Struggling to Rise

Struggling to Rise in Suburbs Where Failing Means Fitting In (New York times)

The Latin American Youth Center, whose Maryland branch Jesselyn sought help from, can be thought of prosaically as a social services agency or more grandly as a modern settlement house -- kin to the centers of immigrant aid that arose more than a century ago. If these poorest families are to succeed, as many previous ones did, their progress may depend in part on the efforts of such groups.

The problems of young people like Jesselyn are sometimes called failures of assimilation. But they can also be seen as assimilation to the wrong things: crime, drugs and self-fulfilling prophecies of racial defeat.

As Jesselyn tells it, she assimilated to the surrounding values of gangsta rap. Writing in her eighth-grade yearbook, she celebrated friends as "my nigga!" and labeled enemies "crackers," "bamma" and "whyte."

"If you're Hispanic, people already expect you to steal, to fight, to be rude, to be ghetto," Jesselyn said. "If everyone thinks wrong of you, eventually you’re going to start thinking wrong about yourself."

Regarding the last paragraph: sorry, no. Jesselyn chose the culture that fits her character. If an immigrant assimilates to the values advanced in gangsta rap, he has no one to blame but himself. Coming from a poor family and having been poor most of my life, I know that poverty is no excuse. (Oh, but what am I thinking? I forgot that I was born with a silver spoon of white privilege in my mouth ....) Jesselyn is quick to blame others for expecting the worst from her. Who might these "people" be? Whites, of course. Whites are to blame for all her choices, her problems, her very identity, it seems. Now, if "people" were expecting the worst from me, I wouldn't take to gangsta rap, but set out to prove them wrong. Either that, or I wouldn't give a damn what others thought. I suspect that most whites would do the same.