Police in the Hallways: Discipline in an Urban High School

6 The Underlife: Oppositional Behavior at Urban Public High School

. 117 . . CHAPTER 6 . The Underlife Oppositional Behavior at Urban Public High School Kids gotta act tough and stupid when they get here, ’cause, you know, they hear about the reputation [of UPHS]. So it’s like they want to make sure they’re not picked on,” Kericia, a small black girl with bright eyes and hair neatly pulled back in a tiny ponytail, told me one day as we sat in the lunchroom. “Is that what it was like for you when you first came here?” Kericia, now a sophomore doing well in her classes, giggled and looked sheepishly at me. “I see a lot of stuff, but I stay out of trouble.” Indeed, there was a lot of “stuff” to see. The most common forms of oppositional behavior I found at UPHS were classroom clowning and antagonism, cutting classes, hallway disruption, gambling, hat wearing, and fighting. Oppositional behaviors were pervasive, despite heavy policing. They were the preoccupation of disciplinarians and in many ways helped to justify the punitive disciplinary approaches. As an ethnographer, I was interested in the interactions of daily life and an insider’s perspective, as I believed that an understanding of oppositional behavior from students’ viewpoints, on a very micro level, would ultimately allow for a deep analysis of the ways that students’ social practices interacted with a particular set of social and institutional forces. I spent considerable time at UPHS observing students’ oppositional behavior and discussing it with them in order to gain insight into how they made sense of that behavior. I learned that students’ perceptions and experiences were indeed influenced by the particular institutional and social context in which their oppositional behavior took place. Students entered a school with a “bad” reputation, one associated with high levels of violence and disorder, and they contended with deep feelings of academic alienation and lack of access to the curriculum. They found many of their 118 THE UNDERLIFE classes boring and irrelevant. They also had to contend with daily policing and the institutional culture of control. Finally, prospects for graduation, higher education, and viable future employment were not great. UPHS students were often painfully aware that opportunities within the informal and illegal economy were ubiquitous within their communities, and other options were scarce. Within this difficult context, students sought certain social and psychological benefits through oppositional behavior. Specifically , they sought to regain a sense of autonomy over the self, create valued identities, position themselves well within social hierarchies, manage and contain violence, have fun, and even make a little cash. Students did not appear to enter into oppositional behavior fully conscious of the benefits they sought or with any explicit intentions, but upon reflection they could explain their rationales and the positive feelings associated with their misbehavior . This is not to say that the institutional and social conditions caused oppositional behavior, but the context did appear to have a significant influence on the ways students made sense of their transgressions. Goffman’s classic description of institutional life found in Asylums and his notion of an underlife are helpful in gaining insight into the socialpsychological benefits students sought in a context of heavy police control .1 Goffman writes that within institutions “we find that participants decline in some way to accept the official view of what they should be putting into and getting out of the organization and, behind this, of what sort of self and world they are to accept for themselves. Where enthusiasm is expected, there will be apathy; where loyalty, there will be disaffection; where attendance, absenteeism; where robustness, some kind of illness; where deeds are to be done, varieties of inactivity . . . each in its way, a movement of liberty.”2 Goffman suggests that institutions, in imposing strict behavioral norms, tend to strip individuals of their “identity equipment ,” making it difficult for them to maintain a sense of ownership or autonomy over the self. Within this context, individuals make what he calls secondary adjustments, behaviors that go against institutional norms, as a means of constructing the self. The collective and sustained practice of these “movements of liberty” constitutes the underlife.3 My observations and students’ vivid statements highlighted for me the tremendous significance of the social-psychological benefits students sought and the assertions of the self that they made through oppositional behavior at UPHS, but it is equally important to consider the conceptual THE UNDERLIFE 119 frameworks with which students entered the...