Social Justice and Writing

Poverty is a form of violence; it traumatizes. The lack of opportunity, increased violence, food and housing insecurities, drugs, and other stresses lead to trauma responses like fight or flight. Children either withdraw or act out in school, and that doesn't go so well. The dropout rates and lack of engagement with education are high. The roots of injustice run deep in the soil of poverty. At the end of the logical progression of a life of closed doors is prison. The men in the writing workshop, overwhelmingly, come from the streets, from gangs, drug addiction, and the despair that goes along with a lack of opportunity. So, what role can writing play here at the end of the road? Simply put, writing, because it is based in language, and language forms the webs of narrative that become a worldview, is the primary tool for creating a new possibility, a wider definition of humanity, a vision for action that addresses the underlying structures of inequity, both socially and personally. Words are the tools for imagining a reality that deviates from the one that landed men in prison. Writing is also a means to understand the past, along with the political and social forces at work, the barriers of race, class, gender, and opportunity. A man or woman has to learn to read to see his or her place in the big system, to rise above the morass of self-absorption and into kind of detachment that allows the story of a life to emerge, to be revised. Of course, education and literacy by themselves cannot solve the ills that lead to America being the leader in rates of mass incarceration. That requires much more: political vision, courage, action, and caring. The work is overwhelming and massive, but one can start with a word, or two, that begins to shine light on a better path.