Staged Fight Breaks Out At Youth Summit

Less than one minute into his workshop, Tivon Edwards found himself in trouble.

“You want a fight?” His angry peer in jeans, Perry Frazier, dashed into the room. Before anyone else could react, Edwards wrestled his challenger to the ground. Soon the pair was embroiled in an intense brawl, an irony given that Edwards was at a workshop on curbing youth violence.

Onlookers gasped in shock. Several attendees reached for their smart phones, snapping photos and taking a video recording of the scene. The adult facilitators, Chaz ​“Sunny Chi” Carmon and Jason ​“J‑Sun” Dorsey, separated the fighting boys while trying to calm the young crowd.

Amid the confusion and chaos, Carmon asked the audience members why they took their phones out. Some said they wanted to attract attention on social media. One said she would use it to submit to a police record.

And a guy shrugged, ​“I don’t really care. They are not my problems.”

Edwards and Frazier finally agreed to unclench their fists and apologize, but the audience could not recover from the fight — until Carmon said, ​“Thank you, our youth actors.”

It turned out that real life-buddies Frazier and Edwards, as well as some of the attendees recording with their gadgets, had rehearsed the fight for days. The intention was to put people in situations, get natural responses, and remind the other attendees of how close everyone is to youth violence. Carmon and Dorsey were running one of five workshops held at this year’s Citywide Youth Summit at the Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School on Saturday. The Saturday event was only one part of a three-day summit that ran from Friday to Sunday, co-organized by New Haven Public Schools, the Citywide Youth Coalition, and the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

Carmon and Dorsey had structured their Saturday workshop around the role of bystanders. In the past, fights would end on the spot, Dorsey recalled, but nowadays social media tend to create a ripple effect and worsen the situation.

“It happens every day,” Carmon spoke to the room of 20 high-school students. ​“Instead of trying to help, people take their phones out and bring fuel to fire.”

That’s why the two decided to divide the attendees into three groups, each assigned a real and pertinent problem facing youth today: school bullying, cyber-bullying, and peer pressure. At the end of the workshop, each group presented five solutions, and all of them share a common theme: if you see something, say something.

A playwright, poet, and student at Gateway Community College, the 43-year-old Dorsey is proud of his youth actors. He started volunteering at Connecticut Against Violence himself for very personal reasons. He was kicked out of 7 high schools in 3 different states when he was young. Then, when he was 19, he witnessed a friend get shot in the head. The incident shaped him profoundly, and since then he has committed to producing poems and running workshops that teach people to value lives.

Addressing the workshop participants, Dorsey proudly said, ​“I’m now a college student with a 4.0 GPA.” He hopes to inspire in youth the same hope and courage that helped him survive his hardships. Previously, he volunteered at the BLACKOUT Arts Collective, a nonprofit aiming to empower people of color through arts and activism.

Carmon, 39 years old and a New Haven native, grew up in a neighborhood where violence and drugs were abundant, and might have lost his way if not for his mentors who gave him a job at the YMCA. The position gave Carmon a purpose, and from then on, his every working hour has been about youth service.

A recipient of the Build Strong Kids for America award, Carmon now serves as the president of Ice the Beef, a local anti-violence group. The nonprofit focuses on high-risk individuals and runs anger management classes. Carmon said his proudest moment is seeing participants learning to control their emotions and using debate, instead of force, to settle disputes.