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11   1 Social Status Wars The twenty-three-year-old Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui had been relentlessly teased and bullied throughout middle school and high school. He was angry at what he perceived as an unjust school hierarchy that privileged the wealthy. Before he killed thirty-two people and then himself in a 2007 rampage, Cho raged against the rich, declaring his shooting a response to the “brats” and “snobs” at his school who were not satisfied with their “gold necklaces” and “Mercedes.” The South Koreanborn Cho, whose parents ran a dry-cleaning business, seemed to believe he had been bullied because of his lower economic status and his race. His peers said they couldn’t understand his accent and way of speaking and told him to “go back to China” one of the rare times he mustered up the courage to speak in class.1 When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold sauntered into the Columbine High School library, they were similarly angry at those with higher status in their school. Armed with a rifle, a shotgun, handguns, knives, and bombs, the first thing they shouted was “All jocks stand up. We’re going to kill everyone one of you.”2 These were vicious and devastating attacks that grabbed headlines all over the world. The media presented a parade of analysts and experts trying to figure out why two middle-class boys or a quiet college student had become mass murderers. Few of them looked at the high school culture that places a diminished value on students who are perceived as not measuring up. In today’s high schools, race and class, the historical purveyors of American status, are still important factors, but gender is also crucial. Students are measured against reductive and stereotypical standards for what it means to be the “right” kind of girl or boy. Children may be perceived as not good-looking or affluent enough; boys are judged for being not sufficiently masculine or athletic; and girls are scrutinized for the extent to which they are pretty and popular with boys. Children found lacking are pushed to the bottom of their school’s social hierarchy, where life can feel unbearable. 12  Social Status Wars The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu explains in his groundbreaking works the dynamics of power in social relationships. Social inequality becomes reified among adults through the acquisition of different forms of capital.3 Young people also find that to win power and influence in a given community they have to have a certain kind of body (body capital), be friends with certain people (social capital), participate in particular activities that are valued in a given school (cultural capital), be up on the latest gossip (information capital), and of course have a certain amount of money (economic capital) and the material possessions that money can buy (symbolic capital). Children who come up short in one or more of these categories are often deprived of basic opportunities to fulfill their potential. A bully culture instead circumscribes their lives. Students who don’t achieve the prescribed status markers can be shunned, taunted, assaulted, and otherwise forced to pursue their education in a hostile environment. Children who do score high on these measures are not necessarily much better off, since these goals encourage an obsession with external approval that rarely leaves room for young people—or adults—to express their authentic selves. The status systems in schools reflect familiar forms of institutionalized discrimination in which some members of society continue to be treated as second-class citizens. Many of the stories I heard from people around the country centered on bullying behavior that took place on their school bus and brought to mind the history of racial segregation on public vehicles. Older students or students perceived as more popular tend to claim a certain part of the bus—front or back—and other students are often forced to sit in the remaining spaces, if they are allowed to sit at all. Rebecca, from an upper-class northeastern suburb, talked about how she had joined the bullies after years of being harassed about her weight. “What is she wearing?” “What was she thinking?” she and her friends would whisper loudly about the other girls. “If someone was wearing something really off the wall, we would laugh about it.” Rebecca had a keen sense of who was higher or lower on the hierarchy. “I had graduated to the...

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