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Dec. 30, 2020 - Epoch Times
44:58
Why Elitism Is a Bigger Problem Than Racism—Bob Woodson on Tackling Poverty, Drugs, & Crime | American Thought Leaders
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That's what we do with poor people over the last 60 years.
We've said, oh, there's a problem, we'll just import a program into there.
We have been conditioned to believe that the real experts are the people with PhDs who have studied about poverty.
In fact, most of the leading experts on poverty, both left and right of center, never talk to poor people.
Never do.
And yet they are the established experts.
Bob Woodson has dedicated the past 40 years to helping people in impoverished communities overcome the social ills that surround them, from crime to drug addiction.
In an area that had 52 murders in just two years, Woodson once helped two warring gangs meet in his office and negotiate a truce.
As a result, there were no gang-related murders in the area for 12 years.
For his lifelong work, Woodson received the Presidential Citizens Medal, one of the highest honors a U.S. President can award a civilian.
In his latest book, Lessons from the Least of These, the Woodson Principles, Woodson summarizes the precepts he's learned over the years.
Beyond another program, charity, or donation, he explains just how to create long-lasting change.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Bob Woodson, so great to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Pleased to be here, as always.
Bob, you have a new book out.
I haven't managed to finish the book in its entirety, but what I have read at times actually brought tears to my eyes.
Incredible stories of empowerment and change from some of the most difficult neighborhoods and communities in the country.
Tell me about this book.
Well, for the past, most of my professional career, I have spent walking with and among people in low-income, high-crime, drug-infested neighborhoods, and same in rural communities, too.
And when I look at how society has attempted to render assistance to this group, and that is a top-down approach That we parachute into these low-income communities because we don't believe there's any strengths or assets that are indigenous to the community.
And we administer the moral equivalent of a transplant, no matter how well-intended transplants tend to be rejected by the body.
Well, I believe that the answers can be found within the zip code of those experiencing the problem.
So my life has taken me into these communities, and I have seen some of the most miraculous transformation and acts of redemption.
I have met people who are resilient, people who have overcome great odds.
And I was blessed enough to walk beside them, with them.
And I chronicled everything that I learned from them.
So this book really represents a compilation of experiences and interactions that I've had and lessons that I have learned from studying people who are what I call community antibodies.
So what I did is try to capture 10 principles from the many, many experiences that I've had.
I tried to distill it into 10 principles that sort of summarizes the font of wisdom that I've found in these communities.
It's incredible.
And indeed, one of these principles, or at least I guess a component of one of these principles, is this idea that I think you go into these communities and you're looking for the people that actually are being successful in these communities, trying to figure out what they're doing.
So it's not a one-size-fits-all solution, throw money at a problem.
It's go in and see what the people that are actually being successful are doing there.
Is that right?
It is.
Well, and also, what I believe is that the principles that operate in our market economy should operate in our social economy.
As you know, in our market economy, only 3% of the people are entrepreneurs, but they generate 70% of the jobs.
And entrepreneurs tend to be C students, not A students.
As I have said, A students come back to universities and C students endow.
But we don't look for credentialed people in our market economy.
We look for people who are effective.
But in our social economy, we don't apply the same principles, but I do.
I believe that even though social entrepreneurs represent A small percentage of people in these communities, but they are the ones where you'll find most of the innovations.
I think we need to cultivate the social entrepreneurs in our social economy the way we cherish, support, and cultivate entrepreneurs in our market economy.
So these people that I write about are really social entrepreneurs, even though they may be small in number.
If we properly harness what they are doing and invest in it the way you do in an entrepreneur, then you can bring about large-scale reform in those communities.
So that's my struggle, is to convince America that the way you Help these communities is to support those that know how to promote reform and recovery from within the communities.
That's my struggle, to convince policymakers and funders that the answers are within the communities suffering the problems.
And the real experts are those that are personal witnesses that transformation and redemption are possible.
You're making me think of the Benning Terrace complex and what was able to happen there.
Tell me about this.
It's quite an incredible story in the book.
About 22 years ago, I was working with a group of men.
Their name was Alliance of Concerned Men.
