LaRhonda was a teacher in West Oakland who was befriended by Khadija, Marilyn’s daughter, and then became very close to Marilyn. She knew the family well, including Marilyn's son, Khadafy, who was also well known to LaRhonda’s husband, Ernest, through a men’s mentoring group he belonged to, called SIMBA. Ernest encountered Khadafy when KD was a little boy -- 7, 8 years old -- but the impression the kid made on the adult has lasted a lifetime. Thirty years later, Ernest remembered a kid who owned whatever room he entered. “It was like seeing Barry Bonds or Willie Mays hitting a baseball. That’s how he was. His head always up, chest out, no fear, asked any questions he wanted to ask.” At the age of 7. Khadafy is dead now, murdered at age 18. Since that death in 2000, his mother Marilyn has dedicated her life to supporting families in the immediate aftermath of a homicide in Oakland, first through her foundation, and since and still, through what is known today as the Khadafy Washington Project, out of the nonprofit violence prevention agency, Youth Alive.
LaRhonda was instrumental in the creation of the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence. The importance of her assistance in that complex effort is not to be underestimated. Starting up a nonprofit is an intimidating process involving mountains of paperwork, and lots of bureaucracy. In the case of Marilyn, who is not great with paperwork, it might never have happened without the thorough competence and capabilities of someone like LaRhonda. LaRhonda was there in the days after the death of Khadafy and remained close to the family.
In our interview, LaRhonda shared many insights and stories which will enrich the book, but one in particular has really remained with me. As a teacher working in multiple Oakland schools, LaRhonda witnessed and remembered clearly the effects on kids of growing up in neighborhoods troubled by daily violence. Not that you need it when you talk to people in the real world like LaRhonda, but academic research has shown that nearly half of children living in neighborhoods beset by violence manifest symptoms of trauma, like sleeplessness, paranoia, trouble sleeping.
But to me, LaRhonda’s most devastating observation, one she says it took her a little time to understand, was that there was a light missing from the eyes of many of the Oakland youth she encountered, kids in fifth grade and older. She came to understand that too many had adopted a fatalism born of seeing so many people, including very young people very like themselves, wounded and killed around them. I’ve thought about this at the funerals of kids killed in Oakland, trying just for a moment to imagine what my youth would have been like had it included multiple funerals of classmates lost to violence, what I might have been like had I experienced this regular drumbeat of violence so close. Trying, failing, mostly, on my part.
LaRhonda was teaching sex education, imploring young girls to do everything possible to postpone becoming pregnant, but it was difficult, because so many of them had surrendered the idea of a future. They lived very much in the moment, but not in the good way. Because of course, living in the moment can be a wonderful, beautiful thing; it should mark all your days of youth. Not that it does. Kids worry, have worries. All kids worry about things, though you’d hope it is not death they worry about.
But among the kids LaRhonda was working with, many of them, their version of living in the moment was not based on a youthful freedom from stress and responsibility, but from a perception, an acceptance, based in the daily reality around them, that they had little chance of living a long life. In other words, some had decided that there were no futures to consider, to plan for, to prepare for, to strive for, to look forward to. That is what they believed. Their condition represented the opposite of what we like to tell our children, that you can be anything, do anything, go anywhere, that there are no limits and all is possible if you work hard, study, pay attention. So, for the girls she taught, some of them, having a child to raise when you are 15, 16, 17, represented a barrier to nothing, and instead might bring you love and the keenest joy in the waning years of your soon-to-be truncated life.
This is the time and place where Khadafy was growing up, in a warm and loving family, but surrounded nevertheless by the realities of Oakland, of West Oakland in particular, a beautiful, fascinating place beset by a violent reality.
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