Why Young Men: The Dangerous Allure of Violent Movements and What We Can Do About It
288
Why Young Men: The Dangerous Allure of Violent Movements and What We Can Do About It
288eBook
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Overview
Across the world, we see an explosion of unpredictable violence committed by alienated young men.
Jamil Jivani recounts his experiences working as a youth activist throughout North America and the Middle East, drawing striking parallels between ISIS recruits, gangbangers, and Neo-Nazis in the West.
Having narrowly escaped a descent into crime and gang violence in his native Toronto, Jivani has devoted his life to helping other at-risk youths avoid this fate in cities across North America. After the Paris terrorist attacks of 2016, he traveled to Europe and the Middle East to assist Muslim community outreach groups focused on deterring ISIS recruitment.
Why Young Men is the story of Jivani’s education as an activist on the front lines of one of today’s most dangerous and intractable problems: the explosion of violence among angry young men throughout the world. Jivani relates his personal story and describes his entrance into the community outreach movement, his work with disenfranchised people of color in North America and at-risk youth in the Middle East and Africa, and his experiences with the white working class. The reader learns along with him as he profiles a diverse array of young men and interviews those who are trying to help them, drawing parallels between these groups, refuting the popular belief that they are radically different from each other, and offering concrete steps toward countering this global trend.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250199904 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/25/2019 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Role Models
In my family, it's tradition to grow up without male role models. My father, Ismat, didn't have a father figure for much of his childhood, and he left me in the same position. Both of us are part of the intergenerational cycle of fatherlessness that makes young men vulnerable to people posing as authorities on masculinity.
Ismat was born in 1963 at the Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya. I don't know why, but his biological parents didn't take him home after he was born, so he was cared for by the hospital until the age of one, when he was adopted by people who seem to have loved him dearly. From what I've been told, however, both of his adoptive parents had tragically passed away in separate incidents by the time he turned fourteen. He was then largely on his own, with minimal to no support from his adoptive relatives. In some of his most formative years, he was without parental figures altogether.
What Ismat had going for him was his hustle and intelligence. As a teenager, he used his inheritance from his adoptive parents to put himself through cooking school. He worked as an apprentice at the Hilton Hotel in Nairobi, then pushed for a transfer to the Hilton in London. He became a chef and embarked on a successful career working in hotels.
His life up to that point is an inspiring story of what hard work can do for you. I feel proud when I tell people about my father's difficult start in life and how high he climbed before he was even twenty. But that pride fades quickly when I begin talking about what his life became as he grew into adulthood. The lack of male role models in his life caught up to him after he met my mother.
Ismat met Pam when he was twenty-two years old. He had traveled to Toronto to attend the wedding of one of his adoptive cousins, who happened to be a co-worker of my mother's. After their chance meeting at the wedding, my parents quickly got married themselves, and my father relocated to Toronto from London. They had three children, with me the first. The pressures of being a husband and father weighed on Ismat early on, meaning their relationship never really got off to a good start. By the time their second child was born, Ismat was already slipping in his responsibilities. He was at home sleeping while Mom gave birth to my sister Jasmine.
Ismat was a far more successful chef than he was a husband or father. In Toronto, he worked in expensive restaurants and built a strong reputation for himself. He even appeared on television a few times to promote the restaurants where he cooked. Meanwhile, Ismat the husband and father was largely absent. Many days he wasn't around at all. I would go to sleep most nights not having seen or spoken to him. Mom would say it was because he was working late. Eventually I was old enough to see he was choosing not to be home because he had other places he wanted to be.
An important difference between Ismat the chef and Ismat the husband or father is that he had role models to help him learn how to cook. He went to school for it. He worked as an apprentice for years under the tutelage of chefs who showed him how to wash dishes, chop vegetables, work a fryer, use a stove, boil pasta, grill a steak and bake a cake. He just didn't have the same education in being a husband or father.
As his oldest child, I've struggled to have empathy for Ismat. Certainly, I was hurt by his absence — and even more hurt by his terrible behavior when he was around. He was always yelling and bullying, as if he wanted us to be glad when he was gone. I've continued to hold a grudge against him as an adult because I've seen the consequences of his choices for my mother and sisters. I've also learned to look back at how he was as a husband and father, however, and remind myself that he, too, was a fatherless young man.
My family has one home video of us, on an old VHS tape from 1989. The video was a gift from one of Ismat's friends in honor of the birth of Jasmine. In the film are scenes from the hospital where she was born and the days after she came home. When I watched it as a kid, I loved it because we seemed like the families I saw on television. There are images of my parents together, my father sitting on the couch, me playing with a toy guitar and baby Jasmine doing what babies do.
I haven't watched the video in many years, but in my last few viewings I started to see something I'd missed as a kid. I could see Ismat's struggles: the distant look in his eyes when he was around his wife and kids, his discomfort when showing affection, the emotionless expressions on his face. Our few family photos tell a similar story of a man who just didn't know what he was doing. In a picture of the two of us sitting together on the couch, he looks like he doesn't want to be there with every fiber of his being. A picture of him with his arm around my mom captures his forced and uncomfortable body language. He looks like he is posing for a picture he wishes wasn't being taken.
