Lesson Planning Against Structural Violence: An Intro to The Bigger Picture Project
by Gabriel Cortez
Intro: About the Bigger Picture Project
It is currently estimated that 50% of Black and Latinx youth are expected to get Type 2 diabetes and that one-third of all youth will get it within their lifetimes, unless we do something about it. That urgency is at the core of The Bigger Picture Project, a partnership between Youth Speaks and the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, which inspires young people to “change the conversation about Type 2 diabetes by exposing the environmental and social conditions that lead to its spread.” Despite evidence that Type 2 diabetes — once known as “adult-onset diabetes” — increasingly impacts younger, more disenfranchised populations, the dominant cultural narrative continues to shame individuals for making unhealthy choices instead of examining the structural violence that prevents Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities from having the same access to healthy options available to wealthier, whiter communities. It invisibilizes the ways youth in particular are targeted by fast food and sugar sweetened beverage companies. It ignores food deserts, food swamps, redlining, gentrification, tax subsidies, and other socially and politically constructed forces at the root of Type 2 diabetes’s disproportionate impact. We know that in order to stop Type 2 diabetes and its deadly and debilitating attack on our communities, we first need to shift the story around it.
This is where youth poetry comes in. One of our strongest tools against harmful and deceptive narratives is learning to harness the truth of our lived experiences. At Youth Speaks, our mission is to help young people find, develop, publicly present, and apply their voice, identity, power, and imagination as creators of societal change. Our teaching philosophy builds on the work of revolutionary Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, who views education as a tool for liberation. We say “no wrong answers” and mean “speak from your heart.” We say “the standard is yourself” and mean “embrace the poetry in how you talk when you are most yourself.” We say “your life is the primary text” and mean before we examine the work of the Sarah Kays, Ariana Browns, Isabella Borgesons, Janae Johnsons and Jose Olivarezs of the world (and we do, eventually), the first most important text is your story. When we do begin to include the work of others, the intention is to expand the frame of reference, to grow your arsenal of effective storytelling devices, and to see your experiences in context of others in a way that upholds your life as equally valid, in conversation. With the Bigger Picture Project, we challenge students to see the effects of systemic violence on their world and use their voices to speak back to, educate around, and organize against the conditions at the root of Type 2 diabetes.
Ice Breaker
We often begin with a live poll of participants in the room, asking students to raise their hand in response to questions about their environment:
“Raise your hand if you pass one fast food restaurant on your way home from school.”
“Raise your hand if you live within three blocks of a liquor store. What about two? If you have a liquor store on the same block where you live.”
“Raise your hand if you have a grocery store within walking distance of your home. Or if you have to take a bus or drive instead. If there are water fountains at your school. Water fountains that actually work. If you have a park in your neighborhood with equipment. Do the basketball hoops have nets? Does the swing set have seats or is it just the rusted bone remains where a playground once stood?”
Finally we say “Raise your hand if you know someone with type 2 diabetes” and a majority of the hands almost always go up. “Now look around. What do you notice?”
Do a freewrite beginning with the words, “I live in a neighborhood where…” Try to go non-stop for an entire five minutes. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar and don’t cross anything out. Just try to fill up as much of the page as possible. There are no wrong answers. The standard is yourself.
Word Palette
Did you know that over the last 20 years, over 1,200 Americans have had all or part of their leg amputated due to war injury but how, in that same time period, over 150,000 Californians (not even considering the rest of the country) have had all or part of their legs amputated as a result of diabetes? Did you know that sugar sweetened beverage companies spend $1,000,000 every hour of every day on advertisements targeting them (A total of $12,000,000,000 every year. Yes, there are all those zeros in a billion), with special divisions specifically for targeting Black and quote-unquote “hispanic” communities?
On the board, there are three columns with a word at the top of each one: “Catchphrases,” “Tactics,” and “Truth.” Beneath the word “Catchphrases,” on the leftmost column, there is a list of famous taglines:
| Catchphrases | Tactics | Truth |
|---|---|---|
| “Have it your way” | ||
| “I’m lovin’ it” | ||
| “Live mas” | ||
| “Open happiness” | ||
| “Taste the rainbow” | ||
| “You’re not you when you’re hungry” | ||
| “It gives you wings” |
Go down the list and see if you can guess the companies behind each phrase. Students are invited to shout out their responses. Who really says “live mas” anyways?
