and somebody whom he loves deeply. . .

>> if you look at meet me now, i just looked right back at them like what? it's like they took some emotions that are used to have, that nervous feeling, that scared feeling, it's gone. i think i lost emotions over this whole thing. i lost the motions. i think my heart got a little stone in it now. and like i told you, my girlfriend gets mad at me now. she thinks i don't care no more because i don't show it. and it is hurting but i think trying. i feel bush is coming from but i speak with my head now. i don't speak it right here in my heart. i know she is good for me but since this whole thing happen, i don't give a damn what you do. this is somebody i used to care a lot about. now i would be like, i don't

give a farc. and i want to be somebody else if i want to be with someone else. if she wants to be with somebody else, go ahead. i lost a lot of emotion over this and i don't even know if it's going to come back. i'm hoping that it do. i care, but if it happens it happens. if she leaves, she leaves. life goes on so i really can't call it. the direct consequence of his injury was this loss of the motion. the loss of emotion robbed david of this ability to have instinct about his surrounding. that puts him in a dangerous place. but it is often true that young people are not credited or not seen as being, let me say, were the of having ptsd. so the patient leaves the hospital often without having any explanation about what he might feel the days and weeks to come.

the same sorts of things that you are i might feel about after a car accident or after a tragedy. patient's interpretation is, i'm going crazy. these symptoms can be very intrusive. the patient's response is often either try and move away, if they can. treat themselves with drugs. withdraw, confront other people, get weapons, and do other things that might put them in danger. what do you think happens when providers, medical providers see these patients? they look numb. they have no emotions. they think, no remorse. no feelings. this is somebody with no empathy. the disconnect is profound. to provide a response is often to assume the worst, wash the hands of the patient, and instead, fall back on assumptions about what black men are.

stereotypes that they have pulled, that we are pulled from the media, that we have pulled from television and our deeply held ideas about what black men are and black men are not. and i will confess to you, that along this journey, i realized that at some level i hadn't questioned the circumstances of young people coming in who had been shot. it's pretty easy, if you don't see it on a day-to-day, to simply assume the worst. and so this was for me transformation. and i would say to you again, as i talk about young people using substances, who treat their pain, i talk about young people getting weapons, i'm not often that as an excuse or saying that it's a good idea. of course, having 11 put you at risk for being injured in worse ways. but we have to understand and we have to explain it if we're going to in an incredible way --

credible way to teach young people how to avoid violence. there's another aspect of what i heard from these young people that want to tell you a little bit about. and see if it resonates with you. young people talked a lot about what it meant to be a sucker. and what respect meant to them in their lives. one young man put it this way. he said, a sucker is a person that if someone says something to them or does something to them, they just sit there and take it and don't retaliate. if you're living in inner-city, you would want to be a sucker because everybody will take advantage of you. i don't know if that sounds so much of anyone here. is that something you've heard before. now, the young victims that i talked to, that i listened to, talked about that. but i will tell you, it's not something they made up.

many of us in our own workplaces might recognize that people saying to you, don't let that person do that to you, or everybody will think they can do that to you. have you ever heard that? allies and are sent in his book talks about this issue of respect and how respect is not used to keep keep young people safe and disrespect often what young people are responding to with violence erupts. eli anderson also said this is part of how young people construct their identity at this kind of notion that you need a preemptive strike, you need to do something to prove to people you're not a victim. and again, i would say we can't fool ourselves into the that young people made this a. in fact, many people would say that the basis of u.s. foreign policy has some of that in it. we prove to people that we are

