Anacostia River, I know what I would love.”

“Peace,” Brewer recalled a student saying. “Yes, peace, I celebrated inside. Peace is what every human being wants, and because of that, it was so easy for this student to imagine that the river — after all it’s been through these past 400 years — craves it too.”

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I spoke with several of the students on a recent afternoon during their lunch break at the school. They all expressed pride in what they created. One boy said his mom read his poems aloud, and that left him smiling hard, or as he put it, “cheesin’.”

Marcus Williams, who is 16, said he struggled with the writing at first because he wasn’t sure what to share but that it later felt therapeutic. For the poem titled “What You Don’t Know by Looking at Me,” he wrote:

What you don’t know by looking at me

is that I grew up with screaming and yelling

and being told to be a leader, not a follower.

So here I am.

What you don’t know by looking at me

is that I am boy growing up in Southeast fighting

to make a change.

“People used to believe that kids grew up and made it to 18, but that’s not happening anymore,” Marcus said. He’s right — too many children in the city aren’t hitting that milestone. By the end of September, 19 juveniles had been killed in the city, which was more than the total number of youths killed the year before. “I personally believe we deserve change,” Marcus said.

He and the other teenagers said the city needs to create more programs that can motivate young people and more safe places where they can gather and escape whatever is happening at home. They talked about the need for more mental health services — for them and for adults in the community. NeKaeyla said support groups should be formed for parents who didn’t learn those skills from their own. “They didn’t have a childhood, and they don’t really know how to give someone else a childhood,” she said.

I was a kid when a classmate was shot and killed. That trauma lasts.

I asked the students what they most wanted people to know about them.

“I’m not a product of what I constantly see,” NeKaeyla said. “They should know I came from the hood, but I’m not hood.”

“They should know that if there are kids-slash-young adults like us that are coming up in the future, that the future will be a way better place than the present is,” Keveon said. “We know what it was like growing up in these times and what we need to do to make change, what we need to do to make it feel safer for future generations.”

In one of his poems, he writes that his favorite sport is basketball even though he’s built like a football player. His favorite food is a potato because it can be cooked in so many ways and “My dreams that I have while sleeping are sometimes better than the reality I face/ while constantly awake.”

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