Audio File
Transcript
My name is Adam Keene.
My name is Bryan Eberhardt.
My name is Chris Dotson.
I interviewed…
I interviewed…
I interviewed Dr. Hopson.
Doctor Hopson…
Dr. Hopson on July 26, 2012.
I grew up as a… as my mother’s only child. My mother’s only child. It’s not like I had a… I was… I was an only child with-with a mother, father, grandmother, all in the same house. It was just me and my mother, and occasionally a dog or something, cat, whatever.
I’m a professor at Duquesne University. I teach social justice. I teach ethics. I teach qualitative research methods, some other kind of research methods as well. But I take my classes to Wilkinsburg and to Hazelwood to bring them to do things here for the community. I’ve got primarily white students. They hear about neighborhoods like Hazelwood and Wilkinsburg, but they don’t come to, like, get their groceries from here or buy anything from here. They’re usually told this is a dangerous place, that this is not a place they wanna come in. They shouldn’t come and stop here. I mean, some of them have even told me that their parents say, “You know, we shouldn’t be in Hazelwood.” I’m like, well, it’s for a grade. It’s a class. So if you don’t wanna be here, we gotta find either something else for you to do, or we gotta flunk you. I bring my students here to engage and work in Hazelwood and other places. And so that’s what’s bringing me to Hazelwood and I’m tying that stuff to social justice because I want my students to get off the bluff. If you notice, it’s on the hill, right? It’s on a bluff. And so it’s possible to be on that bluff and feel like you in a whole another world. So, as teachers, and leaders, principals, and school leaders, I need my students to be engaged in communities because they’re kids, that they might teach, people that they know, people that work at those schools, maybe at that school. And how they gonna say, well, I got kids from Hazelwood, but I don’t never… I’ve never been there. So I’m just trying to get my students to engage with communities that they hear about and sometimes don’t know but will find themselves working in urban spaces and building imaginations and talents of people like you, of you, of you, of you in real ways. And it, it sounds easy, but it ain’t easy. I promise you, it is not easy. It’s not easy for them to take a step or leave and come here or to spend time. And so, no, it’s not dangerous. They have to experience out for themselves. You can’t just tell somebody without them coming to experience it for themselves. That’s like me saying that Africa is a nice place to be. People like “Africa, man, I don’t know.” But unless you go, like a brother like me has been there. I tell you, there’s places to be, y’all. Once you go, you’ll be like “I don’t ever want to come back.” You know, so you gotta experience things and hopefully as young men, you’ll be able to experience things beyond Monongahela, beyond Murphy St., you know, beyond your immediate hoods. So you can have, you know, see what’s on the other side and take the benefits of things that you have to them.
I’ve traveled a bit, you know, so my work is taking me in the United States, but also, Africa. I’ve spent a lot of time in Africa. You know, I’ve taken my students. I’ve told you about my students and taking them to Wilkinsburg and taking… I’ve taken some of my students to southern Africa as well. I’d love to do the same thing with a group of young black men and boys from places like Hazelwood, well or wherever in the city. I mean, part of the thing I do is we go there to do things because I go and we do something there for them like, you know, make something, build something. You know, things that we could do. There was some clean up, we cleaned it up. There’s a really important saying in the Bible as it pertained to the birth place of Jesus Christ. We’re in the church, so I feel like I can talk about some of this stuff. He grew up in a place called. Nazareth. Nazareth was like… it was known for having hoods, like hoods and gangsters. So the issue became, and the question in the Bible somewhere in the New Testament, is what good can come out of Nazareth? If somebody said “what good can come out of Hazelwood?”, what would you say? And so, you gotta think what good. And if you think that something like recycling can come out of Hazelwood or the next leader of Alcoa or the next president of the United States or the next ballplayer who plays for the Heat. If you think like that, if you can imagine that, then that’s what good should be coming out of Hazelwood. You got to recognize that something good’s got to come out of not just the place I live, but who I am. And so, what I see a place like Center of Life doing is tapping the spirit and the talents of young people like you, you, you, you, me. But you gotta be willing to dare to believe that something is going to come out. You can’t just wait for your mama to tell you, your daddy to get on you, your brother or whatever. You gotta believe that for yourself.