For the second column, “Tactics,” we pull up commercials and print ads and invite students to talk about the strategies that unhealthy food companies use to grab our attention. Here’s one. Watch it, letting the responses unfurl on the board before you: beauty, sex, materialism, humor, slang, a pantheon of pop stars that capitalize on their image to sell soda to teens. Students might talk about how commercials make it seem like if you buy their products, they will magically make you smarter, happy, stylish, the life of the party.
Beneath the third column “Truth,” I ask “what are these companies really selling us?” Sometimes, what follows is a thoughtful silence. Sometimes, someone breaks the ice and offers that, even though the label says “Zero Sugar,” it still includes artificial sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup, which is just as bad for you. A range of words, from tooth decay, pink slime, and fried fat to high blood pressure, amputations, hospital bills, and funerals, begins to fill in the last empty spaces of the board. Each a word we can use, which we will come back to later.
Secondary Text
Think about the board we just filled in as we watch this Bigger Picture poetry video by Oakland artist, Obasi Davis.
One of my favorite parts of this poem is when Davis asks, “who loves orange soda?” Davis echoes the famous words from Kenan & Kel except, unlike the Nickelodeon show, Davis’s poem names the “insurance companies, the American Beverage Association, hospitals, and mortuaries” that capitalize on the negative health impacts of drinks like orange soda, pointing to the underlying violence that catchphrases and slogans are employed to conceal. And this is the point of today’s lesson: as poets, we have the power to reverse engineer the language that constructs our world, sharpen its edges, and point it back at the systems that target us. Davis’s poem shows us that every word we put on the board earlier can be flipped and used as a tool for justice.
Writing Prompt
For this writing prompt, you have two options:
Option 1: Write a poem about what advertisers really try to sell us by using their words against them.
Optional Ghost Line: “The commercial says _____, but they didn’t tell you about…”
Option 2: Write a commercial for something that makes your community healthy
Optional Ghost Line: “If I really had it my way, _____”
No matter which prompt you choose, your challenge is to use at least three words from each column in our word palette somewhere in your freewrite.
If you get stuck, come back to your ghost lines or the word palette as inspiration to tell your story. If you find yourself going off on a tangent, embrace it and see where it takes you! You may find yourself writing about Coca-Cola at the beginning and by the end, talking about your grandfather’s hands, and that is 100% okay. Give your freewrite permission to surprise you with where it goes and to make connections you might not have noticed before.
After a ten minute freewrite, we make space for students to share what they wrote aloud. This functions as both celebration of everything we covered as well as the final lesson; a chance for students to commemorate their work by running it back to their peers and practicing that important task of stepping out of isolation, of standing behind your words, of releasing your story to the world. We share our poems understanding that, in doing so, we are strengthening the muscle required to speak up at protests and school boards and city council meetings, the same muscle we will need when it’s time for us to intervene in moments of crisis, advocating for institutions to shift in service of healthier communities.
Revision
Like all things alive within the recurring inflection point that is the year 2020, The Bigger Picture Project has had to adapt. Beginning this school year, we expanded the scope of the project from Type 2 diabetes to also make room for COVID-19, police violence, climate change, and other crises urgent and relevant to our youth. As our lens shifts, what remains consistent is an examination of the structural violence that disproportionately impacts the health of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities and arming youth with the tools to confront it. As poet and sociologist Eve Ewing recently said at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, “When you place an equal opportunity harm on an unequal landscape, the ramifications are unequal. That’s why hurricanes work the way they work in our world. That’s why the 1995 Chicago heat wave worked the way it did. It’s true that nature doesn’t discriminate but man does.” When we make space for young folks to name the continuum between their lived experiences and the unequal landscapes on which they stand, we make possible another world. One that is aware and intolerant of continued injustice against our people. One where it is no longer acceptable for companies to prey on our most vulnerable and then blame them for getting sick. One where we recognize the racist and classist narratives undergirding policies — and even entire political and economic systems — as first words on a page that, just like our poems, can be revised into something that serves us.
If you enjoyed this piece, I encourage you to join the Youth Speaks community by following us on social media at @youthspeaks and joining our newsletter here. There, you can stay up to date with the latest Youth Speaks activities as well as receive resources for young poets and educators interested in bringing our work into your classrooms. You can also find information specifically related to The Bigger Picture Project, including more lesson plans and poetry videos, on our dedicated website located at www.thebiggerpictureproject.org. If you would like to find more work by the author, including some of my poetry, you can find me at www.gabrielmcortez.com as well as on social media at @gabrielmcortez.