These are men who have been to prison, most of them, or they were drug addicts, but through God's grace they were redeemed and transformed.
And they were working in the community with young people trying to divert them away from predatory lifestyles.
And they came to me because they know I had some experience in gang intervention.
And I said to them, No one can really measure your impact, even though you're trusted by law enforcement officials and civic leaders and the kids.
So why don't you go to one neighborhood and see what you can do?
And then Darrell Hall, the 12-year-old, was killed in a public housing complex called Benning Terrace in southeast Washington.
There were 53 murders in a five-square block area in two years in this one complex.
I said that God has made the choice to go up and bring those warring gang leaders to my office downtown because there's sanctuary.
So they were able to go in, and then one day, Bring 18 of these young men.
They came in separate vans to my office downtown.
I had a meal waiting for them because kids will fight when they're drinking together, but never when they're eating together.
I think there's something biblical about that.
But they convinced them to put down their guns.
And so after a few sessions, They dissolved the gang and became the Concerned Brothers of Benning terrorists, and they went back into the same community that they terrorized and tore up, and they became a force for redeeming it.
They planted grass, working for the Housing Authority in a special program.
They planted grass.
The whole community came alive as hundreds of kids rushed into the streets.
For the first time, they could use the football field It was transformed from a killing field.
And so these young men were the catalyst to transform that whole area.
Pete Gruden, the head of the DEA office, Drug Enforcement Administration, came to me and said, Bob, it's been a year, and not only is violence and crime down in Benning Terrace, but it also is down in the contiguous communities When we conduct a raid, it just gets transmitted.
It just moves.
But you all are solving the problem.
For 12 years, we did not have a single gang-related murder in that community.
As we continued to invest, and I learned principles that I extracted, we were able to take the experiences of Benning Terrace In principle, it's an exporter to Dallas, Texas, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
We learned an awful lot.
We worked with the police in doing this, and PBS did a special on it.
It was just an amazing experience.
It's called the Violence Free Zone.
So what happened in this meeting that seems to have created the seeds?
I mean, they had a meal, they chatted, but these are people who are killing each other.
What happened in there?
Well, first of all, they said, first of all, nobody ever asked us to be peaceful.
So we asked them questions about when the beef started.
They said, well, somebody killed my cousin, and so we retaliated.
And I said, but why did it start?
And they couldn't tell me.
And so we asked them some simple questions.
Are you happy with your lifestyle?
Are you happy with having to call your girlfriend when you come to find out whether anyone is waiting to ambush you?
Are you happy with this lifestyle?
And all of them hung their heads and said, no.
Well, then if you're unhappy with it, and we gave you a peaceful way, a respectful way to stop it, would you take it?
And one of them got up and said, yes.
And then all of them stood and said, yes.
And so what we did then when they shook hands, we had a press conference But it's not enough to tell young people what not to do.
You've got to redirect them to tell them what they can do.
So what we did, since the Housing Authority was a part of this gathering, the director of the Housing Authority set up a special program that hired all 18 of these young men as maintenance crew.
The leader of the avenue became a foreman and got paid $8.50 an hour.
The leader of the circle was another foreman.
He got paid $8.50 an hour.
They switched, and the work crews were made up of a mixture of the gangs.
We gave a lot of fanfare to them coming back, and we had the press out there photographing them, bringing down, taking off the graffiti from the walls.
The housing authority said, They removed more graffiti in six weeks than their regular maintenance crew did in two years.
Then the Housing Authority extended them.
Two of them wanted to go in business, landscaping business, so we recruited Rupert Landscaping Company.
They came out on weekends and coached these young people, gave them their product at their price so that they could learn how to build some capital.
Another young man started a restaurant.
And so we just invested in these young people as models of transformed individuals.
And we did a lot of press.
The kids were complaining that the police now were no longer afraid to come into the communities and throwing them on the ground.
So I went with Chief Rodney Monroe, who was the area commander, He said, well, I will bring 25 of my officers to the church and let's have a sit down.
So I brought 18 of the young people together in a church on a Tuesday morning, sat down with 25 police officers.
It was tense at first.
But after a while, they got to know each other as human beings, as dads.
And so that changed the whole relationship between the police and the young people.
