At 05:40 PM 7/2/2004, frank scott wrote:
>i have had moments of wanting to hide under the seat on the bus , when a
>group of black kids get on, and in a bus loaded with mostly whites and
>latinos, begin filling the air with mothafucka-n-word style - loud! -
>patter, partly calling attention to themselves
We used to have a Australian teen on another list, Jessie. One day I typed something that I wouldn't type to a teen normally. I apologized and she laughed at my u.s. prudishness (!!!) and pointed out that they use 'fuck' and other words regularly--to their parents, according to Jessie. But i suppose you want them to control themselves to satisfy u.s. standards about appropriate language.
N-word? Well, I can understand the qualms over this one. (I type it out because I guess, Charles, I can never understand how asterisks are less offensive. :)
Anyway, my experience of this can only be captured with this. My son's friends were explaining to me why they nicknamed him "criggah" ('crackah' + 'niggah'. (and saying it certain ways matters, at least 'round these here. I think that's _very_ important to remember: there are differences in locality, geography, urbarn/suburban/rural. People where I lived, if they got on Cosby's pony, would talk about 'black n-words' or hurl the insult "you a black n-word." This was mainly aimed at the folks who lived in the project up the street. We lived in a HUD subsidized complex intended to ensure that Section 8 housing was mixed in with reduced rent housing, as well as people paying full price--all based on income.)
The nickname means that he supposedly doesn't act white, as demonstrated by the kind of music he likes (rap music about all the money and chicks you have = bad; rap music about coming up in the 'hood = good), girls he dates, the body types of girls he likes, how he acts around blacks (not walking on eggshells about the *shhhhhh* race issue *shhhhh* afraid of stepping in it because you might actually say something and have to own up to it and receive some education :), he "sends back the stare down."
You may know what I mean. In a public space, white people look away in fear. Black kids know they are, so they stare down. It's a way of exercising what little bit of power they have. You stand there with your boombox blaring or just stand there, you gotta have the right 'tude: above it all, unemotional, hard. White guy walks by: stare down. You win when he invariably looks away, eyes averted to the ground, practically pissing himself. (not glorifying any of this, just explaining it)
I would think that this is what is going on with the bus behavior, no? It's hard to say. I was just reading through the debates at another list I lurk on. Their description of kids they deal with, who they think fit Cosby's claims, don't resonate with me. These kids don't sit around complaining about how whitey keeps them down, though they're aware of racism. The kids talk about race/racism plenty, and in their kid way they try to figure it out. These kids don't wear pants down to butt cheeks or dookie dreads. Dreads, just not dookie dreads.
I suppose they're talking about the kids in my apt complex called those folk who lived in an old, run-down project just down the street. Behind our complex was a de facto segregated suburban housing development. The "Courts" as they were called were filled with folk on welfare, disability, or on welfare-to-work programs.
And yet, it's hard to see how they are different from the kids who skateboard in the middle of the street and won't get out of the way. You turn down our street, we're a good distance away, time enough so they can move. They just stand or sit there, given the nature of skateboarding. :) That seems to be similar, to me: "I dare ya to get all Mommy on my ass, Lady." I dunno, we weren't bad kids, but we sure did stuff that reflected a kind of self-absorption. ------------------- Joe Wanzala pointed out that Cosby doesn't care about whites.
Right. In my attempt not to get ppl to riled up--I don't know why I bothered, now--by focusing on Cosby (wrong of me!), I failed.
I think it's pretty troubling to say that blacks are unique when it comes to these behaviors. If you're white and a lefty, I think it behooves you to recognize that 'it's the economy, stupid' and when you talk about it, don't single out blacks. Because it is NOT confined to them.
It's like complaining that there are people who want to get rich quick without working hard. Gee! Shocking. Isn't that what a capitalist wants, too? It reminds me of driving through the tenth poorest neighborhood in the country. My exMIL tutted about how, in her day, these were all beautiful houses and people kept their yards up. I reminded her that in our rural neck o' the woods people treated their yards and homes in exactly the same way, they just had junk strewn all over a half acre and a goat or two grazing on what weeds might be growing up around the hulks of rusted out tractors. They didn't even have white jerks who use the neighborhood as a dumping ground. When they don't want to pay to dispose of construction waste or furniture, they just dump it on the side of the road on the "west side." Not surprisingly, there's always trash around. It's OTHER people's trash, not their's.
