Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [109]
When Stacey started riding the bus this year, she started saying the same thing. She says, “Art’s, Art only picks on us.” She says, “He won’t even let us open the windows.”
Although aware of her daughters’ concerns, Ms. Marshall did not immediately launch an intervention or share the girls’ observations with school staff. Instead, she kept her eye on the situation.
I never just leave ’em at the bus stop. The bus picks them up at the end of the corner here. I will always stay there in the car, and I began to watch. You know, just kind of look and see where kids are on the bus.
In addition to restricting where the children could sit, the bus driver also inconsistently enforced policies regarding who could ride the bus:
Policies seemed to be upheld differently for the different races. Apparently there was, on one day, a little white boy was bringing a friend home, and didn’t have a note (from his parents). The boy was allowed to ride the bus. A few days later, a little Black girl was riding home with a friend and she was not permitted on the bus.
Near the end of the school year, there was a discussion in Fern’s social studies class and other children—including white students—echoed her opinion of Art, who said, “Yeah, Art does this.” The white children’s validation helped Ms. Marshall overcome her hesitancy about complaining. She called the district’s administrative offices and spoke to the director of transportation services who told her, “You know, we don’t, we don’t stand for that.”
Ms. Marshall not only had an idea about the nature of the problem, but she also had in mind the proper organizational solution.
His approach was a bit different than what I told him I thought he should have taken. He said, “Well,” he said, “If you were calling earlier, we could have put a camera on the bus.” I said, “I’m not asking you to put a camera on the bus; I’m asking you to let this man know that the children perceive something and that parents, at least one parent, is aware of something that he said.” He went into the fact that our school district subcontracts the busing service. . . . (This meant that, legally, the district could not speak directly to the driver.) I said, “Well, next thing you do is call the supervisor.” (emphasis added)
In the fall, Ms. Marshall plans to call the transportation administrator before school starts to find out who will be driving the school bus. In the meantime, she seems distressed and somewhat at a loss as to what to say when Stacey and Fern express concerns about Art, stressing only that they have to “judge a person as a person” as they make their way in the world.
A CRUCIAL DIMENSION OF CONCERTED CULTIVATION:
OVERSEEING INSTITUTIONS
In the theoretical language of Pierre Bourdieu, both Black and white middle-class parents, and mothers in particular, routinely scanned the horizon for opportunities to activate their cultural capital and social capital on behalf of their children.7 By shrewdly framing their interventions in ways that institutions such as schools and public and private recreational programs found compatible with their organizational processes, parents could gain important advantages for their children. These benefits go beyond specific short-term goals, such as securing a place in the classroom of “the best” fourth-grade teacher or getting into “the best” gymnastics program. By teaching their daughters and sons how to get organizations to meet their individualized needs, white and Black middle-class mothers pass along skills that have the potential to be extremely valuable to their children in adulthood. These are class-based advantages. As later chapters will show, the institutional relationships forged by working-class and poor families differ in important ways from those of middle-class parents, Black and white.
Among middle-class families, race played a role, not in terms of whether or how parents intervened in