Why Holistic Evolution Inc?

My heart for this work stems from my own experience raising a black boy in Indiana as a single black female. I can remember when my passion ignited for education advocacy. My son was in the 3rd grade when I filed my first discrimination complaint with the Department of Education. My son went to a predominantly white elementary school and I was concerned with the amount of time he was spending outside of the classroom for minor offenses that could be handled with appropriate classroom management. I advocated that education was one of our inalienable rights and that him consistently being ejected from the classroom and missing crucial instruction time, was infringing upon his rights to be educated. According to Bernadette Sanchez, PHD DePaul University, Black boys like my son “face over-referral for school disciplinary action and special education”. As a single mother going through this at the time I knew I was frustrated but I couldn’t put into words where the frustration stemmed from. It wasn’t until I started doing the research that I was able to understand and properly advocate for my sons’ education.

It was this experience that sparked my interest in education policy reform, but not just education, I began to evaluate all of the systems and how they did or would affect the black son that I was raising. “In the criminal Justice system black children are 18 times more likely than white children to be sentenced as adults. Black boys are viewed as older, less innocent, and less human than white boys. Police officers dehumanizing views of black boys were significantly related to their use of force on black suspects. These findings speak directly to the view that black boys are not allowed to be children at all in our society.” Sanchez,B,(2016) While my son has had no interaction with the criminal justice system, our culture has lost so many SONS to this system. I have spent the last 15 years working and advocating for black boys and men within the criminal justice, education, as well as the Health systems. My passion for men of color stems from the love I have for my own son.

When my son was in elementary school I started to notice how many of my sons friends did not have a mother or an adult advocating for them, which  in many cases was a signal for me to get involved and advocate for them. It wasn’t until later that I figured out how I could be most impactful with the evolution of young men of color.

It is my thought that young men of color, being raised in a single parent home have little to no interaction with men. If they are anything like my son, the only men that were consistent in his life was his white male teachers, who were not always nice to him. They had an unsaid distain for him that kept him bumping heads with them. There was a time when my son was about 14, that he said “he hated men and he doesn’t understand why they have to talk to him”. This was very alarming to me, but it also taught me a lesson. My son had not been socialized to interact with men because he was not around any on a consistent enough bases. I reacted by finding black men in the community rather formal or informal that would take time to invest in my son and it worked! I believe my son is a well-adjusted young man that is no longer scared or hesitant to speak to men.

This is why I believe mentoring is a crucial element to the evolution of young men. In our society we have older men that have made all the mistakes within their education, the criminal justice system, even health related decisions and I believe that if we could just get those older men connected to our younger men our younger men will learn the same lessons accept sooner or at an earlier age, thereby causing a holistic evolution of black boys and men. This is where Holistic Evolution Inc. came from.