Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity

Chapter Six: Getting in Trouble

chapter six getting in trouble Well you asked me what my de‹nition of a homie is a friend till the end which starts off when you kids little “gargechos” that are always into something doing something bad acting like they did nothing Well here’s a little story bout a homie named Frankie had another little homie that was down for hankie pankie sorta like Spankie and Alfalfa little rascals doing what they do and getting away without a hassle like going to the schoolyard forging late pass to their class cutting in lunchlines leaving other students last or strolling to the movies to see a Rated R when moms dropped them off thought ET would be the star still there was an issue that just could not be ignored taking tapes and forty-‹ves from the local record stores being good kids to them was nothing but baloney cos this is what you do when its you and your homies. —lighter shade of brown, “homies” Horace has that drained look in his eyes that is always there when he ‹rst emerges from the classroom at the end of the day. He moves as if there is just enough energy left to get him through the door and out of school. I see the identical look of stunned exhaustion on the faces of teachers, but I am not surprised to ‹nd the aftermath of a hard workday on adult faces. It is unexpected, unsettling to recognize that same slow, defeated posture on a twelve-year-old boy. Outside the classroom, Horace catches sight of the crowded hallway and his expression lightens. The corridor is choked with kids and adults moving eagerly toward the exits. Everyone, young and old, is in a rush to be outside, to get on with life. He breaks into a run, tossing his backpack playfully in the direction of another kid. I see his body shake loose as he bolts into the toilets in chase of another boy. Now there are shrieks, yells, roars coming from that room into which I, a female adult, cannot follow. I tutor Horace in an after-school program once a week. He is one of the boys identi‹ed as a “troublemaker” by the school. His name had appeared on every list of the school adults whom I had asked to identify boys “getting in trouble” for me to interview. This is the boy described by one of the teachers as “on the fast track to the penitentiary ,” whose name had become the norm among school adults against which other children could be ranked in terms of their tractability. Horace shakes off a day in which there have been few rewards, intense surveillance, and the virtual eradication of all that he brings to school. He has been marginalized to ranks and spaces that are full of disgrace. What lessons does Horace learn about self and school as he journeys from classroom to Punishing Room to Jailhouse? How does he fashion selfhood within this context? What is the connection between this self-fashioning and getting in trouble? In this chapter, we examine masculinity as a nexus of identi‹cation and self-fashioning during the school day, a ritualized source of articulating power, of making a name for oneself, of getting respect under conditions where the of‹cially sanctioned paths to success are recognized as blocked. Masculinity, however, exists in a dynamic and structuring relationship with other coordinates of social identity: race and class. Therefore, in the discussion that follows I will elaborate on how gender acts are always and already modulated through race at the constitutive embodied level as well as that of the imaginary and representational . 164 BAD BOYS Schoolwork School is a workplace. This seems obvious for the adults who work there, from custodians and cafeteria workers to teachers and administrators . But school is also a workplace for children. Certainly what children do in school is characterized as “work” by both adults and kids. I found many examples in the discipline records of the relationship between “work” and “trouble.” Children are described as “working hard” or as “refusing to work.”1 One teacher had scribbled on the referral form, “He has refused to do any work today,” as the reason a boy was sent to the Punishing Room. In another case, the charge was that “he won’t do the work, won’t read, won’t...