Over the past five years, four young men of my acquaintance have been murdered. They were all black, not yet 25 years of age. And they were all shot to death over what the press commonly calls gang violence.
For my National Film Board of Canada documentary on Flemingdon Park, the neighbourhood where I grew up, I worked with some of these young men on a music video built around the old rah-rah-rule-Britannia anthem The Maple Leaf Forever. Robbie D. wrote a counter rap anthem based on the original lyrics. It was very smart.
One evening we were in a brick walled room inside a community centre: the film crew along with Robbie D. and about two dozen of his friends, singing and filming his version of the old Canadian anthem. The friends comprised a loose collective of artists called Guilty Crimes, based in Flemingdon.
Guilty Crimes is the sort of thing that the press calls a gang; but to me they were amongst the most talented group of young men I have ever met. They were professional, never letting their energy flag. That evening is a highlight for me, and I promised myself I would find more work for these men. I've yet to keep that promise.
I am under no illusions as to the reality of these men's lives. By the time they hit 20 they have a child or two, likely from different mothers. The moms and dads do not live under the same roof; each live with their own parents. The economy of social housing is dependent as much on the number of people living in the home as their need. Most of these men deal drugs on the side, earning perhaps a few thousand dollars a month. They often pour their earnings into production time for their music. Each of them has a collection of songs. They form artistic collectives to promote themselves.
And they don't expect to live to be 30, sadly a fact true amongst their peers. Tobi Johnson was in this collective. He had the voice of an angel. In one of the last songs he recorded, with Robbie D., before he was murdered in London, Ont., he sings, "It's my environment that makes me so violent." He closes by asking, "Father forgive me."
When I met him he wasn't so violent: just a funny guy who made you believe in God as he opened his mouth to sing. He was black, from a poor, social assistance-dependent family, Jamaican by heritage, Canadian by birth. He grew up in a neighbourhood filled with social programs. None touched him. In fact, much of Canada, its values, its virtues, failed to touch him. He grew up in an environment that made him die violently.
It's not poverty, race, culture, hip-hop or rap, music videos, drugs, immigration policies or any one of the zillion other excuses put up by pundits and politicians. Millions of people share in these dynamics but do not die by hand guns on city streets.
It is their environment which makes their lives so violent. Just as our environment-safe, middle class, built on values, which aren't specifically cultural or religious in their roots, but are shared none the less – makes us so silent.
We cannot continue to wash our hands with money. Social programs – our much-vaunted social policies – have failed these (and many, many other) young people. Our liberal ideals have denigrated into a Pilate-like distancing: as long as we pay out, we don't have to care. Not really. Cynical politicians come through Flemingdon regularly, occasionally with a Toronto Raptor, and get their photos taken with young black youth.
Toba Chung (as Tobi was also known) made no excuses for himself – he asked for forgiveness. My dear friend Garfield was murdered nearly two decades ago with a baseball bat. It was a death he predicted for himself, because, as he often told me, he recognized his own sin. He knew the life he had chosen, he knew how wrong it was, and he too begged his Father for forgiveness.
These young men are too smart to fall for a social worker's self-righteousness and too hard-bitten to embrace any quick fixes. But they also seek, in their hearts, to embrace our environment. They want safe bourgeois lives but don't know how to achieve them. This is how we have to get our hands dirty – not with the condescending pity of liberal ideology, or the contemptuous superiority of conservatism, but with the open heart of our faith. We have to share our environment with them.
And I have to keep my promise.
