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Rhodes Scholar JT Flowers talks about growing up in Albina, basketball, finding a focus at Yale
12/8/2017Last month, JaVaughn “JT” Flowers became one of 32 Americans awarded a 2018 Rhodes Scholarship, one of the most prestigious academic awards in the country. Flowers, 24, was born and raised in Portland’s Albina neighborhood and attended Lincoln High School as part of a language immersion program. Last week, Flowers – who will leave for a two-year stint at Oxford University in England next fall -- sat down for an interview in the lobby of the 911 Federal Building, where he works in U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer’s office.
Where and how did you learn that you had earned a Rhodes Scholarship?
The way it works is, they announce it on the spot, immediately after all of the finalists have finished their interviews. Essentially the judges just walked into a room – the interviews were held in Seattle – lined 16 of the finalists up, and the seven (judges) walked in, said a few words, then announced the names of the two winners in alphabetical order. That’s it.
Were you the first or second?
I was the first. I was shocked. I had fully let go of the thought that it was remotely feasible that I would’ve won given the way I thought the interview went, and given how incredible all the other finalists were. I spent a lot of time talking to them over the two-day interview process, and really getting to know the other people I was quote-unquote up against. I didn’t think there was any way.
Do you remember how you reacted?
I was so shocked, I just broke down crying. I don’t think I said anything. I was in a state of complete and utter disbelief. I broke down, and I was crying for about 10 minutes, to the point where they were trying to ask me questions about how I felt, and I couldn’t even speak, I couldn’t even articulate an intelligible phrase or words. It was incredibly overwhelming.
You’re one of 10 African American Rhodes Scholars this year, the largest number ever named. What does that mean to you?
It’s particularly encouraging given how the selection process works. The 32 scholars are selected across 16 districts across the United States. In each district, there are 16 finalists, and two are selected. They’re picked by completely independent committees that don’t communicate with one another, so the fact that this level of representation was able to bubble up through that process suggests that the scholarship is really starting to take note of just how important it is to afford these types of opportunities to people from historically-marginalized or under-represented backgrounds.
You’re an Albina kid. You’ve seen your neighborhood change quite a bit. Can you talk about the differences in what you see there now and what you remember as a kid?
I grew up during the peak of gentrification in North, Northeast Portland. When I was born in 1993, my neighborhood was around 69 percent black, average price of a home was between $45,000 to $50,000. In 2010, my neighborhood was around 65 percent white, average price of a home was $450,000 to $500,000. That’s a transition that occurred during my lifetime. And I was here in Portland for all of that.
It’s interesting. There are times when I’m away from home and I’m reflecting on my childhood and I feel almost as if I imagined some of the experiences that I went through. And then there are times when I’m walking around this hyper-gentrified neighborhood, and things feel oddly familiar in a really unsettling way. That’s not a clean answer to that question, but that’s kind of where I’m at.
You were a star basketball player at Lincoln, a regular in the state tournament starting as a freshman. How much of that was the focus of your life back then?
Coming from where I’m coming from, there weren’t many paths out, and basketball in particular was one of the ropes that people were extended in North, Northeast Portland, to drag themselves out of circumstances. It consumed every single aspect of my identity and personhood. It consumed all of my time. I woke up at 5:30 in the morning three or four times a week, would hop on the No. 6 bus, take it across the river, get up around 500 shots before I even started school in the morning. I would go in the gym at lunch, from 12 to 12:40, and have one of my friends rebound for me, get up shots then. I would stay after school and work out before we had practice. It was sun up to sun down.
So you were imaging yourself in the NBA?
Yeah, that was the dream. That was always the dream.
How did your focus turn from basketball to academic?
At the beginning of my junior year, I suffered an injury to my ankle that largely decreased my explosiveness and athleticism. And I came back too early, re-aggravated the injury, and just wasn’t the same player that I was beforehand.
I also made the decision to switch AAU teams the summer between my junior and senior year, which is by far the most crucial summer, recruiting wise. And my thinking was, I wanted to go to a bigger school. I wanted to go to a UCLA, or a USC, and I didn’t think that those coaches would be present at my games if I continued playing for my team out of Portland. So I switched to a team called Double Pump based in Los Angeles. It’s more competitive, and I went from being the best player on my team here in Portland to the fourth or fifth best player on my team. Which meant that although more high-major coaches were at my games, they saw me as more of a role player than a potential fixture of a program.
Those two things taken in combination – the injury and the decision to roll the dice and shoot for the stars – ended up completely undercutting my recruiting. A lot of schools pulled offers off the table.
You ended up at Yale [after a long process of retaking classes, then spending a year at a boarding school]. How did Yale come onto the radar?
There was an assistant coach at Yale named Matthew Kingsley, he called me. I didn’t even know where Yale was. I had heard the name, but didn’t even know what it meant. He said, ‘Where you go to school isn’t a decision about the next four years of your life. It’s a decision about the next 40.’ It’s a great recruiting pitch.
How quickly did you figure out how prestigious Yale is?
I Googled it as soon as I got off the phone with him. I was blown out of the water. I didn’t think there was any way I would be able to get into an institution like that.
You played basketball only one year at Yale and threw all your focus into academics. How did the shift happen?
Basketball had always been my escape, a way of defraying my stress and decompressing, a form of salvation among all the chaos I grew up in. When I got to college, it very much felt like basketball was a source of stress. I had let go of the idea that I was going to play in the NBA, I knew that ship had sailed. So there wasn’t an end game for me in the game of basketball, and that pushed me to start thinking about what my life would look like once I left the game, and realized that I was utterly unprepared for any option that didn’t involve sports.
I started reflecting critically about my childhood and some of the systemic reasons why I had grown up feeling like I only had one option out. And that led me to see the world in a completely different way. I realized that my situation and the circumstances that so many of my friends and family members had lived through their entire lives are the product of very conscious decisions by policy makers and government institutions. And those decisions shape people’s lives and trajectories. So if I wanted to play a role in providing people from circumstances like my own the access to opportunity, I was going to have to understand the structures by which that opportunity is conferred onto people.
On your Facebook page, you write about how there was a time in your life when you imagined getting out of Portland and never coming back. How did that change?
There was a very conscious shift, and I wasn’t expecting it at all. As soon as I got out of here, I was overjoyed, and I think everybody in my neighborhood and community was happy for me as well. When I got out, my mother, she was over the moon, because she felt like she had done her job, she had gotten her son out of this trap that he was born into.
I think a lot of people from communities like mine perceive this place as a city that stifles opportunity, and l largely think that is true. But when I was in college, I started traveling internationally on Yale’s dime, because I was on full scholarship, and I got to see that the issues that exist in Portland, they are specific to Portland, but they exist and manifest themselves on a general level all across the world.
I was really interested in international affairs and refugee rights and access to opportunity amongst refugee youth in Western Europe, and a few of my friends pushed me to start reflecting on where my direct stake in that conversation was. They said, hey, if you figure out that you don’t have a direct stake in that conversation, the next question you should ask yourself is, where might you be able to be directly involved and have a meaningful stake in seeing through some type of transformative change. And the only answer was home, was Portland.
-Mike Tokito
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