-- we prove to other nations were not going to set that. all of us know it. all of us react to it this way. all of us accept it as a reality, these young people, as well. but i didn't fully understand the ways in which it made for an identity until i met, roy martin. roy martin is a young man who i considered to be, in many ways, my mentor. he considers me to be his mentor. and so while i was able to tell him some things to guide him in some ways, that i have found success, run was able to help me really understand what many of my patients were going through. roy really became my interpreter. roy put it this way, one day we said to me, you know, your normal is not my normal. so you can't take your normal

and apply it to mind, because i want you to understand how it is different. i first met roy when i volunteered for a mentor program in boston. at that time, roy was in a pre-release, after being incarcerated for three years for a shooting come to shooting which he shot nine people, none of those people died. i learned that roy was brilliant. he was born to parents who were 15 years old at the time. and roy, again, a brilliant child, the main thing that they taught him that he took away from his upbringing was to be a fighter. was taught, if you start from if there's a fight you and it quickly. if your brother is in the fight and you don't jump in, and do damage, you will catch up when you get home. and roy sums it up in this way. he said i was taught the rule

that winning justifies everything. and roy said that's the wrong rule. i now know that's the wrong rule, but i wanted to do know that i grew up. and i won't tell you the details today, but roy went from being an honor student, a bookworm, who was actually taken out of his class and put into a gifted class. let me to this story. was sitting in class, and the kids had gotten their papers back. and he and another friend had both gotten 100. and as they celebrated across the room with each other, they noticed a kid sitting in between the newspaper had a big red zero on it. and they begin to make fun of him. and the teacher said, listen, i will teach you a lesson. you're in third grade. i will put you in fifth grade. see how you like it. see how you like being at that end of the bottom.

it was hard for about a week but after that we kind of got on. [laughter] >> and i think somebody said maybe we've learned something about these kids, and they then decided to move them to a gifted school. but that tells you something. at county that a brilliant kid has to have a fluke, at least at that time in those systems to get recognized as a gifted. so roy went from being an honor student to a kid who hung in the streets, to a kid who robbed other people, to a major drug dealer, to jail, to pre-release. he began to do his own work in his own healing, and then took an internship at the office of u.s. senator john kerry where he worked for six years and became critical person in that office, mainly because he could speak the truth of his life.

i realize that it was important that roy also share his story with other providers and doctors and nurses who i came in contact with. and so i asked what if he would go with me to washington to attend a meeting of the society of general internal medicine. and roy came along. in fact, with 22 at the time. the first time he had been on a plane, but we flew down and he presented in a workshop that was very provocative. it was very moving, and it was very educational for me and my colleagues. while we were there, we had done our workshop. we are staying in a hotel in crystal city. we went down to the courtyard, the food court that was connected to the hotel. let me read you a little bit about that moment. we went downstairs to the mall connected to the mayor and found

the food court so we could grab breakfast before heading out to a lightning tour of d.c. we stopped at a small deli grill, and ordered a sandwich is on a much muffins. we stood chatting as the short order cook crack the eggs and begin to immediately end with a large spatula. as he did, i noticed that he was using the same spatula to flip our eggs that he was using to cook raw chicken on a nearby grill. he could easily be contaminating our sandwiches with salmonella, as the bacteria would undoubtedly code the project that i turned to roy and shook my head. he is contaminate our food with that spatula. so custom out, roy said. -- cuss him out. [laughter] >> roy instructed matter-of-factly. was serious. four ball, it wouldn't be an i

do consider making a mistake that it had to be set in a particular way. i said no, roy, i'm not going to does not but were not going to eat the sandwiches either difficult to catch her over and asked for the cooks attention. i explained to him that he was risking making us sick by the way he was using the spatula. he immediately admitted his mistake and apologized. he discarded the eggs and bread and started again, this time using perfect technique that he gave us amateurs to us without charge, still roy glared at him as we walked over to a nearby table. [laughter] >> it's cool, man, i think you made a mistake i said to run. are you telling me that that do doesn't know about salmonella? isn't his job to know, roy fired back that i would have cost the dude out, that way he would remember the next time. do you think, i asked, with my own skepticism? yeah, i know that's not you but that's how i. i just can't let things like that go. i guess i was just bred to be

confrontational. we sat and ate our sandwiches and sipped our hot coffee, despite our many people, young and older were moving about in the mall. a small group of young african-american men passed their roy locked eyes with him and track them as they walked with. the missing let the exchange is that but after a long moment, didn't roy looked back at me. what was that about, i asked roy. what? the steering. yeah, that's just me, roy said. i've got an eye problem. [laughter] >> i said and i problem? that's how i grew up in i just look at people. i can't help it. when somebody looks at me i just have to keep looking at them until they look away. sometimes it causes trouble but most of the time they just look away and we go on about our business. i said, you know how told you about my parents, have economy to fight anti-crime? yeah, roy, you did. so while the other parents are