And so Benning Terrace, I remember the first Easter, they said when they got their first paychecks, they wanted to celebrate.
And so we had a big picnic out there, and they put banners up saying, the Concerned Brothers of Benning Terrace salutes the mothers of Benning Terrace.
And there were softball games and picnics.
And then We said to them, what we're doing for you isn't charity.
You've got to give back for what has been given to you.
What are you passionate about?
And they said they wanted to be coaches.
So we announced that we're going to set up football teams.
The first day, 58 young people showed up.
And then we had 120.
And so our fellows who were predatory gang members became coaches.
And they began to set up football teams.
We got it funded.
We had cheerleaders.
And on a Wednesday night, the area commander, Rodney Monroe, said to me, Bob, look at this.
Kids are playing football.
They're selling hot dogs.
And there's peace.
And there are no police out here.
This is truly a miraculous transformation of this neighborhood.
That's an incredible story.
And something I just noticed you mentioned, you made it clear to them, this isn't charity, you have to give back.
I'm reminded of a quote that I pulled from the book, and you wrote this, People of goodwill armed with noble intentions can do great harm to people in need by their acts of crippling generosity and condescending assistance.
So clearly, what you did here was not this model.
But there are a lot of people out there who do want to help or are invested in helping.
But somehow, you're very critical of some of these folks.
I really am.
I'm glad you mentioned that because as soon as it was in the press that there was peace in that community, next thing we know, some very middle class organizations I had a banquet, and they were recruiting people to come out to Bending Terrace, recruiting volunteers to come out and clean up the neighborhood, because that was a way for them to recruit their members.
And they came out, and I said, this is the worst thing that you can do, is to bring all these celebrities out here, and you're going to clean up.
I said, the kids are being paid to clean up the neighborhood.
And in the process of cleaning up their own neighborhood, they gain a sense of ownership of that neighborhood, and you're interfering with this process.
So I really had to push back against these well-intentioned but ill-advised actions on the part of these people.
And that became another struggle.
To push back against, for instance, and this is why you've got to listen to grassroots leaders.
I said to Curtis Watkins, the coach, are you ready for uniforms?
And he said, no, let the kids play without them first so I can see who's serious.
So I said, well, tell me when you're ready.
And I was at a business meeting in another part of Virginia when I got a call from Curtis.
He said, Bob, we're ready for uniforms.
So I passed a hat in this business.
I said, I need $15,000 before I leave this meeting.
I said, my kids need uniforms.
And they gave me the money.
But I said, and I want you to come to our press conference when these uniforms are given out.
But the uniforms will not be given from you.
The uniforms will be given to the kids by the coaches.
You will get a free t-shirt or a shirt.
And so it is important when you're dispensing support that you use every means possible to reinforce the relationship between the local leaders and the ones that they are serving.
Another example that makes this point.
Some years ago, there was a woman who had a program, a shelter for abused women.
And every year, a volunteer would collect toys, and they would give them to the kids at Christmas.
Everybody was happy except the mothers.
So the next year, the president of the program made it possible for the mothers to volunteer and earn toy vouchers.
The toys that were collected the second year at the Christmas party were placed in a storeroom, and then the mothers shopped for their own children.
At the Christmas party, it was the mothers that gave the toys to the kids, not the volunteers.
That's an empowerment model.
So that's really fascinating.
I'm thinking about the fact that you also describe in your book at the beginning the impact of all the great society policy efforts and so forth.
You're someone that actually grew up under Jim Crow.
You were a significant part of the civil rights movement, but then you exited because you kind of saw it going in the wrong way.
As I understand it, we've talked about this before, but part of the reason was, I think, because of this, I guess, difference in approach, right?
One of the sort of personal empowerment and the other one of, I guess, donation.
Do I have that right?
Yeah.
It's the difference between, like I said, treating people as if they're clients.
Impotent clients, that they're helpless and therefore any assistance that is provided has to come from outside.
You don't build on the strengths that are in there.
That's the problem.
It's like I told you before, a doctor, someone comes in with heart palpitations and the first thing the doctor says, you need a heart transplant.
Well, that is not how responsible medicine starts.
You always start helping We only introduce help in a way until we get to a certain level of intervention that the problem is solved.
But we don't come in with presumptions about the problem and say, To go off, we need a chance.
That's what we do with poor people over the last 60 years.
We've said, oh, there's a problem.
We'll just import a program into there.
70% of the $22 trillion we spent on the poor in the last 50 years went not to the poor, but those who served for poor.
They asked which problems are fundable, not which ones are solvable.
So we've created a commodity out of poor.
So if your job depends upon having dependent people to serve, what proprietary interest do you have in promoting their independence?
It doesn't matter how compassionate you are.
The game is rigged against the poor and favorable to you.
So, Bob, you've created a model—and I think I read that it's in 39 states, and I don't know how many communities—I'll get you to tell me in a moment—have actually been running these Woodson Center-style programs, once again, empowering the local community leaders.
Actually, I think you said most of them have X something in their biography.
I remember reading that.
But basically, people who were deep in those communities.
I have one question.
A lot of people that become successful in some of these very difficult or hard-done communities actually end up leaving.
Does that affect how these programs actually work and the retention of these leaders who affect this transformational change?
I know very few leaders who leave.
They could, very easily.
But we've trained about 2,500 grassroots leaders in about 39 states.
I remember when one of the group of funders came to visit one of my programs in San Antonio, he asked a question of one of the counselors in the drug program, He says, how long are you going to be serving here?
And he never understood the question.
He said, how long are you going to be serving?
He said, I'm a lifer.
I can't think of maybe one or two grassroots leaders who started down this path.
And it's not still doing it.
We say to young people, particularly young gang members, those who are in gang intervention, we make a pact with these kids.
We say, if you pledge your life to living and life, we will pledge the rest of our life to you.
I know young people.
I met them when they were 16.
They're 53 today.
That's how long our grassroots leaders stay with the people they serve.
They're not there for the life of a grant.
They can use money that enables them to reach more, but their long-term relationship is not dependent upon funding.
It strikes me, you know, I guess just bizarre that programs of the nature that the Woodson Center has been doing all these years are not more prevalent and more of these donor-type programs, client-type programs dominate.
And that's because elitism is more of a barrier than racism.
Like I said at the beginning, When it comes to a social economy, we have been conditioned to believe that the real experts are the people with PhDs who have studied about poverty.
In fact, most of the leading experts on poverty, both left and right of center, never talk to poor people.
Never do.
And yet they are the established experts.
And when you had them gathered in a room, as I have, and I asked them, with all of the billions of dollars spent on social science research into the cause and prevention of violence and poverty, I would like you to explain, give me three recommendations that you would make that would reduce poverty and would reduce violence.
You couldn't do it.
They can give you names of categories of failures, but they're not oriented towards solutions, and you can get away with it.
You can waste millions in the social economy if it's well managed by well-intentioned people, because producing outcomes that have the benefit of uplifting people It's never a requirement.
Forgive me for being ignorant here, but how could it not be?
Because when people talk about intervention, they talk about how many people they served.
And that gets accepted as effectiveness.
How many you serve, not how well are they served.
Or whether someone has been broken who has now been made whole.
I remember when I was testifying before—people talk about metrics—I was testifying before the Senate Committee on the merits of Christ-centered or faith-based drug recovery programs, and I was testifying with three psychiatrists.
And I said at the testimony, when they're talking about the validating interventions, and I told them that I took my 13-year-old daughter and my 16-year-old son for a week and volunteered at Outcry in Nevada, a Christ-centered drug recovery program in San Antonio.
And the third day into our visit, Neemfa Garcia, who was an ex-addict herself, And the co-sponsor of the program said to these two women, I want you to take Bob's daughter and my three granddaughters in the van, take them to dinner, and then take them to an amusement park, have them back by nine at night.
And as they were leaving, she said to my wife and me, relax, Bob.
They're ex-heroin addicts and they're ex-prostitutes.
The kids will be just fine.
And I said to these psychiatrists, how many of you Would trust your 13-year-old daughter to patients that you have announced was cured as a result of your intervention?
Of course, there was a silence, and there was laughter throughout the hearing room.
