The Ghetto Solution: African-American Boys Learning How to Become African-American Men

Reared in a Los Angeles ghetto, Gilbert served a three-and-a-half-year prison term for robbery, after which he got a ``second chance'' at UC-Irvine. He graduated and, having been selected for President Carter's Presidential Management program, was on the way to a career when he became addicted to crack. Through a mix of religion and New Age self-help concepts, Gilbert reformed himself and then turned his attention to helping other ghetto kids. What they need, he argues, is to be reprogramed to value people more than money, to believe in their own power to change. He created a seminar program called Simba, the Swahili word for lion. While Gilbert's eclectic mixture of spirituality, self-help and Afrocentrism has apparently worked to help young men to negotiate the passage into adulthood and others to resolve conflicts, his account is too sketchy to be truly convincing. Tyehimba-Taylor is editor of Forward Magazine . Photos not seen by PW. (Feb.)