teaching their kids to play baseball and coaching their soccer teams, my parents were teaching us how to beat up other people's kids. what roy was able to help you understand and many times as we came together was that young people who had no other way to see themselves, who felt so constrained by the circumstances in which they lived, felt so deprived of real opportunities, realize they can use violence to beat somebody. that if you were known, if you had a reputation, if you earned that reputation, by putting in work, and putting in work to these young people meant violence, then you could be done. and if you are known, then you were somebody. and if you were not known you were nobody. and roy began to put this in the

context of what is normal was. and i would say the normal for a in many of these young men was what we've -- outlasted at this point, which is the racism that follows them through the world. and it follows them in ways where, for example, they are not hired for jobs. and many of them have impediments to being hired like past and incarceration. but many of these young people feel the rest of the world has since record from the. recoiled from them in a way that would that they're only marginally even human, i would say. and it becomes a part of who they -- how they see themselves. and it's compounded by the danger in which they grew up by their sense, they are not helpful but rather are harassing in their own way. lackey a sense of safety. the on relenting trauma in their lives and the idea that there's no way, way to forge an identity

except through violence. it would be tempting at this point to think that what i painted is a hopeless picture, but i would actually say it is a more hopeful picture than the ones that many of us have walked around with for years. if young people, the young people i talked about, again, offering an explanation rather than an excuse, if they are trying to accomplish something, stay safe or establish an identity, but using these other forms, we have other ways to do that. we can help them have identity. it's on us to open the doors and opportunities so they can see a future, and they can see safety as a given, and not on safety as a given. the paradigm is really about healing. we can decide that these young people are bad, in which case the remedy is punishment, we can

decide that they are sick, in which the remedy is treatment. or we can decide that they are injured, that they, like any of us, with an injury need healing. we have to participate in that healing. we have to take responsibility for that healing. but the community has to take a responsibility with us for finding out how we got injured and helping us to do. let me give you a concrete example about one program that we have put together in philadelphia, similar programs exist across the country. but it's called healings hurt people. this simple idea is that when a young person comes in that's been a victim of violence, we don't just patch them up and send them out. and you should know, nine out of 10 folks who come in with a violent injury does not get sent to the hospital. those folks get sent home.

they are out within hours of their injury. and it's very simple. what we do is to meet them in that moment and find out what happened. and in that moment we also explain to them some things are going to happen to you in the next week or so that are normal, but they're going to be disturbing. you're going to have trouble sleeping. you may have nightmares. you may have flashbacks. you may feel very unsafe. that's normal. you may not have any of those. but if you do, that's normal. it should go away, but if it doesn't go away come back and we will help you. but here's what you should and, don't go get a gun because you don't feel safe. don't smoke a lot of weed, don't drink a lot call because this is normal. normalizing this for young people is often the thing that gives them relief. we can identify what they need so that to the extent the young people we see, the young men, do

not have identification cards. we have a case manager and a navigator who helps him get those things, get an id card get back in school. identify those future oriented roles, things that they need. and then finally, at their request, we put together what it's called a self -- it's a 10 week educational psychoeducational group with these young men come together, young people, men and women, come together and talk about four main ideas. safety, how to manage their emotions, including the anger that they feel after they have been shot or stabbed. dealing with loss. how did they do with the losses that have experience and sustained in our lives, but how do they also do with the inevitable loss that comes from choosing a different path? when young people decide to move on and identify future, they often leave behind france they love.