Ismat's ignorance of his role in our family also played out in the few interactions we had as father and son, such as on Father's Day, which was one of my least favorite days of the year. In third grade, I came home from school with a picture I'd drawn of Ismat as a superhero, kind of like Balrog, the boxer character from the video game Street Fighter. I spent hours at school that day working on it. I tried to make my father look cool, and I knew he really liked boxing. The top of the drawing read "Happy Father's Day." I was glad he was home because I didn't often get to see him. I handed him the drawing with high hopes for how he might react. When he looked at it, he seemed confused. "What does this mean?" he said dismissively. He then put it to the side, never even making eye contact with me. Not once.
There was something phony about the whole thing. My father didn't deserve a day in his honor — nor did he deserve a gift from any of his kids. That damned teacher had set me up, I thought. She'd made me look like an idiot by forcing me to give him some gift he could toss to the side like it was worthless. And there I was, trying to reach out to him as a son, only to feel rejected once again.
Mom could see the frustration in my eyes. To cheer me up, she picked up the drawing and told me it was good. She put it on the fridge as if it was something valuable. Whenever I got upset with my father, Mom would try to fix things by showing me enough positive attention to compensate for his negative behavior. Sometimes she was successful at turning those negative moments into positive ones; other times she wasn't.
If I could go back in time, I would love to ask her, "Is this what a man is supposed to be like? If yes, why? If not, then what should I grow up to be like?" Instead of having that discussion, though, we both just left things unsaid. We moved on as if nothing happened, but these moments stuck with both of us.
There was a period of time — when I was seven or eight years old and he was thirty — that I remember Ismat coming home from work very late at night. At least twice he woke me up to talk to me. I was really happy to see him. On the first of those nights, he told me about a new handshake he was doing at work — one reminiscent of a handshake Will Smith did on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I still remember it to this day, but I've never used it.
The situation was much more serious on the second night, when he came into my room, sat on the edge of my bed and cried. He told me he didn't know how much longer he could keep doing "this." I was scared because I didn't know what "this" meant. Was he talking about being my dad? Or working? Or coming home late? He told me that he was working so hard for his family, and that he was always tired and hurting. After a few minutes of silence, he stopped crying, said good night and left my room.
Having lacked role models to draw on as a kid, Ismat obviously didn't have those resources as a young man, either. He was struggling not just with being a father and husband but also with being a whole person. He was living a life of such emotional suppression that one of the few people he felt he could open up to was his son, who wouldn't judge or criticize him. Ismat didn't have a supportive community he could rely on to help him on his journey as a husband and father. He was struggling to figure everything out on his own.
My parents' marriage gradually fell apart. I recall both of them making comments to me about separation as early as the mid-1990s, just a few years after the birth of their third child, my sister Janine. But the state of their relationship was never quite clear to me. Ismat became increasingly absent and was away for longer periods of time, until eventually I didn't expect to see him at all. Every so often it seemed like Mom was trying to make the marriage work again — encouraging my father to be home more by getting us to do things as a family, like go out to eat — but when I was in my late teens she gave up and made it clear to me that their relationship was over.
I often thought about how Ismat's absence affected me. I listened to songs about growing up without a father to look up to. Two Jay-Z songs in particular, "Meet the Parents" and "Where Have You Been," were my favorites. I wondered if I, too, would be a disappointment to my children when I grew up. Perhaps it was fate, or something in my DNA.
Mom had a lot to think about in my father's absence as well. She wasn't prepared for the kind of dysfunction that existed in her own marriage and the family she had created with Ismat. She had been raised in a two-parent household — her Scottish father was a school janitor, and her Irish mother kept the house and kids in order. She has three siblings, including a twin sister, and the four of them went to church regularly as kids. They had, from what I can tell, a fairly stable and boring (in a good way) childhood.
Perhaps it was hard for Mom to talk to me about my father because doing so reminded her of how far the situation she found herself in was from the stability she'd grown up with. She also had to deal with the heartache my father brought into her life, which affected her greatly, in ways I'll never begin to know. What I do know is that I could see the pain in her eyes when my sisters and I asked where our father was. Mom gradually became less social and seemed to embrace loneliness. She spent so much time excusing my father's poor behavior when they were together that she probably thought that's how men are supposed to be. She gave up on the possibility of meeting someone who might be different. Both she and I struggled in silence, never talking about how my father's behavior affected us.
Just as Ismat was put on this path by the absence of his biological and adoptive fathers, I was on a similar path marked by similar challenges because of his absence. I didn't have him there to steer me away from the negative influences I encountered growing up. This is the cyclical nature of broken families. I've inherited his struggle in my own efforts to learn about masculinity and manhood without role models at home. I also carry a deep anxiety about what this means for my future ability to be a husband and father. I imagine my father didn't set out to be a bad parent. I bet he told himself he was going to be there for his kids in all the ways he wished his father had been for him. He probably also told himself he was going to be a good man and love his wife the way she deserved. That's also what I tell myself, and I'm concerned that those good intentions won't matter.
