The Brothers Network

By Gerry Christopher Johnson

David H. Sylvester

Having trekked three continents by bicycle, David H. Sylvester knows about crossing geographical boundaries. Having done it as an African American man, he knows about crossing cultural ones, too.

From the Tour de France to America’s urban centers, Black men are sorely underrepresented in the cycling world, a disparity that has only emboldened David to make history.

“You’re going to be Black for the rest of your life; you’re going to be a man for the rest of your life,” said David, who has logged over 20,000 miles. “Why let that stop you from doing anything?”

David hasn’t let his size stop him, either. At 6 feet, 3 inches and 250 pounds, the 46-year-old personal trainer looks more like a body builder than a biking enthusiast. But David’s journey throughout North America, Asia, and Africa, as well as the front page of ESPN’s website on Superbowl Sunday, has been more about challenging stereotypes than other riders. Pedaling against the odds, he has broken both bicycle seats and barriers for Black men.

Ironically, the very journey that has brought him so much joy was forged in personal and national tragedy. On September 11, 2001, Kevin Bowser, whom David considered a lifelong friend and mentor, died in the attack on the World Trade Center. The loss left Kevin’s two young children without a father and David looking for a way to memorialize his companion. “I felt like something significant had to be done to honor this Black man who was a good father, good son, brother, twin,” he said. “He was so much.”

While others may have opted for a tattoo, David decided upon a bike. In 2002, he embarked on a cross-country ride in memoriam of Kevin, collecting hugs, high-fives, and money for charity from Washington State to Philadelphia.

Despite the exhausting endeavor, David actually found himself restless after crossing the finish line. “Everyone was focused on the physical,” he said. “They asked me, ‘Didn’t your ass hurt?’ Listen, I received hugs, high fives, people inspired me, I inspired people. I wanted to do more. But the question was: what was more?”

Emboldened, he decided that more would be a ride across Africa in 2004. “Yeah it was twice the money, twice the months, but I was like, physically, I can handle it,” he said. “I think that when you have challenges in life, and you understand that physically, you can handle them, everything else becomes details after that. It’s up to you whether you want to go after those details or not.”

The route of Sylvester's trans-African bike ride

With that, he embarked on a cycling trip from Cairo to Capetown. He recounted arduous adventures, such as riding jacketless through Tanzania and Malawi during East Africa’s rainy season, that tested, and revealed, his resilience. “It was without a doubt the best decision of my life,” he said.

Since then, however, the road has had its share of setbacks. Conquering Africa led to a plan to tackle South America, for which he received funding from a sports energy bar company agreeing to sponsor him. In 2006, two days before he was to depart for Columbia, his plans were thwarted when a drunk driver’s car collided with his. Not only did doctors tell David that his knee, impaled by his truck’s tilt steering knob, would never propel a pedal again, but his sponsor also sued him failing to fulfill the terms of the grant.

“I was barely handling life,” he said of that dark period in his life. “It took all of the resilience I had found in Africa to get back to riding, get back to walking, get back to smiling again.”

Like so many times as a Black man, though, he beat the odds, and in less than a year, he had rehabbed his knee enough to join a ride across Asia. “That trip was much more grueling than Africa was,” he said, recalling 90 degree weather in Turkey, 122 degrees in Turkmenistan, and oppressive smog in China.

The climate proved no match for the interpersonal challenge he faced, though: After getting into a physical skirmish with a member of the tour, he was kicked off and left to fend for himself 1,000 kilometers and two weeks from Beijing with no help, sponsorship money or knowledge of Mandarin.

“I think that’s where people discover their integrity, when times are tough,” he said. “And times were very, very tough. Nobody would have blamed me if I came back home. But I gutted it out and did what I had to do in order to bike into Beijing.”

David did another tour across the United States in 2008, stopping every week to volunteer at various charities, ranging from a school for the blind children in Phoenix to Walter Reed Medical Center in D.C. In 2011, he made a similar journey from Minneapolis to New York City. The daredevil’s next mission is self-publishing a print copy of his book, “Traveling at the Speed of Life,” which took him over two and a half years to write (the electronic version is currently available online), followed by a volunteer-ride across Australia later this year.

Having experienced physical and emotional breaking points all over the world, David has some advice to Black men, whether or not they own a bike, about facing adversity: Keep going.