that can't be minimized that it is a loss all of us have to figure how we deal with loss. and then finally the f. stands for future. how do you identify a way to see past this proposed limited mortality? i've heard said many times that he and people don't believe, many young black men don't believe they will live beyond the age 21. to be honest, i have not found that to be the case. i think that many young people use that as a way to contain the anxiety that comes from the uncertainty of not knowing. but they can also envision a future. when i asked these young people, come what you think you would like to be doing in your future, they can identify things that productive ways, meaningful work that they would like to be engaged in. so this program is a simple -- it's not a solution. is a simple attempt to address

the problems we see any emergency part. but what's amazing and a perhaps surprising is it is not the norm. most places, most hospitals do not do this. and no insurer will pay for the service. so is it any wonder that these young people are left in their own devices it's the simple thing we can do. we can reclaim in many ways, protected by the resources these young people are. but in order to do that, our own transformation must precede our service to that. and i would say that as a society, we must very clearly rethink the biases that we have about young people, particularly the young black men. seeing them rather than a drain or a problem, see them as a resource. in fact, all of the programs, the program i told you, all of the programs that i mentioned

really rely upon young people who have been victims to be the service provider. when they are able to heal from their wounds and injuries, there are the most qualified to speak with other young people who have been victims. but i would push us even further. our judgments influence how we see them and influence how they see themselves, whether we realize that or not. our transformation has got to be one that humanizes young black men. that sees them as a fully human, that sees them not as members only of a group, sees them not as a stereotype, but sees them as individuals with individual circumstances. many of the circumstances that led to the injuries that young people have were normal in a sense, they were at parties, they're walking down a street and somebody tried to get their chain. we have to see the diversity of experience, but even for those people who are involved in things in selling drugs or

involved in the streets, we have to find a way in that moment of boulder building when they're thinking about their lives, seeing this more as a wakeup call. it's our responsibility to engage them. finally i would say that the idea of individual responsibility doesn't remove their responsibility, all of our responsibility to gather. and so i began by talking about this idea of the wrong place wrong time. the title comes from a phrase that is often uttered by young people as i sat with them, they would say, you know, doc, i guess i was at the wrong place at the wrong time. what does that mean? many of them were at the wrong place. they were in their communities. often when providers see those words they think oh, yeah, you are minding your own business. they take it as a subtle -- a subtle way of saying i had no responsibility and the provider

decides to place the blame. but i would turn this on its head and say, there is a right place for us to help young people, and to do the stories that they tell. and that right place is the community. not just the communities where these young people live, but this community, this large defined community where all of us see young black men as a valued resource. and that's not just lip service. that's really what we invest in and what we see. and the right time is both early and now. that is, protecting young people from injury and, is our most profound work, making sure that young people are safe. we know that not only their emotional health but their physical health will be improved by that. but we have to intervene and help them heal where ever we find them, whether it's in schools in the hospital, we can turn our backs. i think that we can find

something that we didn't know we had in the young people who we have sometimes cast aside. so without i thank you for your attention. i would love to hear your thoughts and your ideas, and make this a conversation about what we would like to see. thank you. [applause] >> i have a microphone that's working. comments to make? of course, all the way and. >> first. >> good evening. thank you so much for your wonderful words. my question is you talk about the healing place. in philadelphia, like charter schools, how can we create something like this?

>> well, one concept that we have begun to learn from that our colleagues have talked about him one collie, a psychiatrist is an idea called trauma informed practice. that means that whatever we see young people, we recognize that many have experienced really severe, and their lives and that is what affects their behavior. and that safety is primary. now, one of the things i have seen over my time is the way to make schools safe is with more cameras and more metal detectors and more men walking around in uniforms with guns. and that is our way of thinking about safety. but it's not clear that that makes, does what we wanted to do. the science behind it is we'll all of us possess in ourselves a mechanism. it gets turned on when we are

scared and we need to run and hide. it is often we don't need it. the idea behind post-traumatic stress is that system doesn't go all the way off. and that's why decent people are hypervigilant and they can go from zero to 60 in seconds, right? some of it has to do with that idea of respect. some of it has to do with being a man. if we could think about how we make these places healing, it doesn't have to be a hospital. as a matter of fact, it's better if it's not a hostile because that means we've done before the young person has been shot. but trauma informed means we understand the life expect of the person who's coming to us. and that we actually incorporate them and make our services match that. many traumatized people get we troubled ties every place they go. you go to get a drivers license, they talk to you like your not a person. you go to get, you know, assistance, medicaid, they talk. so it's a constant process that if you're already a little bit