To me, one of those bars in the bird cage of oppression is the denigration of certain behaviors among the "raced" or "gendered" or "disabled" etc, while the erasure or positive spin put on those same traits among those who don't have race, or gender, or disability, etc.
I don't know what Cosby actually _does_ to make things better, and I can hardly expect Belair folk to get a klew and engage in a Marxist analysis, as Dwayne did. But he's exactly right. Just suppose you got 'em all spiffed up with the right clothes, the right posture, the right language, what then?
The very structure of a capitalist society means that there are never going to be enough of the 'good jobs' to go around. It _has_ to be that way in order to function. Again, MacLeod's _Ain't No Makin' It_ is a damn good illustration of that. The black kids believed in the American Dream, made all the right moves, went to college, and still landed in pretty crappy jobs in a crappy, racist society where their schooling, proper English, appropriate dress, etc. bought them ... a shit sandwich. IIRC, some of them ended up getting into more shadier forms of employment and others were just bitter and angry.
It seems to me that there are some great scholarship on the decline of "old heads" -- men and women who mentor kids, who are 'other mothers,' etc. They blame some of that on flight from urban areas but also on the fact that there is a _material foundation_ missing. That material foundation once sustained the culture of the 'old head.' It's not JUST that blacks have irresponsibly left their own. It's that they had the material foundations ripped out from underneath them.
So, once again, we're back to "it's the economy, stupid."
Joanna:
I think you misunderstand what I mean by culture, mores, 60s. By culture, I'm talking, in part, by differences regarding religion and, yes, birth control. We did some research about how health education takes place outside formal institutions. One of the findings was that blacks in the neighborhood we studied tended to get their information through the grapevine. They didn't get it in magazines, but handed on down. I'm not talking about changes in sexual behavior.
Second, rising teen pregnancy rates, for the black scholars I've read, have to do with the lack of any way for these kids to become adults. Adulthood (getting a decent job and having a family) and the American Dream was something blacks strived for throughout the first half of the century. They didn't squander the gains wrought by CR struggles, they were handed a shit sandwich that made it impossible for them to achieve these things: the material foundations required for their achievement was ripped out from underneath them through urban flight, industrial flight, city governments that ripped down neighborhoods.
Patricia Hazard Gordon talks about how the legalization of gambling was one of the first problems. It ripped out from underneath black communities a way to hustle a second job in an underground economy which employed people to do all kinds of work, not just work related directly to gambling.
Second, my "it's the economy, stupid" thesis is that the same behaviors emerge among poor whites. When I married, I married a much older man and had three step kids at the age of 19. My youngest got a girl pregnant when she was 16. They ended up marrying. The welfare workers came by to make sure my SS was going to do the right thing. blah blah.
Talking to my DIL, it was clear that, for her, having a baby was what was going to make her life meaningful. And why not? What else was she going to do with it? Go to college? on what? Get a good job without the college degree?
Ran into this phenom working with a feminist group trying to address the huge problem of teen pregnancy in our county, the highest teen preg. rate outside of NYC at the time. It was a successful program b/c we helped young women by mentoring them to think of themselves as people who could pursue a career. But, really, career? that's a joke.
But, as you radicalize yourself, you start to ask the same questions Dwayne posed. Yeah, some of them will "make it." MY DIL is now a mgr at a women's clothing store. Three kids. My step son runs a pizza joint and mops floors at a movie theatre on the weekend. They have middling home and lots of things. But they couldn't have it without both of them working long hours for salary or without my SS working a second job. She's pretty much a drunk and Chris is bitter about her drunkenness. They bathe in consumer goods in order to avoid each other. So much for the American Dream.
"We're in a fucking stagmire."
--Little Carmine, 'The Sopranos'