Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys

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[ 142 ] 7 Guilty by Association Acting White or Acting Lawful? Children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. —Barack Obama, DNC Speech, 2004 The problem is that parents, shopping-mall security, police officers, grocery-store clerks, and even other youth have a hard time distinguishing the delinquents from the wannabes. . . . The many lawful youth take on the stylistic affections of true “wild children” even though they infrequently, if ever, cross the line in their behavior. —Mary Patillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences, 1999 J.T., an African American sixteen-year-old, was a good student: “I get like A’s and B’s and sometimes C’s, but I try to stay on top,” he explained. I saw two of his report cards to verify this. His mother worked for the City of Oakland as a clerk. He described what she does: “The kind of person that checks yo’ papers to see if you legit. Like, she’ll put the rubber stamp on your paperwork if you paid your taxes, yadadamean [you understand]?” J.T.’s father had moved to Chicago when J.T. was eight years old, and his Guilty by Association [ 143 ] mother kept him disciplined: “She’ll make sure I am doing good, and if I ain’t, she’ll pull out the whip. . . . One time, when I was little, I stole some shit from the store. My mom found out, and she made me take it back. And she ask the man [store clerk] if I could work to pay him back. He said no. My moms made him give me a job! He made me scrub the piss outside the store. . . . I never stole again.” His mother, Angela, worked until 5 p.m., arriving home by 6 p.m. J.T. got out of school at 2:45 p.m.; he had three hours to kill. These three hours, between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m., were often the most dangerous hours for young people in Oakland. This is when most youth crime, violence, and victimization took place. To prevent J.T. from getting into trouble, his mother ordered him to attend one of the few afterschool programs in the community, at the East Side Youth Center (ESYC). J.T. had never committed a crime or been arrested, despite growing up in a neighborhood where crime was rampant and having an older brother who had been arrested several times. J.T.’s brother, cousins, and childhood friends were involved in gangs and drug dealing. Despite actively avoiding delinquency and never being arrested or suspended, J.T. believed that sometimes he was treated worse than his delinquent peers. He told me that even though he tried to stay away from trouble, authority figures often implicated him in the deviance and crime that his friends committed . “I just always knew it was stupid to do crazy shit, so I just stayed away from stupid niggas. . . . The only thing I did was not go to school. I was just taking care of my lil’ sister and trying to make some money cleaning people’s yards.” Although J.T. claimed that he stayed away from the guys who committed crime, six out of eight of the people he hung out with on a regular basis had previously been arrested. I believe that what J.T. meant when he said he stayed away from guys who committed crime was that he had the unique skills to navigate between what authority figures expected of him and what the streets expected of him. J.T.’s story is representative of the nine other non-delinquent boys in this study. They all reported being and were observed to be treated similarly to the delinquent boys. Out of the forty youths I studied, ten had never been arrested but came from the same neighborhood, schools, family background, and subculture as those who had been. Four of the youths I studied were siblings of delinquent boys I had observed and interviewed. The other six Guilty by Association [ 144 ] were close friends with some of the boys who had been arrested. These non-delinquent youths also felt deeply impacted by punitive social control and the youth control complex. An example was Jaime, a sixteenyear -old Latino who received A’s and B...