Parents need help, not more mentor programs
21st November 2011 · 0 Comments
By Tonyaa Weathersbee
Guest Columnist
Call me cynical, but I’ve never been one to gush about mentoring.
Not that I don’t admire the people who do it and the organizations that promote it. I do.
I guess I’ve just grown tired of seeing corporations and governmental entities push mentoring when they could use their clout to create jobs or build training programs that could put struggling parents in a position in which they don’t have to rely on strangers to take their children to the zoo or to ball games, or to do other things that parents normally do.
I’d also like to see more energy directed toward combating the structural inequality that makes it hard for Black parents to create normal lives for their kids, and not into more charities and programs.
And the recent debacle at Penn State University underscores yet another reason why I feel this way.
In what may wind up as the biggest sports scandal in more than a decade, Jerry Sandusky, the former defensive coordinator at Penn State, was recently charged with 40 counts of sexually abusing eight young boys that he met through The Second Mile, a charity he founded in 1977 to help underprivileged youths.
On its web site, The Second Mile describes itself as a non-profit for children who “need additional support and who could benefit from positive human contact.”
In light of what Sandusky is accused of, that statement resonates like a sick joke.
Preliminary accounts hint that the boys who Sandusky abused were Black. Apparently, reports of the abuse — including a 2002 incident in which a graduate assistant told Penn State football coach Joe Paterno that he saw Sandusky sexually assaulting one of the boys in the shower – went ignored for years.
Yet, the recent firings of Paterno and the school’s president, Graham B. Spanier, didn’t go ignored. The students rioted. And Sandusky apparently is banking on his record as a charitable man to delude people into believing that he only showered with the boys after workouts, but never had sex with them.
Sadly enough, a lot of people will probably buy it.
This happens because whenever the victims are recipients of the abuser’s charity, they tend to be invisible. The abuser as the giver, as the gracious one, is glorified and exalted. Everyone wants every excuse to be able to believe or forgive the abuser and any excuse to be able to marginalize the victims or paint them as ingrates or opportunists.
We’ve seen this happen before – when supporters of Bishop Eddie Long quickly vilified the young men who accused him of sexually abusing him as scammers. Long ultimately settled out of court with his accusers, young men who said they looked to Long as a mentor and father figure through his program, The Longfellows Youth Academy.
And the odds of this kind of abuse happening more often will grow as long as nothing is done to reduce the social and economic instability that makes it difficult for Black parents to even trust themselves to raise their own children.
So, they let the Eddie Longs and the Jerry Sanduskys of the world do it for them.
There’s a way to put this in check, though.
We can begin to insist that the corporations and government entities that want to volunteer and mentor in struggling communities use that energy to create jobs and do things to counteract the joblessness and other structural problems that make it tough for Black families to establish stable lives.
We can also be leery of non-profits that seem to be turning Black dysfunction into a cottage industry.
And we can increasingly remind ourselves that mentoring and charity ought to be an accompaniment, not an answer, when it comes to helping struggling Black parents with their children. Because when programs like The Second Mile and The Longfellows Youth Academy become too much of a solution, the children become an afterthought.
That’s not the way it’s supposed to work.
This article was originally published in the November 21, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper
