Resisting gang life is hard for kids
The other night, Yolanda Tate tried to talk one of her former foster children from drifting back into a life that could lead to his early death.
The youth is one of more than 20 African-american boys that Tate has fostered over the years. He wanted to hold onto the possibilities that she had exposed him to, but was struggling against the pull of the gangs that define life for many in Memphis’ impoverished neighborhoods.
“He said he doesn’t want to go back into the old life, but he doesn’t have anywhere else to go,” said Tate, who added that many of the boys she fostered came from families who were affiliated with gangs.
“He’s 17 … right now, he’s living with 20 other people in a two-bedroom house. A lot of them go back to the gangs because they have nowhere else to go.”
And, when they go to the gangs, crime is the price they pay for room and board. And acceptance.
The federal government, however, believes it can help Memphis fight that. It was one of seven cities to receive $10 million to hire more officers to reduce violent crime.
D. Michael Dunavant, U.S. Attorney for Tennessee’s Western District, said part of that money will be focused on
preventing gang violence, which law enforcement officials say is a key driver of violent crime in the city.
But that’s not the whole story.
The rest of the story is the part that Tate sees; the young men who choose gangs over unstable, impoverished families. The young men who have little faith in the institutions that are supposed to nurture them and more faith in the streets that groom them to exist and not to evolve.
But Tate, also known as “Mama Tate,” tries to counteract that.
“It’s difficult to get them out of that way of thinking, because they hold true to what they think they’re supposed to be,” Tate said. “I started changing the [gang] colors of their clothes and what they wanted to wear … I told them that’s not what makes you who you are …”
“Most of all, I show them what it’s like to live in a real family, with rules and love …”
Of course, Tate only sees a fraction of what happens to youths who are in homes that are vulnerable to the pull of gangs.
But her experiences lend credence to the idea that maybe, just maybe, a good chunk of that federal money being used to bolster law enforcement could be used for more efforts to help youths like the one Tate recently talked to; youths struggling with choices that can help them survive in the short term but get them or others killed or incarcerated over the long term.
“We try to teach young people positive things that they can apply when they go home,” said Katie Hill, clinical supervisor for Youth Villages’ Lifeset program, which provides guidance to youths who are aging out of foster care.
“But neighborhood resources help, and some communities have a lot of resources, and some have few resources … the ones with few resources are more vulnerable to gangs …”
It also speaks volumes that gangs and poverty dominate communities here to the point that, in order for youths to escape it, they must be cocooned in homes like Tate’s to be deprogrammed to believe in a life where violence isn’t the currency.
But that’s where we are, unfortunately.
Yet a more permanent path out of this gang predicament lies with efforts to help the boys who Tate helps see themselves as more than the sum of how they survive, but how they thrive.
That’s the only way that, a decade from now, Memphis officials may be announcing more federal grants that help it bolster its assets.
Not one to help it contain a problem.