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While growing up in east Baltimore City, negative messages were consistently communicated to me. I received these messages from everywhere, at school, in the neighborhood, and throughout the city itself. Of course, other locations such as church, community centers, and other places were not exempt. Everyone seemed to say the same thing. According to the messengers, growing up in East Baltimore City was a predictor for failure. However, the messengers never paused to consider the extent to which their interpretations of east Baltimore City were obviously incomplete, blatantly skewed, and seriously flawed.
Too often I heard the nonstop echoes of, “You don’t want to become a product of your environment… you don’t want to become just another statistic,” and so on. Why do people constantly feed these messages to young people? Deliberate negative connotations controlled the interpretation of the dominant narrative. It became cliché and even I began saying, “I don’t want to become a product of my environment… I don’t want to become just another statistic.” I perpetuated the deficit narrative as a form of dysfunctional consensus, not agreement. I always disagreed with the destructive narrative but as a young person, I did not feel confident enough to cordially interrogate the offensive messages or the negligent messengers. Sometimes when young people ask relevant and bold questions, adults perceive the inquiry as disrespectful, more so coming from a black female youth.
I understood the intentions along with the deeper intentional and unintentional key messages. However, the lack of awareness was alarming. Although I restated what I repeatedly heard, I knew the messages was explicitly biased. Those who believed they were doing the right thing by amplifying these messages were seriously misguided. While growing up, I understood that my environment was more than what the messengers reduced it to be through their redundant messaging. For example, based on my lived experiences, mainstream media inundate programming with negative stories and imagery of black people. Over time, the dominant culture has doubled down on the unconscionable destructive narratives without relief.
I often reflect on what my life would be if I did not reclaim the lens in which I see myself. How do I see myself in contrast to how others’ have been conditioned to see me? How does the world see me? How does this country see me? Maybe I am asking the wrong questions. Do they see me at all?
My lived experiences exhaustively default to redefining and reintroducing myself. As a Black girl growing up, I had to relentlessly fight for others to view me with clarity. I needed the lens in which they viewed me to remain clear, versus clouded with their biases, predominant deficit narratives, and flat out lies they were led to believe. For example, as a young person, angry was and continues to prove as an upheld convenient descriptor to describe Black females. Although I have every justifiable cause to demonstrate anger, my behavior does not exemplify this stereotype.
Based on my lived experiences, I continue to fight for basic considerations as a human being. My presence is dismissed, and existence denied, unless it fits into the dominant culture’s vantage point. Even then, I must go above and beyond to validate my place in the world, which usually translates to making people with privilege feel comfortable in this country. Why are we not increasingly challenging the erroneous perceptions, preconceived notions, unacceptable stereotypes, senseless assumptions, and overall incompetency?
As an individual rooted from East Baltimore City, I recognize myself as a direct product of my environment. In contrast to the deficit narrative, I understood my asset base first-hand. An African Proverb states, “It takes a village to raise a child.” East Baltimore was the village. I am not and never was ashamed of my environment, but the impact of the deficit narrative taught me to lack pride for the very place that produced me. I resented every messenger for directly and indirectly playing a role in recklessly reinforcing these negative messages without balance. Joy coexisted with the pain, and through the pain resulted in strength, stamina, resilience, and perseverance, among other attributes. Even the late great Tupac Shakur metaphorically acknowledged the rose that grew from the concrete.
