Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [171]
I was just shocked. It was somebody that I used to be able to go, I’d call and be like, “Let’s go here, go there.” Like, it was a hard time getting through that. I just was having a hard time doing everything.
During his interview, Tyrec seemed visibly depressed about his friends’ deaths. He reported that his girlfriend, Whitney, was an enormous aid in helping him cope with these tragedies.
Some of the working-class and poor young men in the study also spoke about the role of the police in their neighborhoods. It was a topic that evoked long, passionate commentary from them. Both white and Black males reported police harassment. Harold had moved across town from Lower Richmond to a working-class, low-income neighborhood that was virtually all African American. Some of his family members and neighborhood acquaintances have had run-ins with the police there. He reported, “Cops, they just like harass people for no reason. I don’t like cops.”30
Over in Lower Richmond, Tyrec echoed Harold’s complaints. He felt that while he was out driving, he was a magnet for police:
The cops, they . . . kept giving me tickets, trying to mess my license up, so I was like [I’ll] just sell the car. I don’t know—it’s just up here they really like tend to mess with people. I’d rather catch the bus than keep having to go to traffic court and all that.
The white working-class and poor young men in the study also complained bitterly about the police. Billy acknowledged, “I mean, these kids around here are bad, half of them aren’t going anywhere.” Still, he was insistent that inequity and corruption were interwoven with police work in his neighborhood:
(Extremely serious tone) They’re crooked. I never committed any crimes, half of us didn’t. But we all get locked up because the cops don’t like us around here. It’s a fact. They love locking us up.
Although quite different from young people getting “locked up,” there were signs of variation in how storekeepers treated young men in public spaces. As noted above, although Alexander is pursuing a pre-medical curriculum at an Ivy League school, he was regularly treated with suspicion in stores. He reported, “Sometimes I play games with them and [stand] in a not very visible place in the store and someone will come to ‘put something away.’ ” “My parents have always talked to me about that kind of thing,” he told me and, in a tone of resignation, said he tries to “just ignore it.” In this regard, his experience is similar to others from less affluent social classes. Harold, who works full-time and has never been “locked up,” sounded equally resigned when he talked about being harassed by the police: “You can’t dwell on it, though. It’s going to happen regardless.”31 White middle-class youth did not raise the issue of treatment by the police. When I queried them, they described the police as benign or as positive forces in their lives.
Awareness of Social Class
Despite signs that the middle-class youth had benefited in critical ways from the social class position of their parents, these young adults appeared largely unaware of the advantages that had been bestowed upon them. Instead, they stressed how hard they had worked, implying that they thought they had earned on their own the position of privilege they held. Also, they were very focused on their position only vis-à-vis others in their own neighborhood or school. They seemed unaware that there were youth living less than an hour away who had very different lives. Although the degree to which the middle-class youths’ life paths had been structured by their class position was not clear to them, in contrast, the working-class and poor youth and their families were keenly aware of neighborhoods where life was different.32 Many dreamt of moving to the suburbs someday. Billy directly observed the impact of middle-class neighborhoods on life chances. In his interview,