By Elisabeth Pitts:
In the Upper Gym this past Wednesday morning, a group of high schoolers started gathering for their first seminar of the reinvented Diversity Day program. Emotions were varied: their murmured conversations spanned exasperation, curiosity, and indifference. In the center of the room stood a tall, kind-faced man, talking quietly with one of the freshmen who had come in a few minutes earlier. This was Wyatt Jackson, a Boston-native actor, singer, performer, and speaker who was here to lead the Hip Hop Workshop.
As the final few students set their backpacks down and looked out at him quizzically, unsure of what to do next, Mr. Jackson surged forward and boomed, “Good morning, Belmont High!” The session had begun, and for Mr. Jackson, this was business as usual. This unique workshop, combining hip hop, community building, and diversity awareness, is something that he has gotten down to a fine craft through decades of traveling the world and working with a diverse and ever-evolving group of young people. As we gathered in a large circle and began to learned a basic hip hop sequence, Mr. Jackson would pause to draw attention to the cultural significance of our actions: “This circle, it’s a metaphor for a greater community. When you break away into smaller groups in a few minutes to practice the dance, that’s a metaphor for the smaller, tight-knit communities that make up this bigger one.” The music blared again, and he shouted, raising his voice over the remaining giggles and whispered conversations, “It’s going to sound corny, but you all can change the world. Who here believes it? Raise your hand if you believe it!” Slowly, hands went up, and soon everybody had joined, even if they still looked out of their comfort zone.
When we formed smaller groups to practice the steps, Mr. Jackson moved throughout the gym, pausing to watch pairs and trios laughing and shuffling their way through missed counts. To one group, he smiled and said, “Connect to each other in smaller ways. Talk to each other. Connect to each other. Problem solve.” As he walked away, they huddled and started the dance again, this time on the right beat. This kind of compassionate encouragement and growth mindset is something that, Mr. Jackson later explained, was a way to think about diversity a little more creatively, to take a complicated and often painful topic and break it down to the simple problem solving of learning a dance, regardless of your background.
As the class continued, we all did the dance as a larger “community” one more time and then listened as Mr. Jackson talked a little more about diversity as a concept.
“The dancing is just a metaphor, that’s all it is. The dancing is just a tool, to get you to think about, if you don’t learn how to work with your neighbor, you won’t be around. Does this make sense? Let me see a show of hands if this makes sense.... Here is a term we’re using right now, the abbreviation is PVEST. Phenomenological Variant Ecological Systems Theory- People act differently in different contexts. Phenom- there are phenomenal things that happen in the club, there are phenomenal things that happen at home, there are phenomenal things that happen in the studio. Systems theory, it’s this- the system of home is connect to the system of the club, believe it or not, the system of the studio, school, it’s all connected in some way. So what we do in hip hop, we can cold switch and feel connected in a way that everyone can understand.”
Towards the end, we got into a giant circle and did the wave twice. He stopped the music, saying, “Move your body as if a wave is coming towards you. Slow it down.” We did it a second time and he cheered us on as it moved slower, thoroughly through every person. Some kids danced along to the music where they were standing, still holding the hands of the people around them. It no longer felt tense- definitely not some kind of eye-opening revelation, but a quick moment of ease in a room full of apprehensive kids, and as crucial as it was small. Our environment, our exposure to the world, and the tendencies of our generation have given us the tendency to be nihilistic, but for a few seconds it melted away. “You can change the world,” Jackson said, “but you have to think about the other person.”