Kids and class and power

[cosmolinguist]

The other day I kept seeing this link shared all over Mastodon and I hated this pull quote so much I couldn't bring myself to read it for a whole day.

Not for nothing, these are the kids that were born, literally, in the months after September 11, 2001. They came into a world at war. They grew up in the shadow of ever-threatening “Red Alert Levels” and endless “Active Shooter Drills” and the ubiquity of “Rekt” videos on 4Chan. They did not know one day of school before Columbine. They did not know one day of life without the threat of terrorism. They have not known one day of their nation in peace.

It turns out it isn't all as bad as that, as erasing of the context and of the less-privileged unheeded protesters these kids are heir to. But when I didn't know that yet, I said:

No. This is gross.

There are millions of kids who've lived their whole lives in fear in other countries, because of actions of the U.S.

There are millions of kids in the U.S., too, who live with the fear of dying for being black, and we whites didn't march with them or listen to them because they are black. Even though they always turn out for us. They know solidarity is essential; whites don't see that.

We waited for an affluent school of kids taught they'll be listened to. It's not magic.

Today in my RSS reader I found something interesting also pondering, but from a sociological perspective, what made this school shooting get such a different reaction from all the other ones.

These high-schoolers, I thought, are the children of “concerted cultivation.” That was the term Lareau used for the middle-class approach to raising kids. It’s not just that middle-class parents cultivate the child’s talents, providing them with private coaches and organized activities. There is less separation of the child’s world and the adult world. Parents pay attention to children and take them seriously, and the children learn how to deal with adults and with institutions run by adults.

Reading this made me feel a lot like I felt a couple of weeks ago when I had to read Penny Eckert's famous sociolinguistic study on "Jocks" and "Burnouts" (the kids' names for themselves) in an early-eighties Detroit-area high school. To paraphrase slightly from Wikipedia, Jocks embody middle class values, profit from the corporate organization of education which simulates expectations and norms of the corporate workplace, one in which personal values coincide with those of the organization. Burnouts, on the other hand, resist the corporate norms of education in preparation to enter the blue-collar workforce. Jocks' social networks are restricted to the school environment and their own age; Burnouts' social networks extend across age groups and local and urban environments.

I empathize with these middle-class Parkland kids, and the Jocks, somewhat because I was destined for college and I felt part of adult institutions. But my parents are totally working-class and I fit in with adults partly because I was disabled (thus relied on adults more; I wrote somewhere in these pages about how much it affected my relationship with my parents that I couldn't drive so I had no independence) and partly because people my own age didn't like me. By my last couple of years of high school I finally did have some friends, but they were all younger than me by a year or two or three, which did make me weird.

So I certainly had opinions about adult institutions -- my school (it helped that my mom worked there; she gave me some of that adult perspective on it), politics, religion, literature, romance/sex (I'd had none, but I had opinions!) -- but I wasn't really listened to. By anyone. I was halfway to being this kind of cultivated kid but the other half, the adults in my life reciprocating, was never there.

So I've been watching these kids and wondering what having adults listen to you must feel like. A friend of mine went to their local #MarchForOurLives and said

I'll tell you my favorite part of the march. We were walking near one family whose two girls--they looked about seven or so--started a chant of "Arms are for hugs!"

It was just their two little voices. They held each other with both arms, looking tentatively about.

Then a couple of our adult voices joined in. Then a LOT more voices. As more and more voices joined in, the girls' voices grew and grew. You could hear them grow bolder; their voices always led. Better still, you could SEE the change: their postures straightened, their steps turned into stomps, and they went from timidly embracing each other to swinging their hands while belting out their chant. And they were BEAMING. They made a thing happen.

I try to imagine how they must have felt. It'd have been a hell of a drug for me, at their age. Or any age until I left for college, really.

Of course, I also never worried a day in my life about being shot for going to school. I've only just started to learn about the horrors that have become commonplace in an "active shooter drill." I'm not saying these kids are lucky or have it better than me overall. I'm just slotting some interesting stuff together in my head.

Comments

[barakta]

Brain too full of snot to be coherent but wanted to say this was interesting to read and yes v much generational class and impairment effects on social structure locationing and social wossnames.

[cosmolinguist]

Sorry to hear your brain is all besnotted.

[barakta]

Thank you, mostly pissed off cos I've only had about 3 weeks since lurgy from hell!

I know I owe you an email about seeing you. Remind me when you're away and go back to uni, I'll try and brain some dates today. (I got my inbox to 5! I feel like I can BREATHE again).

[cosmolinguist]

I've sent you a proper email with it, to make finding it easier later.

In so doing I noticed the last email I had from you was the PDFs of, among other things, the Eckert paper I talk about here. So your help has really done me some good with that! :)

[barakta]

Email++

Given even the quick n dirty Acrobat OCR jobbies were good for you that was very easy indeed. It's a simple boot into Windows jobbie and a few mins poking Acrobat and I tend to have a backlog of scanning of my own I can clear at the same time. Always happy to help cos I know it's lowspoons easy for me and horrid hard for you...

Still ridiculous tho but universities ARE ridiculous!

And Government Depts are even more ridiculous. I sent a blind screenreader using friend my completable access to work support worker and travel reclaim costs forms... She's been asking AtW for *15* years to make these accessible to her... they offered a shitty word doc which was so full of macro crap that JAWS had a tizzy and it was incomprehensible... Access to Sodding Work... I mean there's got to be like socio-psychology there of an entity to support disabled people being so unutterably FAIL!

[conuly]

Not for nothing, these are the kids that were born, literally, in the months after September 11, 2001. They came into a world at war. They grew up in the shadow of ever-threatening “Red Alert Levels” and endless “Active Shooter Drills” and the ubiquity of “Rekt” videos on 4Chan. They did not know one day of school before Columbine. They did not know one day of life without the threat of terrorism. They have not known one day of their nation in peace.

You know, I think many kids this age are barely aware that we're at war, and have been their entire lives. I know my nieces weren't until Ana was 10 or 11 - one day I looked at her and said, shocked, "my god! We've been at war your entire life!" and she had no idea. And even now she knows, it's not like she's thinking about it constantly.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, I think plenty of kids (mostly white ones) are living lives in peace and without thinking about terrorism.

Like I said, that screed got a little better at acknowledging that once I read it, but the fact that this was the quote everyone was sharing it with still seemed to justify my displeasure at it.