Three years ago, Emile Brock was a 16-year-old high school student in San Francisco who often helped his co-workers beat up those who were caught shoplifting from the grocery store where they worked.
“We fed one another’s violence, condoned and admired it. We made our violence acceptable by dehumanizing the victims…We earned our money and didn’t steal, so we didn’t feel bad roughing up some ‘lazy crackheads.’ We were preventing people from getting over on hardworking folks like us.”
The former George Washington High School student wrote those words in 1999, and they helped him to win second prize in the Anti-Defamation League’s “Sugihara ‘Do the Right Thing'” essay contest. In his piece, he explained how he made the transition from violent young man to one who teaches violence prevention. First prize went to Thomas Stewart of Galileo Academy.
Brock was recently chosen along with two other contest winners from Boston and New York — the other two regions where the contest was held — to go to Japan. The winners participated in the country’s centennial celebration honoring Chiune Sugihara, the World War II-era deputy Japanese consul to Lithuania who issued transit visas to thousands of Jews, allowing them to escape from the Nazis. The trip was sponsored by All Nipon Airways and Tigre Business Network.
While they were there, the students met with Japanese high school students. For Brock, now 19 and a freshman at San Francisco City College, it was his first time abroad.
Brock is a large, light-skinned African-American man with a bald head and a quick smile. When he began his job, he wrote, “We were instructed to stop anyone we saw stealing…My peers told me of their experiences, what to expect, and who to look out for: black people (especially black men) and homeless people.
“I am a black male, and they were telling me to watch out for people like me.”
Brock is part Cherokee on his father’s side — his father is African-American — and his mother is Jewish, but Brock was raised with no exposure to Judaism.
He spent large chunks of his childhood in foster homes, and his relationship with his mother is estranged. In his essay, he recalls his escalating cycle of violence:
“Every day I stepped into the store, I became a more violent person, with no respect for myself or for the lives of others,” he wrote. “Every day I was losing more of my essential self: a warm-hearted, caring, compassionate person.”
Brock credits a shoplifter with stopping that cycle. She was a white woman in her 30s. When he caught her taking a large jar of peanut butter, she told him she had left an abusive relationship, had three children to feed, and her paycheck from the law firm where she worked as a secretary did not cover her bills.
Rather than turn her in, Brock told her to meet him in the back of the store. When she did, he gave her about $300 worth of groceries.
“At the risk of being fired and facing charges in a court of law, I helped someone who needed a hand,” he wrote.
Brock said that he never considered whether the judges of the contest would be put off by his decision to steal. “I told my teacher I was going to win this,” he said.
Defending his actions, he wrote, “I believe the decisions I made…were morally correct, because I went with my humanity and what I knew was right. I didn’t steal for myself, I stole for others. Sugihara went against his government and did the right thing; I went against my job duties and did the right thing. Instead of submitting to the inhumanity of my peers, I regained my own.”
While Brock’s essay proved to be controversial with some of the 55 judges, “in the end, he won out,” said Jessica Ravitz, associate director of the ADL’s Central Pacific region. “We decided it wasn’t our place to decide what was and what was not the right thing to do. We wanted to see them grapple with the notion of doing the right thing, and how it affected the people around them.”
Brock spent a week in Japan, mostly in Osaka. He lived with a host family.
At first, he said he was in culture shock. But by the time the week was through, he said that while on the surface Japan seems like a very regimented society, “when you meet people on a personal level, you always find similarities.”
Brock works for an organization called Manalive, which teaches nonviolence and survival skills to former prisoners and others. He hopes to eventually transfer to U.C. Berkeley and become a history professor.
While Brock always had Jewish friends when he was growing up, he only started getting more in touch with his Jewish roots a few years ago, although he doesn’t practice any religion.
“Spirituality will always be with me where ever I am,” he said. “I am proud of who I am, but I don’t have one preference.”