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It’s been 58 years since Claude Brown published his thinly fictionalized autobiographical novel, Manchild in the Promised Land, the subject of an enormously powerful, poignant and provocative recent essay in The New Yorker. A tale of coming of age in 1940s and 1950s Harlem, Brown’s novel tells the story of the book’s protagonist, “who pulled himself up from the gang wars, the pot smoking, the stealing, the dope pushing, to become a law student at” Stanford and Rutgers.
Hailed as “the definite account of everyday life for the first generation” of southern Blacks “raised in the northern ghettoes,” the book was described as frank, brutal, fierce, obscene, tender, unvarnished and unforgettable by reviewers that included James Baldwin, Nat Hentoff and Norman Mailer. The novel went on to sell four million copies.
The book is a story of how Brown was able to overcome pessimism, defeatism and a kind of moral nihilism. He grew up in an environment in which he “didn’t know anyone who finished high school until he eventually graduated himself, by going to classes at night—his friends hadn’t seen proof that a diploma could do anything for you.”
Brown, as Nicholas Dawidoff describes in his New Yorker essay, “explains crime as the consequence of pessimistic boys growing up among unfulfilled adults who had no agency, the boys certain that an empty future awaited them, too. He understands their frequent decisions to ‘break bad’ as having everything to do with being denied the opportunity that they and their parents had travelled North to find. ‘For where does one run to,’ Brown writes, ‘when he’s already in the promised land?’”
Over half a century later, Manchild remains a book that “tells it like it was—and still is.” For the fact is that the social isolation and broken promises of upward mobility that Claude Brown encountered remain enduring facts of life for all too many who grow up in poverty.
For poverty in the contemporary United States isn’t just a matter of destitution or urban or rural squalor or widespread and inescapable violence, let alone a pathological culture. It’s an utterly precarious ecosystem filled with stress, depression and trauma, and a lack of opportunity that this society still refuses to address in a sustained and systemic way.
Ask Janet Metcalfe, the Columbia University cognitive neuroscientist, neurobiologist and neuropsychologist who is a leading authority on learning and metacognition, a secret of academic persistence and success, and she’ll tell you that the answer lies, to a large extent, in people’s conception of their future self. For it’s the ability to project oneself into the future that is a key to such attributes as resolve, willpower and patience and the one’s knack for coping with stress and setbacks.
That vision of a future self also contributes mightily to a sense of agency—to the belief that we can seize the initiative, set goals, overcome feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, and exercise a degree of control over our environment. It’s the crucial foundation for self-efficacy and personal empowerment.
In the words of a recent review of the relevant literature:
“What motivates people to make decisions in the present that benefit their self in the future [is] the degree of connection people perceive between their present and future self. People who see their core identity as changing substantially over time, into a substantially different future self, are less likely to forgo benefits in the present to ensure larger deferred benefits to be enjoyed by that future self they are not as connected to.”
Human beings appear to be nearly unique among living creatures in their ability to self-reflect and to project themselves backward in time, across space and into the future. That capacity offers us an unrivaled opportunity to ponder our identity, our formative experiences, our talents and our core values and aspirations and imagine and invent a future for ourselves.
We, in our role as teachers and mentors, have a unique opportunity to help our students envision their future selves. That requires us to step outside our comfort zone and encourage our students to reflect on their experiences and what they’ve learned about themselves, their backgrounds and their strengths as well as their weaknesses.
Help them identify their core values and aspirations. Give them opportunities for choice. Help them set achievable goals. Encourage risk-taking and self-reflection.
Also, expose them to various career paths and to examples of success and the convoluted paths that those like them took to achieve success—which often entailed setbacks and contingencies and, yes, luck—but also a mentor or two who took them under their wings.
Above all, encourage your students to think forward—to consider their goals and dreams and work with them to craft a realistic path forward.
Be patient. Be supportive. Share your experience and offer advice and examples about how to overcome challenges and achieve goals.
In my own teaching, I strive to introduce my students to literary and historical examples of characters and individuals who encountered challenges, obstacles, setbacks and failures, who demonstrated resilience, who bounced back from adversity and moved forward against all odds.
I’m convinced that by learning about those struggles and triumphs my students can develop the perseverance and determination that they will need as they struggle to navigate the challenges and reversals that inevitably lie ahead.
Literature and history can also provide matchless opportunities for self-reflection. I want my students to think about their own lives and formative experiences and develop empathy and compassion for the lives of others, including those who, as a result of circumstances or personality or context, weren’t able to fulfill their talents or potential. Then, too, I want to help them imagine new possibilities for their own lives.
I was struck by steps that Metcalfe has taken in her own life to help K-12 students and others to cultivate a vision of their future self. This has included working closely with principals and teachers in high-poverty schools in the Bronx to help them nurture their students’ understanding of themselves and help them work toward their goals even as they face a host of challenges along the way.
Each of us who has the great privilege of holding a tenured position in the academy owes a huge debt. We have a duty and responsibility that goes well beyond teaching, scholarship and professional and university service. Like Socrates, we “owe a cock to Asklepios.” That’s an obligation we mustn’t neglect.
