Geoffrey Canada (1995) “Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America.” Beacon Press: Boston, 179pp. 

 OVERVIEW 

 This book tells the story of Geoffrey Canada's experiences growing up in the violence of inner-city New York in the 1950s. Back then, violence consisted mostly of fistfights, and such fighting seemed universal. Canada remembers how, when he first moved to Union Avenue in South Bronx, the older kids forced him, at the age of seven, to fight with several other seven year olds. It was a cruel spectator-sport, but it served a practical social purpose: in the absence of any adult men, the youths' society's pecking order was determined by whom a person could beat in a fight. From that early beginning, Canada's life was defined by violence: boxing was the primary pastime and social pursuit of all the boys he knew—as was all but required in a society with no authority, where might made right in a very real sense. Canada describes with practiced detail how he learned to take a punch, how to jab and weave, and most importantly, how to tell whether or not his opponent could fight, and when it was acceptable to run away or to negotiate.

Canada was one of the few kids in his neighborhood who was both tough and successful at school. It was a difficult line to walk. One of the older boys on his street also liked books and provided the young Canada with crucial intellectual support, and some well-placed fights at his elementary school managed to convince the other boys that he was not a willing victim even though he was in an advanced class. 

Though he rarely makes the comparison explicit, Canada describes his childhood in such great detail in order to show exactly how uniquely problematic our current youth violence situation is. He’s particular in telling us about the social mores of confrontation and respect that come in a fist-fighting culture, so the reader can easily imagine how the situation would be different when everyone had a gun. 

He needed only drop a hint about how his own emotions and social expectations changed when he himself bought a gun, legally, when he was in college. The violence of youth (street) culture becomes reasonable after one had been through several fights. When one’s social status, established by violence, prevents further fighting, the reader realizes the necessity of violence in a violent culture. 

Canada spends page after page telling us what he learned from losing fights, describing the emotional difficulty coming from getting beaten up, and the necessity of keeping your head up anyway. There’s the further social cohesion that came from being taught how to defend yourself. Implied is the suggestion that none of these lessons can be learned from gun violence. 

Canada is explicit both about the difficulty and detriment of being forced to grow up at such a young age, and also the benefits he accrued from it. As terrible as it was to have to learn to fight at the age of five, to be unable to focus on school because of the constant threat of fights, and to have to turn to older boys rather than to the police for protection and justice, Canada makes it clear that most of his friends survived their childhoods. They were trapped in poverty, but Canada shows us exactly the joys and meaning what they had, and what they didn’t have.

Each of his anecdotes makes a separate point on a whole range of subjects related to violence. He’s often at his most profound when he is not speaking directly about fists and guns. For example, he describes how he learned adults at school were not to be trusted, and how he applied this knowledge when he was working for a community violence-prevention program many years later. 

Most of his points about the nature of violence are made in this way: he describes a violent situation from his childhood, he enumerates what he learned from it, and he explains how he put it to use in preventing violence as an adult.

For example, when working at a school for troubled teenagers in Boston, he found that two of his students were constantly fighting in class and forcing the staff to pull them apart. Canada found that this was odd; when he was a kid, his friends would never fight in class—they would wait until class was over and arrange a formal boxing match out in front of the school. He discovered from this that these kids didn’t really want to fight each other; they just wanted the attention they got when they disturbed the class. He dealt with the situation not by telling them not to fight, but by insisting their fighting take place outside. When they realized they looked cowardly for not wanting a “real fight” outside, the boys soon gave up their disturbances. 

 Similarly, Canada's primary violence prevention program in New York City was a martial arts class: he overcame the problematic violence of the streets by teaching kids a better use for violence. Martial arts not only taught them all the self-discipline that Canada learned himself as a boy, it also gave them a skill that commanded respect on the streets, and a respect that they could earn in a constructive and positive way. More than that, it gave them an adult male role model in the person of Canada—someone who was tougher than the gangsters on the street and smarter than the authorities downtown, someone who understood where they were coming from because he had been there himself.

Canada shows he understands violence because of his experience with it. The latter part of the book is a series of policy recommendations, including descriptions of the programs that he has himself worked with. He argues against the "tough on crime" policies that were universal in the mid-1990s, claiming they show a poor understanding of the nature of youth violence, and advocating prevention programs rather than penalties. He argues in favor of a "peace officer corps" to supplement the authority of the police, a program that sounds very street workers in Boston and other cities. He insists that schools need to actively involve parents, and that police officers must come from the neighborhoods where they work. Such policies are now considered fundamental rather than revolutionary, even if they have not been universally implemented. Still, it is frightening to read such confident arguments, knowing that they were written before 1995, and knowing the writer has since put those arguments into practice and turned them into a national ideal for violence prevention. Canada's words are persuasive enough, but they are even more persuasive in light of his work with the Harlem Children's Zone. (www.hcz.org) 

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION 

1. To what extent do you agree with Geoffrey Canada’s analysis and programmatic approach? 
2. To what extent is urban street violence a reflection of national violence (wars, currently and in history), sensational news reporting, the violence of video games and the culture of rap? 
3. What specific impressions, agreement, criticisms or suggestions do you have in regard to this thinking and strategy? 
4. Do you think it necessary for anyone wanting to work with at-risk youth have some personal experience with violence themselves? Why or why not? In what ways can a youth worker overcome their ignorance of how violence works, and are there some things they simply cannot understand without having experienced such violence themselves? 
5. Do you think a martial arts class is a good program in preventing youth violence?
6. Do you find the cultural norms of violent youth as rational and explicit as Canada makes them out to be? 

 IMPLICATIONS 

1. Violence prevention requires an intimate personal experience with violence—either actual or vicariously from those you are close related to. 
2. Take the boxing-driven violence of cities in the mid-20th century and add crack and guns, and you have the fatal violence epidemic of the 1990s. 
3. There is no way to re-create the pre-gun society that Canada remembers. The only way to bring urban youth society out of its fixation with gun violence is to create a completely new approach to dealing with violence. 

  Peter Bass (with Dean Borgman) cCYS