I can look back on my life and see where Ismat's intervention or positive example might have kept me from making bad choices. For instance, as a high school student I often got into fights, mostly because I held on to a conflict-oriented view of masculinity. To be a man was to fight, I thought. In grade eleven, I was suspended following an incident in our school cafeteria. Some older students who had been trying to assert themselves as the tough guys in our school had challenged me to a fight earlier that week. I saw one of them in the cafeteria right before lunch on a day I was ready to fight and asked if he still wanted to go at it. As we were swearing at each other a crowd gathered, which tipped off a vice principal that something bad was about to happen. The crowd scattered when the vice principal showed up, leaving no one in the cafeteria except for me and a few of the guys who wanted to fight me. The vice principal tried to single me out as the problem. I didn't want to talk to him, so he suspended me.
Mom was called to the school to meet with that same vice principal. Afterward, she tried her best to speak to me about what had happened, but she could only see the issue from the school's perspective. To her, I was wrong because I was getting into fights and disregarding an authority figure. I wasn't able to get her to see my side of the story: I needed to be tough and look tough. I couldn't refuse to fight. Nor could I just be obedient to the vice principal. To me, getting suspended wasn't as bad as going to school and having people think I was weak or a snitch.
Ismat probably would have understood what I was thinking and feeling — I'd heard stories about him getting into fights when he was young, too. He wasn't around, though, so Mom was stuck trying to figure it all out on her own. It would have helped to have a role model who could show me that being a man didn't mean being like the rappers I saw on television. Without that, moments like the one in the cafeteria pushed me further toward the Hollywood gangster subculture I was already obsessed with — and later toward other groups that offered an alternative vision for who and what men could be.
Recognizing the importance of fathers doesn't dismiss the importance of mothers in the lives of young men. It's about acknowledging that male role models are important, and that their absence has consequences. The National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI), a nonprofit organization working to end fatherlessness in the United States, claims that "there is a father factor in nearly all social ills facing America today." This bold statement is backed up by research showing that fatherless children are more likely to have behavioral problems, live in poverty, experience abuse or neglect, use drugs or alcohol, repeat grades in school, become teenage parents and go to prison. NFI research also shows that adolescent boys with absentee fathers are especially likely to engage in criminal and other delinquent behaviors.
A 2013 literature review by researchers from Princeton University, Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley, also found that fatherlessness significantly impacts children. These researchers examined forty-seven studies from both Western and non-Western countries and concluded, "We find strong evidence that father absence negatively affects children's social-emotional development, particularly by increasing externalizing behavior [such as aggression and attention seeking]. These effects may be more pronounced if father absence occurs during early childhood than during middle childhood, and they may be more pronounced for boys than for girls."
University of Virginia professor W. Bradford Wilcox, the co-editor of Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives, has outlined four distinct ways that involved fathers can contribute to children's lives: (1) playing with children in ways that show how to properly use your body for play and not violence, (2) encouraging children to take risks and be independent, (3) offering physical protection or the appearance of physical protection and (4) providing firm discipline. Wilcox has argued that in the absence of these contributions, sons "are more vulnerable to getting swept up in the Sturm und Drang of adolescence and young adulthood, and in the worst possible way."
The challenges posed by fatherlessness are growing across the West. Divorce rates and single-parent households have been on the rise for decades in Europe and North America. The United States is the clearest example of this change, with up to 50 percent of first marriages ending in divorce and subsequent marriages failing at an even higher rate. Of all American children born in 2014, 40 percent were born out of wedlock. And one-third of American children live without the involvement of their biological fathers. Statistics Canada reports that 12.8 percent of Canadian children live in fatherless households. In the United Kingdom, more than one-fifth of families with dependent children are without fathers in the home. Across the European Union 16 percent of children are growing up in single-parent households headed by the mother.
Jay-Z has talked about the vulnerability to outside influences that comes from growing up without a father: "We were kids without fathers, so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history." He goes on to describe this search as "a gift," because he and his peers "got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves." Searching for father figures is, to paraphrase one of Jay-Z's album subtitles, both a gift and a curse — a gift if the inspirations you choose motivate you to make positive contributions to the world, a curse if your inspirations motivate you to make negative contributions.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Why Young Men"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Jamil Jivani.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Foreword by J. D. Vance
Introduction: Paris Attacks
1. Role Models
2. New Arrivals
3. Crisis of Distrust
4. Capacity to Aspire
5. Competing for the Future: Part I
6. Competing for the Future: Part II
7. Social (Im)mobility
8. Reentry
9. Diversity: Part I
10. Diversity: Part II
11. To Brussels
12. Faithless Radicals
13. Fake News
14. Youth Workers Fight Back
15. Jobs
16. Isolating Extremists
17. Broken Democracy
18. My Brother's Keeper
Epilogue: What Went Unsaid
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index