From Surviving to Thriving

The Black Child Legacy Campaign (BCLC), for example, seeks to reduce the incidence of infant sleep-related death, child abuse, and third-party homicide in Black families. The inclusion of the word “legacy” within its name is strategic and purposeful. Although Black death is often foreshadowed, notions of “Black legacy” are not. Chet understands this. He notes that only six of his eight siblings are still living: “I can recall my mother’s response to losing her oldest son to an asthma attack. And the impact was profound on both the siblings but clearly on my mother who, for the rest of her life, would mourn the fact that she buried a child. It was very clear in her mind that it was supposed to be the other way around.” Chet goes on to talk about tensions between the “joy” and “pain” of life and his desire to “advance” the former: “It is much easier for me to think about advancing joy and having kids alive and flourish … having their families thrive.… That comes very easily born of my own experience and interpreting what this means in my professional life.” Indeed, scholars argue that Black children and their families want to “do more than survive” and that there must be ways to counter the “survival industrial complex” too many Black children experience (Love 2019).

Through the Sierra Health Foundation, community members meet to strengthen and create legacies for Black families. Chet and his team provide space and structure for engaging deeply in public health issues that affect Northern Californians. Chet sees BCLC as a potential model for the nation and posits, “I know we’re a modest-sized foundation … but I do think Sacramento is like many jurisdictions that with the will and investment can turn the tide on the national crisis that black maternal and child mortality represents, and so we have a unique opportunity and unique responsibility.” In addition to direct programs that specifically benefit Black children and their families, sleeping assessments of infants now conducted in hospitals because of BCLC advocacy efforts help all families. “Good policy for Black families is good policy for all families,” asserts Chet.

The Art and Science of Negotiation

Chet began his time with Sierra Health in 2008 and has come to be known as an advocate who can engage in the art of negotiation. At times, his ability to negotiate has challenged his relationships with young activists who want to see things move quickly. Chet says, “I’m a big believer in strategy.… We have to think about what we’re doing and why … and that the art of negotiation is not a weakness.” Chet has compelling ideas to share with young people who wish to engage in equity-oriented and justice-seeking work to bolster the well-being of Black communities:

• The enemies of one’s prosperity are not the people in their communities.
• Creating a new narrative is possible through one’s scholarship, music, and art.
• The change one hopes for and aspires to cannot be done without one’s personal involvement.
• Young people have the right to demand that adults in their community act in ways that promote all the above.

Chet speaks passionately of his desire for young people to know that committing violence against their peers or within their communities will not help them. Reminiscent of Jay-Z’s plea, “Please don’t die over the neighborhood that your momma rentin,” Chet encourages youth to instead strive toward ownership themselves. However, Chet has a more expansive but detailed vision than other elders, who simply want youth to pull up their pants and “do better” in situations without providing any obvious path for doing so.

If adults do not demonstrate accountability to children and youth, as well as a positive vision for their futures, youth have a right to demand it, according to Chet. There is historical context for this ideology. Independent Black Institutions established in the later 1960s and early 1970s throughout the United States asserted such norms when public schools were failing Black and Puerto Rican students. The EAST, for example, in Brooklyn, New York, was home to the Uhuru Sasa School, the Black News newspaper, and the Black Experience in Sound performance space. Black teachers, parents, and students who grew tired of the New York City United Federation of Teachers broke away to establish African-centered education through which Black educators encouraged youth to hold adults—including their own family members—to high standards when it came to education and miseducation. When listening to Chet talk about young people, one is reminded of the wisdom that comes with long, slow work and, perhaps, the enduring fable of the tortoise and the hare.

“Most Kids Don’t Know My Story”

As leader of the Sierra Health Foundation, Chet established a variety of programs: Build.Black., Kings and Queens Basketball, California Funders for Boys and Men of Color, My Brother’s Keeper Initiative, and the Positive Youth Justice Initiative. Chet put in the work and the time. If one were only to see Chet in his sunlit office, one might make certain assumptions about his upbringing. “Most kids don’t know my story,” shares Chet. “I am one of eight kids from the projects. Grew up in places that had very similar challenges in a different time. [Youth] need their own contemporaries to show them what that can look like and to guide and help shape their potential, their ideas, their own aspirations.”

Invoking Harold Melvin and the Blue Note’s song, “Wake Up Everybody,” Chet shares a line he would repurpose for twenty-first-century educators: “Teachers, teach the truth.” He explains that “the niceties in which we try to think about and speak about the history of challenge in this country need to be unpacked in ways that allow the reality of both the impacts and pushback on those practices and policies to be more clearly understood.”

