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3. Teach You a Lesson, Boy Endangered Black Male Teens Meet the Slave Past In July 2005, American parents learned of two unusual programs designed to teach teenagers valuable, yet difficult, lessons in gratitude and resourcefulness . Heifer International—an antipoverty and anti–world hunger organization operating in fifty countries—offers an immersion experience at its Heifer Ranch in Arkansas. The ranch’s Global Village, a re-creation of living conditions in developing nations, is the site of a learning experiment that ranges in duration from one night to two weeks. Students (middle school through college age) are randomly divided into “family” units, given “resources such as food, firewood, water, or shelter. . . . Since the resources aren’t equally divided, families must trade with each other to meet their basic needs, prepare their evening meals and settle in for the night” (“Heifer Ranch” n.p.). It is this uneven distribution of resources that makes the experiment vivid for many of its participants; some groups “receive more than others, while a group of refugees receives nothing. The exercise creates a microcosm of the real world where people have to trade firewood, cornmeal, water, or vegetables to survive, or depend on strangers.” Though the scarcity element might invite comparisons with a televised Survivor episode, a camp leader warns in advance, “It’s not about competition. It’s for you to experience what it means to live like this.” One church-group adviser brought sixteen teenagers from Boulder, Colorado, for this precise reason: “Here’s a bunch of affluent, Caucasian kids. . . . They talk the talk, but I wanted to see if they could walk the walk” (“Teens” B1). Thousands of students each year go through the real experiences of trading, bartering, or begging for sustenance in this simulated environment. For many, this prompts insights into global hunger that are more immediate than those they might have studied formally. Teach You a Lesson, Boy 65 In the main, the young people at a Global Village program are more or less “good” kids, interested in solving world problems. But what about another type of teen, one less concerned about global issues and more interested in himself? The ABC television network put the question this way: “What do you do with a teen who curses at you, breaks the law in your house and doesn’t listen to anything you say?” (“Brat Camp” n.p.). For nine families, the solution resulted in the July 2005 premiere of another program created to teach teens a lesson: the reality TV series Brat Camp. Produced by Arnold Shapiro of the award-winning documentary Scared Straight!, Brat Camp removed nine unsuspecting, antisocial (and apparently white) teenagers from their daily environment and took them to SageWalk, an Oregon wilderness-based rehabilitation program for troubled kids. The sight of teens (who appear onscreen framed by captions such as “Compulsive Liar,” “Steals from Mom,” and “Violent Temper”) learning survival skills as a form of therapy and behavioral modification is a huge audience draw. Brat Camp ranked among the top-ten televised shows for every week it aired, pulling in 8.5 to 10.5 million viewers per episode. The SageWalk wilderness program also garnered increased attention, as visits to its Web site rose from two hundred daily hits to more than nine thousand visits per day after the show’s premiere. Although Heifer International may have a more virtuous ambition (to create more globally minded teens) than ABC television (to generate viewers and advertising revenue), both programs tap into parental anxiety about the proper behavior, morality, and life path of their children. Though they predate the two programs mentioned above, two films in the early 1990s featuring antisocial black male teen protagonists share a remarkably similar motivation. Like the Global Village and Brat Camp, Brother Future (1991) and The Quest for Freedom (1992) are premised on the theory that physical labor, privation, and isolation from one’s regular setting or comfort zone can influence a self-absorbed teenager’s behavior. But rather than sending these disruptive teens to a third world camp or wilderness rehab program, these films offer the ultimate no-nonsense boot-camp location: the slave past. In this chapter, I consider the ways in which bodily epistemology works as a reformatory strategy designed to rehabilitate wayward black youth and address anxiety about black males in the hip-hop generation. I read the films as both an exercise and a solution. They are an exercise in compliance, one that deploys the slave past...

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