hyped, can only make it worse. so trauma informed principles can be applied anywhere and ought to be applied everywhere i think in workplaces would be more healthy. if we thought more about, again, these four things. how do we make it safe, how do we help people manage their emotions under the circumstances, how do we help each other deal with loss, and how do we envision the future, not only as being the individual, but also our respective institutions. >> i have a question. washington state, some of the -- a judge and a couple of public health professionals did a study, because they saw a cycle of young people going in and out of the justice, you know, the prison system and the juvenile system. and a judge that concerned about it, so he came up with a program

to test the guys who are constantly coming in and out of the system, and found that a large percentage of them had learned ability or certain parts of cognitive brain. once he gave treatment, have your center and as drexel, learning disability, adhd and other cognitive brain dysfunction as a method of, you know, minimizing recidivism within the prison system? >> that's a very good question. young people who come to the program are assessed for what parts of their lives are not working. and so many, if they're having difficulty or had difficulty in school, we arrange for them to get those kinds of the valuation. so it's good important to identify how to make these young people successful as we connect them to resources and services. but to raise another important

issue. this is where the size and this is where i do the geeky doctor think that the science tells us a lot about what adversity and trauma do, not only to the body but to the brain. and so when we are allowing young people, children to be exposed to neglect and abuse and witnessing violence in all sorts of form, the idea is that as their brains develop it shifts, it shifts the develop it over to the survival part of the brain, and away from the kind of more regulatory part of the brain. so trauma isn't only about what it does to how people behave. it actually can have brain a facts that can be profound. but reversible. it's important that we think about the fact that, in these have been shown in animal models, and most that have been neglected behave in a particular

abnormal way. you can see the changes in their brains. we also know that by intervening, by caring for an providing for one of the most important things we can provide for these young people have been injured come is a caring adult in their lives. mentorship is great if mentor programs tend to be really like three months or six months. there is not a larger vision about what mentorship can be. i know many of you have worked in places where it there is a longer vision. but it is about 10 year, lifelong mentorship for the young person. that number helps them to learn the things that we want them to do, but i would say actually may repair the damage that has happened to their bodies and their mind, their brain over their childhood. that's powerful work, and we should see it as such.

>> good evening. thank you. i've listened to conversations and wholeheartedly about the stress and the strength. also my concern is these boys, we're told that young black boys, i think the whole thing has to be looked at from a holistic point of view. historically, and right now, you see there's, what's the word, endangered species, endangered species. and and public enemy number one. that's what i want to say. i own expense, okay? and i'm 60. so what i'm saying is not to offend but just the way that it is. cultural a from day one black men have been feared because of he excels people can see that we're going to fall because, consider sports, right? the great white hope for someone to be a black man physically.

right? so he could have a white champion. and i will sell that and sell this. young black men, they do not see potential for themselves and white america. which is why you should live for the moment. we should only tell them that the gangsters that they ended have no use for them, period. kerry. maybe they might understand, these gangsters pay does. this is just the facts of life. they don't see that the gangsters never have any women. their families is totally away from what they're doing. what they do and what they do, you know, they don't bring their families in, they don't bring their women and. and family is sacred to the. they only see the glamour and the bling. so the young men have to feel that they do have a future here. and i'd like to say to the person, the earth belongs to everybody. for everything of thing on a, we

care for what care for which is our sell. maybe i give you a different kind. it's here for everybody. >> one of the things that i wasn't sure about, and i think you said it in a different way was the fact that most of these young men feel guilty. they feel that something they didn't do, whether it was glaring into a person or a person withered away, kept them in that situation. and one of the things i've often wondered about is what it is that people can do to make black children feel more empowered. there is such a thing as a good feeling about entitlements so that nobody defined you, and you can begin to realize that you