One example Chet gave was the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four African American girls–fourteen-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and eleven-year-old Cynthia Wesley. Susan Collins, Addie Mae’s little sister, survived but was permanently blinded. Chet was recently working with a group of young men unaware of this historical act of racial terror and hatred. My interview with Chet took place in March 2020, just before people of all ages around the globe collectively witnessed George Floyd’s final eight minutes and forty-six seconds of life that a community member filmed on a smartphone. This time, the murder was also witnessed by countless young people who were sheltering in place, isolated from peers by the sudden COVID-19-related closures that exacerbated the shameful inequities of the public education system. The names George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Elijah McClain are likely deeply imprinted on the hearts and minds of those and other youth who had never learned the names of “the four little girls” who were earlier victims of the ongoing pattern of racism and murder in the United States.

Setting the Table

Chet notes that effective responses to historical injustices have been strategic and purposeful: “There was real strategy and thinking. There was a value and a commitment to a cause. There was a willingness to take on risk. And there was a commitment to this notion of agency and voice in the midst of all the chaos that people saw surrounding them.” This strategy is evident in the innovation and foresight of Black Lives Matter founders Alicia Garza, Patrise Khan-Cullors, and Opal Tometi, who brilliantly created a decentralized movement that now has chapters throughout the United States. BCLC has similarly created impact and established a network by distributing leadership and resources throughout Sacramento to ensure that communities that have suffered the most are engaged in personalized ways. In keeping with Chet’s firm belief that teachers are not found solely in classrooms and schools, BCLC’s Community Incubator Leads have a strong presence in many settings across under-resourced Sacramento neighborhoods.

Sacramento mayor Darryl Steinberg credited the progress made in decreasing the number of homicides involving Black youth in Sacramento to the work of Sierra Health Foundation in a 2019 Sacramento Bee article. In that same article, Chet talked about the importance of proactive and holistic engagement, “not just waiting for someone to shoot at somebody, that is not the case … it really is around the things we know that add additional stress and trauma in their lives, which sometimes cause people to respond in ways that are not healthy for themselves, their families, or their communities.”

Although Chet has little interest in garnering accolades for himself, he is keenly interested in the futures of emerging leaders: “At this point in my career, I am adamant about sharing.… Getting old is a challenging thing but what really makes it worthwhile is that you acquire a level of wisdom.… I want to set up folks [who] are going to be next.” Despite all Chet has achieved with Sierra Health programs and fundraising, he is still not satisfied. Expressing concern that progress on racism and racial disparities has not gone far enough during his thirty-five years of committed work, he shares, “I am not as far as I hoped to be at this point.… There is still more to be done for communities of color.… I think over the last number of years we’ve actually gone backward.”

Chet’s ability to look beyond all he has done and toward the work that has yet to be done is perhaps his greatest gift: his temerity and tenacity to desire more for Black people are palpable. You can see in Chet the boy in a family of eight, wrapped in the love of older siblings and a mother who protected and guided him along the way so he might be of service to others. Chet is a constant gardener; he never lets up and is consistent in his mission to problem solve on behalf of those who need it: “I don’t know everything. I don’t have the answers to everything, and I always come to the work with a willingness to listen and learn. I think that’s what makes you a really good advocate because it’s the integration of the best ideas that allows you to have the best chance for success.” This gardening is not a form of missionizing or colonizing but is made possible by an intentional leveraging of resources, experience, knowledge, and his own innate ability to facilitate dialogue. Using the metaphor of gumbo, a dish created in Louisiana that varies in terms of the ingredients but always begins with the foundational roux, he explains, “I’ve always said to folks, it’s like making good gumbo, you know.… It ain’t one thing … and you know gumbo can have several people cooking it from the same ingredients and it ain’t all gonna be the same. Some folks, maybe they should fry the chicken [laughter], but you leave those experiences with an appreciation of what other people can bring to the table. And it doesn’t have to minimize what you have to offer at all.”

Setting the table so that others may bring their offerings defines another truth about Chet’s leadership: “Leadership is like love. [There’s] no shortage of a need for it to be present.”

REFERENCES

• Jay-Z. 2017. “The Story of O.J.” 4:44. Roc Nation.
• Love, B. 2019. We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Boston: Beacon Press.
• Sullivan, M. 2020. “Teen Homicides Fall to Zero as Sacramento Sees Overall Decline in Murders in 2019.” Sacramento Bee, January 28. https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article239093098.html.