Not Oprah’s Book Club: G-Dog and the Homeboys

Video styles this week (I recorded this in the a.m. but just finally got the transcript written, after the jump):

Go check out Homeboy Industries!


Good morning feministing. Good morning world. I decided I’m going to do my Not Oprah Book club on video, video style, this week for no other reason that I figured out how to use this webcam, which feministing so graciously figured ou how to get so I thought I’d make use of it.
I wanted to talk about a book I’ve been reading as part of the research for a book I’m working on–a collection of New Yorker-style profiles on young people who are doing really interesting social change work. One of those people that I’m profiling is named Raul Diaz, and he’s from Los Angeles.
LA in the house. I didn’t really get LA, actually, until this last reporting trip. I hung out with Raul and some other folks who are really amazing and realized how awesome LA can actually be. I had a sour taste of LA my other trips, so anyway, LA, I am newly converted to your interesting-ness.
I wanted to talk about this book, G-Dog and the Homeboys by Celeste Fremon. It is about this Jesuit priest, Father Greg Boyle, who has done incredible work for the last 20 years in east LA, particularly in the late 90s, with really volitale, violent gang population. I remember being a teenager and hearing about it in the news and the mainstream media line was about these “super predators,” which actually happened to be 16-year-old guys, kids. Unfortunately it dehumanized them and created these harsh laws that did nothing to heal them, but punished them.
Read quote: “In the sixteen square mile area of Boyle Heights that is patrolled by the Hollenbeck Division of the LAPD, there are sixty different gangs, into which an estimated 8,000 members are divided.”
The turf wars, the violence, it’s all incredibly real. But the decision to create punitive measures to meet that problem was misguided.
Father Boyle realized this and used a different approach.
Read quote: “In the end, Father Greg Boyle did not make peace in the barrio. What he did instead was profoundly change the life of every gang member he came in contact with. The change didn’t come en masse; rather, it took place on an individual basis, kid by kid, soul by soul…others have come to understand the thing that every son must understand of a father–if the son is to achieve true adulthood–and what every good parent must face with humility: Greg’s job was never to save them. It was to love them. Yet it is precisely because of that love that gradually many of Father Greg’s homeboys have finally become strong enough to save themselves.”
A beautiful conclusion. I’m not ruining anything. This book is so much about the idea that if you give kids, especially in low-income areas, more opportunities, more love, more celebration, if you make them feel seen (as opposed to punishing them), but also really creating a community of love and a community of teenagers feeling like they’re really being seen–you see incredible results.
Father Boyle has now created Homeboy Industries: nothing stops a bullet like a job. Raul Diaz, the guy I’m profiling for my book, works there and he helps guys between the ages of 18-25 do prison re-entry. They’re incredible people.
I urge you to think about the ways in which your love can be transformative and a tool of social justice. How can you love better? How can you love less conditionally? How can you love people who need to be loved and aren’t?
And on that sappy note, this is Court signing off.

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