didn't create your own hell. i wonder whether that is part of your process. >> i think it is. i think we think about it as kind of fundamental safety, is necessary to be able to explore what your life could be. and there is a sense in which, i would say many of the young people feel, it's almost remorseful. that is, the same way that you are i might feel like i just wish i'd done something different that day. i think i would feel the same way. i wish i had stayed in bed five minutes longer. i wish i had not gone where i went, gone to that party. that's pretty normal, i think, to try and -- that's what stories do, it helps you make sense of the world, why this happens. does this mean something about me or is it simply was wrong place, wrong time expected. the problem is in the settings with it go to get help, so much

is reinforce the negative. it's very rare for young people to get to tell the story. for injured victims to get to tell the story and health care setting. many i think health care providers don't really want to hear it. because it's painful. they don't believe it often, they don't want to be taken to court. they think that somehow by asking summit what happened. again, we get this where you simply make an assumption. so we have a way. we can change how we see them and how we talk to them that opens up those opportunities for them. >> iges, i just want to know like, how, why, how do you think it is, like do you think blacks,

us black young males commit most of the crimes we commit and things like that because like going up with a single parent or by, why do you think like they do the things they do? >> that's part of what you mentioned i think is for -- one of the things we have to recognize is that in this country, it's not just being a young blackmail. it's being a poor young blackmail, living off neighborhoods where the schools don't serve you well, where you don't feel safe, where the environment doesn't speak safety to you. and so it is more than simply who you are. it's all of the forces that the lack of the supportive forces around you. with regard to parents, i do think parenting is a tough job under all circumstances.

i wish that more young men had access to their fathers in their home, but given that that's not possible, the question is who can fill that role. and i think one of the most powerful interventions we can have simply is caring adult. a caring adult who is willing to be with that young person for the long-term, whether that's a man or woman or relative, having someone there for those times when they are stress is maybe the most important thing that we can do to try and buffer some of the trauma that's come into their lives. >> do you think they can raise a boy to be a mayor? >> apps loaded. absolutely i believe that, the idea that haunts us that we get

really hung up on this idea about what it means to be a man, right, that sometimes we constructed, at least in all this, we think about men as violent, powerful, strong, sexual, all those things, right? as opposed to the fundamental ideas of responsible, integrity. those things are independent of gender. but having somebody modeled for you, what that looks like, it's important i think to have a male do that. i think it's important to have a male in your life who can model for your, no, no, don't pay attention to that. keep your eye on this because you can still be this man and do another way, right? and that's part of this discussion at roy and i had, which is, you know, what does it mean to be a male. you have heard a man means you strike first and you strike hard

and you're in the fight quickly. is there another way to be a man? that is not just one way, and a way that, the way that we have put out there is a destructive way in many ways, and it often, it means there is violence going both ways in the relationsrelationships. so i think it is possible. >> first of all i want to thank you so much for your powerful book. and i had the opportunity to. peter: early. we talked about the power of. vhdl affect the wire has had on baltimore in terms of perpetuating a healthy start type of african men and boys that and i can understand, and forcing for a certain extent the light on the culture having sort of a fear of large black men or lousy speaking like that and not

having enough compassion to embrace the whole humanity, even when they are physically injured. but also can you address the issue that i have come across as an educated -- educator, african-american folks buying into the same startup in being even more so fearful of african boys and men themselves. i've had a colleague interacting with some of the students who said, look at that big old boy over there. you know, he is about a couple of minutes from to appear and then not even when you see young men on the street, in a crowd and want to go over there and you think they're too loud and being to boisterous. and first asking today, asking them that they're a bit too loud, just being as fearful of them and not understanding the maturation that you may see a young man, i am six-foot three. you may see a young man who is 61 but he is only 14 years old. and sing the physical thing doing him as an adult when, in fact, he still a baby.

