Respect your family business: What you know by 40...

... is that you better respect your family business.

For some it's easier than others.  Lionel Jefferson's business is laundromats.  Arnold and Willis were going into... what did Mr. Drummond do anyway?  Lamont was going to run Sanford and Son.

But for those of us whose parents didn't hand us a business, we have to figure out what we are going to build for a business, profession, or career.  Hopefully our options are better than our parents' options were.  Hopefully, our families were blessed to leave us something to build on.  ]

I was lucky and I wasn't.  My family business was very clear, but that business doesn't leave much material wealth to build on.  My parents were teachers.  Dedicated, professional, masterful teachers who got a masters and doctorate in education, worked in public institutions, and dedicated their vocation to kids in special education (my mother) and to adults in community colleges (my father).  That's my family business, and when my parents passed they left the most valuable thing you could leave a child:  good names, great reputations, and models of good living for a great cause.

And when I got in to Yale Law School, I'm sure they both thought I'd become a high powered attorney and represent an uptick in our entire family's financial fortunes.  I thought the same thing.

Yet very early on I was called home to teaching.  A little disoriented by the dizzyingly elite culture of Yale, I was called to Umoja, a program that went into New Haven public middle schools to teach civil rights history as a way to give the children perspective on how their educational opportunity had been earned by the bold sacrifice of their elders and ancestors.  Teaching this, at that time, brought home to me that I owed my time at Yale to my parents and ancestors, to countless young people and elders in the 50s and 60s who put their lives on the line for future generations of Black children to have a chance to attend a school like Yale.  Umoja helped set me on a course that didn't lead to corporate law and the big money that comes with it.  My path led to public education policy advocacy in many forms, to youth empowerment and organizing work across the country, and, ultimately, to use my law degree to create more educational opportunity for others.

And if that were the end of the story, that would be a nice neat bow for my life.  But all that is just the preface.  That's the introduction.  Now begins the first chapter of my life's work.

My family business is education, and if I think back over my (too) many jobs, the ones that stick out as the most invigorating, most exciting, and most fulfilling all had something in common.  I worked directly with young people, encouraging their growth and development into critical thinkers and leaders.  And of those experiences, the one that still brings joy to my memory, is the two years I spent teaching creative writing at Balboa High School in San Francisco.

The creative writing program, called Roots, was originally intended for young people whose parents were incarcerated.  But I was able to gather so much interest by going from class to class spitting a spoken word poem to get kids to sign up for the elective that we opened the class to students who were missing a parent or loved one due to death or being an orphan or because their parents were back in their home country.

I got the Roots youth started with journaling and formed spoken word poetry from their free-writing.  We organized and blocked their poetry for the stage and made it into a play called Sentences.  We put it on for peers, teachers, and administrators, many of who were tired of my students behavior issues in their classrooms.  Teachers who would kick my students out of their classrooms, almost on sight, came up to me crying and offering Roots students 'one more chance.'  And I knew that meant many more chances, that we had reinvigorated in weary teachers and administrators an empathy that would encourage them to see these struggling students through to graduation.  Then we took the play to Washington D.C. and presented it to a conference of judges and probation officers, so that they could feel the consequences of their sentences on the children, families, and communities left behind.  Here's a front-page article in the San Francisco Chronicle about our work in Roots.

I left Balboa and the Bay Area after Hurricane Katrina to get closer to my folks, at the time, mostly in Montgomery and Atlanta.  But I never forgot the joy of working with my Roots students.  I literally loved the students, the work and I haven't experienced anything quite like it since.

Well today, 27 days before I turn 40, I am clear that my family business is education.  And today I will offer the first in a series of creative writing workshops for high school students to create spoken word pieces to celebrate Dr. King on his holiday.  I love planning the lessons, mapping out how, from day one I will get these youth to gain enough creativity, mastery, and confidence to compose and deliver powerful pieces two months from now.  I love prepping by digging up and through Gwendolyn Brooks and Rita Dove and Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes and Chrystos and Rumi and Khalil Gibran and Shel Silverstein for just the right pieces to inspire their wonder and feed their fearlessness.  I loved waking up this morning knowing that, by the end of the day, I will have seen, first-hand, that the world is in good hands, and that I have had something to do with it... that I will have been a teacher again.

My entire time as an English major, I ran from teaching.  "Those that can do, and those that can't teach" I remember reading in some cynical quote that certainly doesn't apply to those for whom teaching is what they do, people like my parents and people like me.

And I'm encouraged by the fact that my mother and I graduated the same year, from the same school: Me with my undergrad in English and she with her masters in Education, both from Xavier University of Louisiana.  I'm encouraged by my father's journey, getting his Ph. D at 46 and within 10 years becoming president of Trenholm Tech in Montgomery Alabama where he administered two major campuses and several instructional sites, 34 instructional programs and about 200 employees.  I'm encouraged by my sister, who after Katrina, while raising 5 children, got her Masters in counseling and has her own practice focused on helping youth and families.  I'm encouraged because I have finally accepted a core part of my destiny.  And I couldn't be more proud to finally join in my family business.

What you know by 40 is that your family business isn't necessarily a business at all.  It might be a calling.   It might be a lifestyle or a culture.  It might be a responsibility to something greater than yourself.  Whatever it is, you better show it reverence and acknowledge its centrality to your life.  I've learned to embrace my family business and I'm, finally, ready to teach.