ABSTRACT
In 1999, I founded an after-school organization, Urban Word NYC, for teenagers who write and perform their own poetry, spoken word, and hip hop. The organization’s policy, painted onto the office walls, comes from one of its former students: “This is a safe space. So say what you want, but don’t let your words endanger anyone.” Under this banner, I have worked with hundreds of New York City youth in an after-school setting, and also in high schools and colleges as well, always with the goal of holding them and their words accountable to serious thinking. I come to theory because in my years teaching, directing an after-school program, working inside high schools and colleges, and listening to urban youth inside and beyond schools, in poetry workshops, on stages, among their peers, in the hallways between classes, in freestyle battles, on the subways, often out of the earshot of adults they think might be listening, I have not yet found a teenager who isn’t in some way engaged in analyzing and theorizing their lived experiences. As one student participant stated in a focus group, “for teens today, one experience is like a lifetime.” Further discussion revealed that what he meant by this is that a teenager’s lack of years does not prevent them from contending with (and making sense of) the realities of an unstable world. It is their desire to explain and question these realities that makes youth participants such active and important theorizers during the research process. In this personal reflection I attempt to relate my process for choosing those theories that best spoke to my research with and about youth of color in New York City’s urban high schools.
