The Good Men Project

By MATTHEW GOODMAN

Like us all, I’ve had role models. Some were people I’ve aspired to be with so much zeal that sometimes I’ve stood in the shower pretending I was one of them, giving a speech rallying people or myself, imploring in the manner that, let’s say, my brother implored me when we stood at some figurative or literal edge that I needed to jump from, or span I needed to cross the previous day or hour. But then sometimes we find role models in the strangest places, and they need not possess personas or histories that are without faults or similar with our own; or at least that has been the case in my life.

Four years ago, at the age of thirty, a time in my life when I still carried the reclusive chip on my shoulder that had begun to take shape sometime in my early teens, I met a gentleman who taught me to smile and laugh more, and to speak, as he once demanded, “my truth,” a seemingly simple and apparent lesson but one I had either never learned or forgotten over time. His name was Randy Smith. Originally from a small town in Georgia, Randy was a former gang banger and heroine abuser who’d been through residence detox facilities and state prisons a handful of times in his life.

Shortly after we first met, Randy’s son, a gang member in Newark, New Jersey, was murdered. I was a case manager and a GED teacher in a transitional program that served formerly incarcerated men and women. Randy was a resident. He was sixty-three with a gold-capped bicuspid. He struggled to read and multiply, but he came to class every night. After his son died, he came early and talked to me about this or that in the news, sometimes about his job working in the facility’s kitchen, and sometimes about the gossip that existed in the building, home to seventy men ranging in ages from twenty-two to seventy; and he talked about his son, and his past, the things he would do over if he was a young man, how he would care about himself and his future, not question and deny it. Sometimes Randy would pepper me with questions. “What’re you doing for yourself?” he’d ask. “Who do you love? Do you love them right? What do you think? Why are you so quiet? What do you mean? Explain.”

Randy was not the only man in the facility who pushed me to live a fuller life, to keep my nose, as Randy said, open. In my three and half years of working with men and women recently freed from prison, there were dozens. Some were coworkers. Some were clients. It is without the slightest hesitation that I say they schooled and challenged me, and, as role models do, they highlighted dreams and traits I wrongfully suppressed. In fact, there are men and women who inspired me, offered me guidance, and played such a significant role in my development as a man that as I write this I can’t help but wonder if instead of writing about Randy I should be writing about them, sharing the stories they shared with me or recalling something they said or did. Undoubtedly, I could fill a book with sketches of these people, the role models who I came to know as a young adult.

Thus, every time I hear someone say that there is a lack of positive role models in poor African American and Latino urban communities, I cringe; for I know that it is not that there is a lack of role models in such neighborhoods; rather, it is that too many inspiring men and women with much to teach go unheard and unnoticed and lack the just opportunity to make a difference in the lives of others, specifically the children and teenagers in their community.

Of course, this lack of opportunity is built into our society and our criminal justice system. For example, if after attending inadequate schools you’d reached the age of twenty and, lacking any real economic opportunity, you were arrested for selling drugs and incarcerated, upon your release not only is it difficult to find a minimum-wage job, but, no matter how determined you are, it is virtually impossible to find a job working with youth. In fact, no matter how many educational degrees or attributes you possess that the young men and women of your community would benefit from, you can never be a teacher in a school where you would work with children confronting the same perils and challenges you faced, stumbled upon, learned from, and, as best as you could, overcame.

From here, we must see that this system of exclusionary education limits youth’s exposure to leaders. But if there is need for another example, then we need to only take a cursory glance at the curriculum in our public school English, science and history classes, where there is, at best, a limited presentation of African, African-American and Latino as well as other minority history makers, scientists and thinkers, and writers and artists, some of whom rose from environments and predicaments similar to those many students find themselves in. What makes this egregious is that as the children in urban communities are struggling to overcome the obstacles and limitations of their neighborhoods, and many fall prey to, the majority of the role models they have are those who are projected by the same society and collective social perspective that constructs and maintains unjust systems of education and justice.

For example, as far as presented role models go, Jay Z and Lebron James are brilliant contemporary artists who have a fervent global following. They’re on TV. They’re in the news. They’re held up as ideals—the rapper and basketball star. Many, many children aspire to be something like them. This is not to criticize Lebron James and Jay Z, or the numerous other talented luminaries who are their contemporaries. In fact, it is to celebrate them. Their brilliance has a tremendously constructive influence on many young men and women. But then, they are also known qualities, what we, as America project. So then the question is: What happens to the children who aren’t athletic, who enjoy science or dancing or writing rather than orating poetry? What happens to those who have fallen off-track, who might be hustling on the corner, or running with a gang, or spending too much time watching TV?

What lacks in impoverished inner-city communities is not role models. Rather, what lacks is the presentation of alternative models of brilliance. One can only wonder what Randy’s son might have become if Randy or a man like Randy was a present aspect of his life. I suppose one is certainly within his or her right to criticize Randy for not being there, and to criticize any and all men and women whose mistakes landed them in prison. Randy would have bravely accepted the responsibility. But the true question, Randy would have also said, is never what should have been done. Rather, it is what can I do now?

Thus, I can only imagine the positive affect a man such as Randy Smith, and the positive affects of the many other men and women who possessed qualities I aspired to obtain, could have on youth in Newark, in Baltimore, in Brooklyn and Detroit if with little to bind us other than being present in the same transitional facility, they pushed me to strive toward a better self and provided me with profound models of humanity and manhood.

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Matthew Aaron Goodman was born in New York. He earned a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. His debut novel, Hold Love Strong, was published by Touchstone Fireside (Simon and Schuster, 2009) and chosen by Barnes & Noble as a Discover Great New Writers book for Summer 2009. He has taught in the New York City public school system, worked with formerly incarcerated people, and created a literacy program for youth on the spectrum of criminal justice involvement. In 2007, working hand and hand with formerly incarcerated men and women, Goodman created The Leadership Alliance, a community empowerment project  that unites recently freed people with volunteer partners. Goodman lives with his wife in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently at work on a second novel and a screenplay.