But I said to them, that's the level of confidence I have in a faith-based cure.
Because Pastor Freddy Garcia and his wife, who are ex-addicts, that their witness makes them very discerning.
They know who's faking, but you don't have the competence in your craft to risk your children.
And so the question that I have Shouldn't that assessment be counted or taken into consideration when we're defining effectiveness?
Why can't we build that in?
I think that's an excellent question.
I have the same question, Bob.
But I would have trusted any one of the 25 men and women sitting there With tattoos on their arms, I would have trusted anyone.
As long as Pastor Freddy and Nifa said, go with them, I would trust.
That's the level of confidence I have.
And that ought to count for something.
Scholars ought to study that intervention.
They ought to interview people who have been helped in that way to try to discover why and how this faith-based intervention works.
Why can't we take science and social science in applying it to studying what James C. Scott called medis knowledge?
There are two types of knowledge.
According to James C. Scott, a Yale-trained economist, he says there's two types of knowledge, meatist knowledge and epistemic knowledge.
Epistemic knowledge meaning that which you can teach in a classroom, that you can teach someone to maneuver a ship across an ocean, but when that ship gets to the port of Baltimore or New York or Philadelphia, that ship's captain turns the ship over to A harbormaster,
because the harbormaster has common sense knowledge about the jetties and what is going on in that port, and it takes the harbormaster to maneuver that ship into port.
Well, grassroots leaders are like harbormasters.
They have common sense knowledge, and they know how to Maneuver people into recovery from predatory behavior, from drug addiction, from all kinds of maladies.
But as a society, because of elitism, we assume that only people with letters behind their names have only legitimate Contributions to make, and people with letters in front of their names like ex-con, ex-this, ex-that, we discount what they say and what they do.
And so the Woodson Center has been tasked with trying to convince this society that they're looking in the wrong places for answers to poverty and despair.
That the real solutions could be found by investing in these grassroots leaders like the Alliance of Concerned Men and thousands of others that abide in these troubled neighborhoods.
Bob, I'm just thinking about the fact you have 10 different principles here.
One of them we talked about a bit already, this idea of agency.
Just talking about the pastor, you just mentioned you were talking about another one, which is this idea of witness.
But what I noticed was that grace is actually your 10th principle.
I guess my question is, is this connection with the divine, some kind of transcendent connections, an important part of this always?
It is a fundamental part of it—grace.
I call it, in some cases, radical grace.
In the book, in other essays, I talk about Robert Smalls.
Robert Smalls was born a slave in, I think, 1839 in Sumter, North Carolina.
And he was working on a southern supply ship during the war.
And one night, he stole the ship when it poured on Friday, And he arranged with his crew, and he arranged to pick up the family members of the slaves.
And he put on his master's hat and coat and gave hand signals and went past five southern garrisons and safely made it out and turned the ship over to the Union Navy.
And he was celebrated throughout the country.
And it was because of his brave act that Abraham Lincoln permitted blacks to fight in the Civil War.
After the war was over, he became a very successful businessman and, during Reconstruction, served several terms as a member of Congress.
He went back and purchased a plantation on which he was a slave.
And because the wife of the slave master and her siblings were destitute and she was delusional, He took them in and permitted her to stay and sleep in the master bedroom.
That to me is an act of radical grace.
And Dr.
King exhibited that same acts of radical grace when he had to flee his home, his wife and small child, When his home was firebombed, and he's standing next to 200 angry Black men who are armed with guns, ready to tear the place apart.
And Dr.
King counseled peace in the midst of that kind of challenge.
So Dr.
King was maintaining this act of radical grace, and thousands of our grassroots leaders Do the same thing every day.
That forgiveness is an integral part of their recovery, forgiving themselves and forgiving others.
Bob, tell me, why did you write this book?
Who is this book for?
I really wrote this book as a real guide to people Particularly those that are outside who really want to be sincere about wanting to make a difference in these communities, so they can be given the proper direction as to how to help, so they won't injure with the helping hand.
But I also wanted to write it to validate so that grassroots leaders will—I really want to celebrate grassroots people through this book, So that the general public will get a chance to know what radical grace is and how wonderful and how innovative, how resilient grassroots people are.
