Remembering "Manchild in the Promised Land"

Children of the Recession:
Remembering "Manchild in the Promised Land"

http://www.truthout.org/060809A

Monday 08 June 2009
by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

If Reno was in a bad mood - if he didn't have any money and he wasn't
high - he'd say, "Man, Sonny, they ain't go no kids in Harlem. I
ain't never seen any. I've seen some real small people actin' like
kids, but they don't have any kids in Harlem, because nobody has time
for a childhood. Man, do you ever remember bein' a kid? Not me. Shit,
kids are happy, kids laugh, kids are secure. They ain't scared- a
nothin'. You ever been a kid, Sonny? Damn, you lucky. I ain't never
been a kid, man. I don't ever remember bein' happy and not scared. I
don't know what happened, man, but I think I missed out on that
childhood thing, because I don't ever recall bein' a kid."[1] --- Claude Brown
--

When Claude Brown published "Manchild in the Promised Land" in
1965, he wrote about the doomed lives of his friends, family and
neighborhood acquaintances. The book is mostly remembered as a
brilliantly devastating portrait of Harlem under siege, ravaged and
broken from drugs, poverty, unemployment, crime and police brutality.
But what Brown really made visible was that the raw violence and
dead-end existence that plagued so many young people in Harlem, stole
not only their future but their childhood as well. In the midst of
the social collapse and psychological trauma wrought by the systemic
fusion of racism and class exploitation, children in Harlem were held
hostage to forces that not only robbed them of the innocence that
comes with childhood, but also forced them to take on the risks and
burdens of daily survival that older generations were unable to
shield them from. At the heart of Brown's narrative, written in the
midst of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, is a "manchild," a
metaphor that indicts a society that is waging war on those children
who are black and poor and have been forced to grow up too quickly.
The hybridized concept of "manchild" marked a space in which
innocence was lost and childhood stolen. Harlem was a well contained,
internal colony, and its street life provided the condition and the
very necessity for insurrection. But the many forms of rebellion
young people expressed - from the public and progressive to the
interiorized and self-destructive - came with a price, which Brown
reveals near the end of the book: "It seemed as though most of the
cats that we'd come up with just hadn't made it. Almost everybody was
dead or in jail."[2]

Childhood stolen became less a plea for self-help - that
short-sighted and mendacious appeal that would define the reactionary
reform efforts of the 80s and 90s - than a clarion call for
condemning a social order that denied children a future. While Brown
approached everyday life in Harlem more as a poet than as a political
revolutionary, politics was embedded in every sentence in the book.
Not a politics marked by demagoguery, hatred and orthodoxy, but one
that made visible the damage done by a social system characterized by
massive inequalities and a rigid racial divide. Manchild created the
image of a society without children in order to raise questions about
the future of a country that turned its back on its most vulnerable
population. Like the great critical theorist, C. Wright Mills, Claude
Brown's lasting contribution was to reconfigure the boundaries
between public issues and private sufferings. For Brown, racism was
about power and oppression and could not be separated from broader
social, economic and political considerations. Rather than denying
systemic, structural conditions, as in the discourse of individual
pathology or self-help, Brown insisted that social forces had to be
factored into any understanding of group suffering and individual
despair. Brown explored the suffering of the young in Harlem, but he
did so by refusing to utterly privatize it, to dramatize and
spectacularize private life over public dysfunction, or to separate
individual hopes, desires and agency from the realm of politics and
public life.

Nearly 50 years later, Brown's metaphor of the "manchild" is
more relevant today than when he wrote the book, and "the Promised
Land" more mythic than ever as his revelation about the sorry plight
of poor and minority children takes on a more expansive meaning in
light of the current economic meltdown. The suffering and hardships
many children face in the United States have been greatly amplified
by the economic crisis, and in some cases the effects and
consequences of that suffering has been captured in images,
interviews and television programs that have born witness to what has
become the shame of the nation. For example, "CBS Nightly News" with
Katie Couric has been running a probing and poignant series called
"Children of the Recession," which foregrounds the suffering and
despair faced by so many millions of young kids today. Many of these
images portray kids who, through no fault of their own (or their
parents for that matter), are homeless, lack food, health care,
adequate shelter, clothing, even spaces to play. They are forced to
inhabit a rough world where childhood is nonexistent, crushed under
the heavy material and existential burdens they are forced to bear.