so those are the things, particularly with a napkin and american community that we may have to address our own biases towards african young man. >> i think you said it perfectly. i -- one of the struggle is that we have abandoned the word boy in part because of the meeting that it is had. were buoyed -- men were called voip, so that is often offensive. but calling boyz ii men has its own unintended consequence. so a 14 year old is used as a man, and a black man, that is often viewed as a threat. and a boy is a joke that i understand what transition to adulthood we have to respect that, but that mental model i think gets us in some trouble. you know, i can't much comment on the wire. a number of people have

encouraged me to engage because they knew these kinds of questions would come up. [laughter] >> you know, i still find it painful. i have watched pay for, i can't quite get through it. i am interested in your perspective as residents of baltimore, hearing what you think those kinds of messages are, the perspective as a, unicode what are the perspective of law-enforcement perspective, how do we balance those perspectives. but to the main point, i think that these held notions of young black men are not reserved for white people. they are, all of us have bought into them in some way. and how do we actively resist them? not only to this larger, whenever we hear it out in the world, but to the faces of young men themselves, that it's not you. that's not what it means to be a young black men. don't accept those pervasive images. and then work with them about

what it means to be, what they can be and how they define themselves. so i applaud the work you're doing to i will say one more thing. we know that art can help heal the effect of trauma. we know that physical activity can help heal some of the disruptions, but what is it we do wind dollars gives sure, we pulled physical education out of schools. appetite something were to take all of this together. we have to provide mental health healing treatments to people who are incarcerated. it just makes sense, not just the right thing to do to be effective. >> i used to work in an emergency room, what martin luther king washington hospital and was not allowed. and i hated to see the gunshot wounds. so i had a very good solution.

i found that most of our, a lot of our gunshot wounds came from places called nickerson gardens. so i had an idea that we could make things very easy in a day if we just blew up a nickerson gardens. [laughter] >> that would take a lot of weight off of us. but a friend of mine lived, a friend of mine lived only a few blocks am nickerson gardens. and we're going to play tennis. and he said he wants to stop over at nickerson gardens. and it was early in the morning. it was time for people to go to work. but we went over there. i looked and it was interesting. no one was heading to work. there were a couple of people hidden in the back, the back a hidden to the liquor stores. but no one was heading to work

at all. and so i went over and said i never saw anyone heading to work. i didn't see people coming back home from work. and so that kind of changed my impression about nickerson gardens. and i said when i was young all of the men worked, all the men worked. they were all poor. they all worked. if you have a family, you're considered a shift is no good, if you can work at least two jobs. and so we saw people going to work every day, a father, all the men going to work every day. so they had a certain, they gave me a certain image of outward and imports to work. the more you work, the more you get. and when you go to nickerson gardens, you looked, if you see someone there, you know, in the

daytime, not going to look at, the looked successful our people who are pimps or drug dealers. and i think that, if it's a kind of tough problem for the doctors, i think a lot of doctors probably see things similar to what i saw before i went to come before went to nickerson gardens. most of them said i wouldn't go anywhere near nickerson gardens. the people that i talk to were, so if they're probably not going to see, they're probably not going to see that. but i think probably the big thing that we're probably going to have to work on is just simply where are the black role models for the young boys? young boys see something. whatever you do, usually is

based on some role model, somewhere in your mind you see someone doing something, and you think you can do it. and most of our blackboard, unfortunately, when you look all through television, it's almost all you have to be athletes entertain her. and that's what i thought i had until i broke my ankle and i changed. >> i just want to say that hasn't been my experience. as i have, when i was in roxbury in massachusetts, what is true though is there are people in communities in housing development who do go to work but they may not be visible, so visible to the young people there. so we again have to take the roof off the idea that we say, yeah, there are people to work two jobs. it's just that they are always coming and going to said that on

is that sometimes those people walked past us like we don't exist. so how do we make that merge? how do we help those hard-working people connect their work with the help of that community? it's something i think they would want to do, how do we make it happen for them though. [inaudible] >> i just want to make a comment. i'm an attorney and i work in the drug treatment center, and we have 120 beds. the large majority, it's all male facility, and the large majority of them are black men. and i just really want to applaud you. my heart is pounding because i

feel like you have brought something that, given, almost like has been addressed. we talk about humanity and all of that, but you are taking the time to look at black men, young boys, and looking at them as human beings as they are. to me just makes a difference in my work, because everyday i am talking to young black men ranging from the age of, say, 20 to 65 actually. and i'm doing the work, going to court, and i've been doing this, working in the criminal justice system since 1983. and so i have become numb. so speed of emotional numbness, you can become numb to the work