“The only crime in life is stopping,” said David, who, at 47, shows no signs of slowing down. “Why stop? If you keep going, you’ll make it easier for the next Black boy coming down the pike.”

Gerry C. Johnson is a contributing editor of The Brothers’ Network. His has written for the public sector, including the Pennsylvania Humanities Council and the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation, as well as several publications, including theGrio.com, Philadelphia Weekly, and Where magazine. The recipient of a 2011 Arts Journalism Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, his favorite subjects are arts & culture, race, gender, and sexuality. He currently resides in New York City.

The White Underclass

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: February 8, 2012

As a practical matter, we can’t solve educational problems, health care costs, government spending or economic competitiveness so long as a chunk of our population is locked in an underclass. Historically, “underclass” has often been considered to be a euphemism for race, but increasingly it includes elements of the white working class as well.

That’s the backdrop for the uproar over Charles Murray’s latest book, “Coming Apart.” Murray critically examines family breakdown among working-class whites and the decline in what he sees as traditional values of diligence.

Liberals have mostly denounced the book, and I, too, disagree with important parts of it. But he’s right to highlight social dimensions of the crisis among low-skilled white workers.

My touchstone is my beloved hometown of Yamhill, Ore., population about 925 on a good day. We Americans think of our rural American heartland as a lovely pastoral backdrop, but these days some marginally employed white families in places like Yamhill seem to be replicating the pathologies that have devastated many African-American families over the last generation or two.

One scourge has been drug abuse. In rural America, it’s not heroin but methamphetamine; it has shattered lives in Yamhill and left many with criminal records that make it harder to find good jobs. With parents in jail, kids are raised on the fly.

Then there’s the eclipse of traditional family patterns. Among white American women with only a high school education, 44 percent of births are out of wedlock, up from 6 percent in 1970, according to Murray.

Liberals sometimes feel that it is narrow-minded to favor traditional marriage. Over time, my reporting on poverty has led me to disagree: Solid marriages have a huge beneficial impact on the lives of the poor (more so than in the lives of the middle class, who have more cushion when things go wrong).

One study of low-income delinquent young men in Boston found that one of the factors that had the greatest impact in turning them away from crime was marrying women they cared about. As Steven Pinker notes in his recent book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”: “The idea that young men are civilized by women and marriage may seem as corny as Kansas in August, but it has become a commonplace of modern criminology.”

Jobs are also critical as a pathway out of poverty, and Murray is correct in noting that it is troubling that growing numbers of working-class men drop out of the labor force. The proportion of men of prime working age with only a high school education who say they are “out of the labor force” has quadrupled since 1968, to 12 percent.

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan released a famous report warning of a crisis in African-American family structures, and many liberals at the time accused him of something close to racism. In retrospect, Moynihan was right to sound the alarms.

Today, I fear we’re facing a crisis in which a chunk of working-class America risks being calcified into an underclass, marked by drugs, despair, family decline, high incarceration rates and a diminishing role of jobs and education as escalators of upward mobility. We need a national conversation about these dimensions of poverty, and maybe Murray can help trigger it. I fear that liberals are too quick to think of inequality as basically about taxes. Yes, our tax system is a disgrace, but poverty is so much deeper and more complex than that.

Where Murray is profoundly wrong, I think, is to blame liberal social policies for the pathologies he examines. Yes, I’ve seen disability programs encourage some people to drop out of the labor force. But there were far greater forces at work, such as the decline in good union jobs.

Eighty percent of the people in my high school cohort dropped out or didn’t pursue college because it used to be possible to earn a solid living at the steel mill, the glove factory or sawmill. That’s what their parents had done. But the glove factory closed, working-class jobs collapsed and unskilled laborers found themselves competing with immigrants.

There aren’t ideal solutions, but some evidence suggests that we need more social policy, not less. Early childhood education can support kids being raised by struggling single parents. Treating drug offenders is far cheaper than incarcerating them.

A new study finds that a jobs program for newly released prison inmates left them 22 percent less likely to be convicted of another crime. This initiative, by the Center for Employment Opportunities, more than paid for itself: each $1 brought up to $3.85 in benefits.

So let’s get real. A crisis is developing in the white working class, a byproduct of growing income inequality in America. The pathologies are achingly real. But the solution isn’t finger-wagging, or averting our eyes — but opportunity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/opinion/kristof-the-decline-of-white-workers.html?_r=1&hp