Current statistics paint a bleak picture for the nation's young
people. 1.5 million are unemployed, which marks a 17-year high. 12.5
million are without food, and a number of unsettling reports indicate
that the number of children living in poverty will rise to "nearly 17
million by the end of the year."[3] In what amounts to a national
disgrace, one out of every five children live in poverty, while
nearly nine million lack any health insurance. School districts
across the nation have identified and enrolled over 800,000 homeless
children. Their numbers are growing at an exponential rate as one in
50 kids are now living in crowded rooms at motels like the Budget
Inn, in seedy welfare hotels, in emergency shelters or with
relatives, or are they simply exist on the streets with their
parents. What is unique about these kids is not just the severity of
deprivations they experience daily, but how they have been forced to
view the world and redefine the nature of their own childhood within
its borders of hopelessness and despair. Unlike Brown's narrative,
there is no sense of a bright future lying just beyond highly
policed, ghettoized spaces. An entire generation of youth will not
have access to the jobs, the material comforts or the security
available to previous generations These children are a new generation
of "manchilds," who think, act and talk like adults, worry about
their families, headed by a single parent or two out of work and
searching for a job, how they are going to get the money to buy food,
what it will take to pay for a doctor in case of illness. These
children are no longer confined to so-called ghettos. As the
burgeoning landscape of poverty and despair increasingly find
expression in our cities, suburbs, farms and rural areas, these
children make their presence felt - too many to ignore or hide away
in the usually contained and invisible spaces of disposability. They
constitute a new and more unsettling scene of suffering; one that
reveals not only vast inequalities in our economic landscape, but
also a voice that portends a future that has no purchase on the hopes
that characterize a vibrant democracy. And their voices must be
heard, and their stories made public.

In one episode of "Children of the Recession," a 12-year-old,
Michael Rotundo, living in a motel room with his parents, complained
that he can't think straight in school and is failing. His mind
filled not with the demands of homework, sports, girls or hanging out
with his friends, but with grave concerns about his parents not
having enough money to rent or put down a payment on a house. His
voice is eerily precocious as he tells the interviewer that he dreams
about having a normal kid's life, but is not hopeful. Another child,
when asked what he does when he is hungry, stated, with a sadness no
child should experience, "I just cry." In another episode, a young
boy said the unthinkable for any child. He said that his life is
ruined and that all he now thinks about is death because he doesn't
see any way out of the circumstances he and his family find
themselves in. A sweet-faced 13-year-old, Lewis Roman, told an
interviewer he wanted to get a job to help his mother, and when asked
how he copes with being hungry, he said he hides it from people
because he doesn't want them to know. His only recourse from gnawing
hunger is to try to fall asleep.

Millions of children now find themselves in the richest country
in the world suffering social, physical, intellectual and
developmental problems that, thus far, go unacknowledged by the Obama
administration, as it bails out the automotive industries, banks, and
other financial institutions. What kind of country have we become
that we cannot protect our children or offer them even the most basic
requirements to survive? What does it mean to witness this type of
suffering among so many children and not do anything about it - our
attentions quickly diverted to view the spectacle and moral
indifference that defines so much of the world of celebrity
entertainment or the bombastic, even demagogic, editorialists and
talk-show hosts that bookend the evening news? How do we reconcile
all of this pious talk by the Obama administration about renewed
democracy, truth and justice as the essence of what America is all
about when so many of our children are suffering, plagued by
psychological and physical problems that are entirely unnecessary in
country that can spend $534 million dollars on a military budget,
"account for roughly half of the world's military expenditures,"[4]
and trillions more on wars abroad, but cannot liberate children from
the pain of homelessness, poverty, sickness and a mounting inability
to just simply be kids. Children should not be reduced to statistics,
commodities or disposable populations; they represent a window into
the failure of the United States to take heed of the crisis of young
people seriously and to uphold their end of a social contract that
guarantees them a decent future. It may be tempting to ignore these
children, to look away, to blame them for their plight or to allow a
generation of "manchilds" to develop because of our political
indifference and lack of social responsibility. But they will not go
away, and as their ranks swell, not only will the Obama
administration lose its moral and political credibility, but we all
will become contaminated by a level of suffering and hardship that
will only get worse. Of course, we need more than the mobilizing
influence of shame, moral outrage and social responsibility. We need
more than a president who speaks movingly about children, but does
little to address the urgency of the immediate crisis. We need more
than sloganized language of "change" and "hope," one that goes well
beyond philanthropy and individual charity and transforms government
in the interests of both children's and democracy's future. Have we
so lost our moral and political bearings that we cannot raise our
voices in protest, forge social movements and promote direct action
that makes children the center of our politics and the call for
democratic renewal? I hope not.

When Claude Brown wrote "Manchild in the Promised Land" in 1965,
he recognized clearly that the future and morality of any society is
intimately connected to how it treats its children, and that such an
insight becomes relevant to the degree that it generates a politics
informed by the courage of conviction and moved by a public
consciousness of compassion and justice.
--

[1] Claude Brown, "Manchild in the Promised Land" (New York: A
Signet Book, 1965).

[2] Brown, Ibid. p. 419.

[3] Cited in Bob Herbert, "Children in Peril," New York Times
(April 21, 2009), P. A25.

[4] Robert Weissman, "The Shameful State of the Union,"
CommonDreams.org (January 30, 2008). Online:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/30/6725.
--

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and
Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. Related work:
Henry A. Giroux, "The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of
Innocence" (Lanham: Rowman and Lilttlefield, 2001). His most recent
books include "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan
Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the
Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the Terror
of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008). His
newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Beyond the Politics of
Disposability," will be published by Palgrave Mcmillan in 2009.

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