re: #290 Vicious Babushka

I went to Cass Tech High School and most of the kids I hung out with were Black. I could have gone to the district high school but wanted to get away from the kids who bullied me in Middle School.

In my public school in Connecticut, 99% of my classmates were white, but there was a huge class division between the ‘farm’ kids— and that was a catchall term for kids from working-class backgrounds— and the middle-class kids. Nearly all the bullies— not just angry kids that would get into fights, but actual bullies— came from the middle-class group. It was very similar to racism. The middle-class kids kind of ran the school, they were the arrogant loud ones in class, they were over-represented on the sports teams, and basically the working-class kids kind of disengaged from the school system.

When I later saw a school with a significant racial divide, it was similar, with both class and race in there at once: the Hispanic kids, especially the boys, were very disengaged, the white kids, on the whole, had more bullies and ran the school.

It’s this disengagement that’s the huge problem, even if you don’t give a shit about the feelings of the people involved. Black kids growing up getting frisked by the NYC cops for no actual reason other than being black and walking along the street, Hispanic kids growing up getting overlooked in school because of an accent, all of this shit, even if it doesn’t turn into resentment, makes that person more likely to view society antagonistically, rather than as something that helps them out. They see the social order as designed to preserve the position of their ‘superiors’. And to a certain extent they’re quite correct.