In the past week, two Georgia teens’ stories have gone viral.
One of the boys, 14-year-old Royce Mann, attends the $22,000 a year Paedeia School in a tony section of Atlanta. His slam poem “White Boy Privilege,” in which he apologizes to immigrants, black people, women, and other marginalized groups, earned kudos from celebrities and praise from millennial websites, which called him “woke,” or aware.
The other teen is black, homeless Fred Barley, 19, also a Georgia resident, but from the less-glamorous Conyers. Barley pedaled six hours in the blazing sun on a kid’s bike, lugging water, a box of cereal, and a tent, to camp out at Gordon State College in Barnesville in order to register for classes. Barley captured the hearts of police officers, folks in his community, and regular people across America who contributed more than $180,000 to his GoFundMe campaign.
Mann offers a fatalistic, elitist, and divisive view of America. His rhetoric does nothing to actually help the people he professes to care about. Barley, on the other hand, exemplifies our country’s pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps optimism, which is why he inspired people of all races to rally behind him.
Mann says that he and other white boys are at the top of the ladder, while everyone else is stuck on the “first rung.” As an immigrant, I adamantly disagree with him. My family and I emigrated from the Soviet Union when I was three. My mom, a doctor, volunteered at an AIDS clinic while studying for her licensing exams. My dad, an engineer, toiled as a janitor at NYU and walked 13 miles from our home in Queens to lower Manhattan and back because he couldn’t afford the subway fare. My friends’ parents, who were from China, Haiti, Pakistan, and other countries, made similar sacrifices for them. As a result, we all went to college, became professionals, and achieved the American Dream.
Fred Barley isn’t fortunate enough to have parents, so he’s looking out for himself and doing everything he can to eventually attend medical school. It’s this attitude that ingratiated him to military couple Casey and Cole Blaney, who have become his surrogate parents. Barley will undoubtedly reach the top of the ladder where Mann is perched and probably even surpass him. And when he does, it’s doubtful he’ll wish he’d been born there, since it’s much more gratifying to have achieved success on your own.
While Mann and other “social justice warriors” were bemoaning the lack of privilege in our country, and celebrities like Taraji Henson, Malik Yoba, and Kathy Bates were tweeting Mann’s video, police officers were paying for Barley to stay at a motel, a pizzeria owner was giving him a job, Casey Blaney was setting up a GoFundMe campaign for him, and regular Americans were contributing to it.
Mann makes insulting assumptions about similarly ordinary folks, which is representative of the disdain elites have for anyone who may not reach for The New York Times first thing in the morning. He assumes that waiters think people of color steal silverware, teachers kill students’ dreams, and police officers are on his side, but not on the side of black kids. In fact, he’s prolonging his 15 minutes of fame with a new poem about police brutality. While police brutality does exist — and must be stopped — so too does the kindness that officers showed Fred Barley. As Barley himself said of Officer Dicky Carreker, “The stuff that’s happening with police officers. I am black and he didn’t care what color I was. He just helped me, and that meant a lot.”
There’s a huge disconnect between what “social justice warriors” think of privilege and what actual Americans who face adversity think of it. I recently had lunch with a former student of mine who, despite being a Dominican immigrant from a low-income home, graduated from Skidmore and is heading to law school. When I asked her if she suffered from a lack of opportunity, she replied, “There are plenty of opportunities out there. You just have to take them.” Fred Barley would agree with her.
The fact is, America always was and continues to be the land of opportunity. We should create even more opportunities for people.
The fact is, Americans will bend over backwards to help anyone who has shown the will and work ethic that Barley has demonstrated.
The fact is, many “social justice warriors” do nothing but show how “woke” they are by hash-tagging on Twitter and opining about white privilege while sipping their lattes. They wouldn’t last a minute at the inner-city high school where I used to teach, or the Senegalese village where my friend did Peace Corps, or in any other environment where real social justice warriors do their work.
Maybe I’m being too harsh on Mann. He’s only 14 and was undoubtedly influenced by teachers, parents, and peers. But I hope that he takes his good idea of turning the ladder into a bridge to actually make a difference one day.
In the meantime, remember Fred Barley and the Americans who pitched in to help him — they epitomize everything that’s great about our country.
Florina Rodov contributes to The Atlantic, CNN Opinion, Education Week and others, and runs a nonprofit that supports low-income gifted kids through after-school programs.
