Last week I told you about the circumstances, thoughts and feelings that swept over me after I found myself living in the Skid Row district of Downtown Los Angeles.
I told you that I've taken this on as a challenge, a chance to study, do some research, and graduate from this all-too-unique University of Skid Row.
There are no role models at this university. The only path to follow — the only case study that is applicable — is your own. Each case on Skid Row has a unique combination of variables to feed into the "impact matrix." The rest is largely a process of trial and error.
Very few students of this university come here of their own accord. Most follow a trail of drugs, sniffing their way from one crumb of self destruction to another until they reach this vast classroom of iniquity, where every kind of drug and vice is bought and sold on the street like stocks and commodities traded on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Some arrive here thinking that Skid Row will be a pit stop — somewhere between hard times and better times. Some are recent parolees who view the neighborhood as a permanent residence — not much, but better than county jail or the state prison system. Others are directed here by various federal, state and county agencies after experiencing disasters. Katrina victims sprinkle the campus. Finally, there are many who are unable to help themselves — the mentally ill who need the social services that are concentrated in Skid Row.
It's clear that many — from the tough-luck cases to the parolees to the Katrina survivors and the mentally ill — need these social services.
I've been here a couple of semesters, though, and I sometimos wonder who needs who the most. Do the people of Skid Row need the services to survive? Or do the service-providing agencies need the clients and the government revenue they bring to the organizations?
My research so far indicates that one could argue that the social service providers amount to an enabling tool for many, allowing them just enough help to keep them trapped in their own ways and unable to graduate from Skid Row.
This argument seems to have some statistical support, since so many students never graduate. They flunk their "self study" courses time and time again, relapsing into drug use or criminal behavior. For some, it is all that they have ever known. For too many it is all they will ever know.
I've known other circumstances — better circumstances.
I came here as the product of a middle-class family in the Leimert Park district of Los Angeles, an upscale African/American neighborhood. My father was a dedicated educator and my mother worked as a county administrator. They were devoted and dedicated to the development of my sister and me. They spent a lot of time with me. They paid for my education at a prestigious private prep school and and Ivy League university — the best money can buy.
I learned a lot — but it still wasn't enough. Here's a lesson that came late in my academic career: When you buy the best it is sometimes still necessary to fight off some of the worst aspects of all that privilege affords.
The education and manners make it hard to admit to oneself that a dose of elitism might have come with the privilege. Privilege makes it easier to pre-judge or stereotype fellow human beings.
I wasn't explicitly taught to see my privileged upbringing as an excuse to pre-judge or stereotype others. My parents had taught me the opposite, as a matter of fact. And I had learned in school that everybody is equal — no matter what color or gender, rich or poor, mentally and physically fit or challenged.
But my time at that other university — the Ivy League school I attended long before I arrived here at the University of Skid Row — was not textbook perfect. I was fighting, back then, to maintain a sense of self esteem and value. I found myself desperately reaching for sense of worth and at the same time trying to achieve some sense of differentiation to separate me from Ivy League colleagues.
Call it the "I am not like them" syndrome. I thought I had escaped it. I was horrified to see that I had not. It is the same syndrome that leads the white person who may have many black friends to lash out and call a black man a nigger when under threat. It is something deep, dark and hidden until something triggers it, sending it gushing upward like oil from the ground.
How much do you believe in something like equality? I found out that the answer sometimes depends on how much you have to believe it. For many of us it more of a seasonal belief than a structural principle.
Everyone says we are the same. Most desire to be politically correct. Is that political correctness a part of one's core being or is it a function of convenience?
In most places — under normal circumstances — you cannot see what is in the mind of another. Most individuals simply do not deal with any darkness or ugliness that lurks deep in our psysches. These dark aspects reside well below the intellectual level, deep in the gut. Most of us have acquired social skills that help us avoid getting down to that level — common courtesies, self-interest that leads us to avoid random confrontations, decent clothing that serves as a uniform of acceptance in the larger society, the ability to tamp down anger or frustration in order to complete a conversation or transaction.
All of tose skills are stripped from thousands of denizens of Skid Row — shorn away by physical or drug abuse, neglect, economic struggles, or prison time. That has left thousands who now believe that they will never find their way out, never graduate from this university.
I hope to graduate — and I hope you'll follow along with the story of my efforts next week.
Walter Melton is a writer for the L.A. Garment & Citizen.
Story collage by LA Beez
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