I really wanted to validate The important role that grassroots leaders make, that the qualities that make them effective also makes them invisible.
Well, I wanted to remove some of the invisibility of grassroots leaders, so I wanted people throughout the country that will go into low-income communities, not looking at it as a cesspool of pathology, But going in and looking for the Josephs of this world, going to looking for people who are in poverty, but not of poverty.
That was part of it.
I really wanted people to be inspired, but also wanted people to look beyond race.
The moral and spiritual freefall that Americans are in, It's consuming wealthy people in affluent neighborhoods like Silicon Valley, where there are two-parent households with both parents with master's degrees, a median income of over $180,000.
At the same time, their teenagers are committing suicide at six times the national average, that even in places like wealthy Plano, Texas, White teenagers from affluent families are chewing pure heroin.
They're called gummers.
In places like New Hampshire and Northern Virginia, where there are wealthy whites, they're dying from suicide and drug addiction.
Appalachian whites, low-income whites, OxyContin is destroying communities there.
In inner cities, people are dying of Black-on-Black crime.
Homicide is the biggest cause of death in the inner city, and suicide in affluent communities.
So, Americans are thirsting for content and meaning to their lives.
It is the absence of content and meaning that is, I think, causing this despair and the self-inflicted wounds that are taking place.
And if grassroots people can find moral content And meaning in their lives in these toxic high-crime neighborhoods, and they can find peace, then maybe they have something to export to people who are morally and spiritually starving to death in the gilded ghettos of America.
And so I'm hoping that if we can just get beyond, we can deracialize race, And desegregate poverty.
I'm hoping that one day we can reach a time when we put aside our racial differences and come together to see how grassroots, low-income Black and brown people have found moral content in their lives, how they can teach People in these gilded ghettos how to find moral content and meaning in their lives.
And so that's why I wrote the book, and I hope it would be an inspiration to people to come together to recognize that in America, those bourgeois values of faith, family, are still the most important foundation upon which we should build our lives and our nations.
Bob, before we finish up, I have to talk about this as well.
We've talked about this offline before, that a lot of the models in society or the people, the celebrities in society and so forth—you've touched on this just moments ago—but We seem to have this, I guess, bit of a moral hole or this kind of challenge.
And this is what a lot of young folks are learning.
At the same time, we also have, let's call it Critical race theory based diversity education, which is prominent in the federal government and across the education system, which seems to be going in a very different direction than what you're suggesting.
It's a growing secularization that we have transferred the moral authority from individuals and And civic institutions to government as the ultimate arbiter of what is right and wrong.
And that's the direction in which we are headed.
Critical race theory used to be called stereotyping, where you generalize about all things.
And it's really a dumbing down of standards of people.
But it's this growing secularization that we're moving away from faith And you look at what is happening.
I just saw a special on Whitney Houston, one of the most accomplished, beautiful women, died at age 48 with five or six different drugs in her system.
Prince, another talented Black entertainer, died before a young age.
Michael Jackson.
These people had everything that the secularists tell you we ought to have in order to achieve success in life.
And yet the River Phoenix, you can go down the whole list of so-called celebrities, secular celebrities, that have taken their lives because they lack content and meaning.
And so that cannot be the direction in which we should be guiding our children.
By contrast, the people in the Woodson Center network, they may not have The money or the celebrity status.
But when you go and visit with them, you just feel the level of love and respect that they have for one another.
And you don't see them destroying their lives with drugs.
You don't hear about suicides among low-income, grassroots leaders.
I think that in 40 years, I've known maybe You have to look at low-income people as a source of restoration and reform and replenishment.
Bob, any final thoughts before we finish up?
No, but I'm just delighted that I was able to Walk with grassroots leaders and I have been a spectator, a participant spectator,
but I just love and cherish my grassroots leaders and they have been such a source of wisdom and such a source of support that I'm just blessed that God gave me the opportunity to report.
to the country a little bit about what they do and the potential contribution they made to save this nation.
I really think that grassroots leaders are going to be the new patriots that are going to save this nation.
Bob Woodson, such a pleasure to have you on.
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