that you are doing because i went to this job two years ago, really hopeful and excited about making a difference in black man's life. and what can i do just to make a difference? because i come every day, talk to the boys, and just two weeks ago one young man told me, he said, i wish i wasn't in treatment because if i was still in jail then i could handle my different the way i want to. i do have to take what people are saying. and we had maybe an hour and have conversations around that. but as a black woman i really couldn't relate in the way i was trying to get him to see the violence wasn't the answer and that there were black with who it handle any of their business without a gun, or so forth. so i just appreciate that i can't wait to read your book. i of persia what you're doing and i hope you get to talk to more and more of the people

about this issue is because this emotional numbing that blackmun expressed if they start at a young age, by the time they get to be 30, 40 and 50, you can only imagine, you know, how their lives have turned out. but i feel like this is something that even all the time i've been working in a system and who have three brothers have been in and out of jail. so i would appreciate that you took this time to investigate and to write a book and to share with the world. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> let me just say, i think you are doing critical work. and i -- i wrote this book because i couldn't not write this book. because i heard, i felt like i had heard these profound stories, and somehow i had the privilege of being able to talk

about them. and again, my greatest debt of gratitude is to the young men who shared their stories and allowed me to hear from them. as young people enter the legal system, they often are profoundly affected by these same issues. so when you have been injured, when you have been victimized, you have to go into court and said opposite the person who hurt you. and if you think about it from a trauma perspective, you may have seen that face constantly in your mind since the day that this happened. you may have been haunted by the face of the person who did this to you. and yet, when young people resist that process, we have to understand and explain to them what's going on, and help them make their way. and four children, this is often meant having the abuser often in a different room so children can

testify in a safe place. on closed-circuit tv, that's coming about. but all this understanding, affects the young people producing. all of the people that you see in the criminal justice system. it offers us new ways to think about how to address the root cause, which may be the trauma and adversity that is experienced over their lives. so thank you. >> i want to thank you all very much for coming. dr. rich will be here to sign books and also speak with you if you would like to talk with him for the. once again i want to thank you very, very much are coming. [applause] >> dr. john rich chairs the health management department at drexel university school of public health. he is also the universe is

director of the center for nonviolence and social justice. dr. rich is a former medical director of the boston public health commission. for more information visit public health dr. axel.edu. >> well, there is a new worldwide community gathering to read a book and it's called "one book, one twitter" and the organizer is jeff howe. explain to us what "one book,

one twitter" is. >> well, in a sense it is a global book club but the inspiration was really not book clubs. which twitter has a few of and our wonderful. as the big reads that we've seen over the last 10 years, the first one being nancy pearl's what if everyone in seattle read the same book, where in 1998 all of seattle read the sweet hereafter. the one that actually inspired me as i was reading about "one book, one chicago" the first and not go -- to kill a mockingbird and connections that true and i was reading about that in the course, i'm a fellow at harvard is taking a course with robert putnam. and the idea was that these programs, want to get people to read and that's wonderful, what did is they build social capital.

they build connections between people to give people with nothing in common something in common. >> what book was chosen to be read? >> there was a long and involved nominating and then voting process. ultimately, the book chosen was american gods. >> why did you choose that was? >> i didn't. i mean, it was the crowd. why did the crowd choose it? that's a good question that there were a lot of classics at the. essentially i launched this on wired.com. i am a contributing editor. and the books that were nominated and then collected the most votes in that first phase we had a lot of science-fiction, with slaughterhouse five, brave new world, people, there's a lot of neil gaiman fans but even when we added the board picked the six popular ones and then

added four times to sort of introduced some diversity into a list of finalists. people still, you know, a broad group of people really decided that they wanted neil's book. and anything anyone read in high school or college, people didn't necessarily want to read. they want to read something of. >> jeff howe, what's the processor? have people already started reading american gods? >> good heavens, yes. it's been -- it's been -- with a lot of traffic. it's been at least as successful as i could have wished, probably more. in fact, you know, i keep saying this is one big experiment. "one book, one twitter," one big experiment. we have never, no to my nose every try to conduct a global book club before, and it is so international that there is no bit of inactivity overnight because that's when all the people everywhere f