The Atlantic - Latest Comments in The Proper Response To The Bumrush

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

Cheerful Iconoclast — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:09:43 -0000

Ulysses, that is the kind of hard-headed comment I find quite appealing -- you said what I originally wanted to say, but better. So thanks for that. As I recall, the original article said that Larry had actually flunked nearly every class in high school, which rather strongly supports your supposition that he is illiterate, or every close to it.

If somebody comes up with a good way of engaging Larry and other similarly situated in the larger society, I'd be all for it. I'd rather have Larry being socially productive than sitting in a jail cell.

But until that happens, things like punishment ought to be on the table.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

Cheerful Iconoclast — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:32:55 -0000

But until that happens, things like punishment ought to be on the table.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

Cheerful Iconoclast — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:06:00 -0000

Yfantis, I take you at your word, and in truth I probably knew at the time that you didn't think that Conroy deserved the beating. But rhetorically it was just too good a turn of phrase to pass up.

I also apologize for not responding in general earlier -- life intervened, and I probably would have posted a more elaborate defense of my honor had I seen Mr. Coates' comment earlier.

Let me back up a second, since I was the one whose comment Mr. Coates found objectionable. In reading the thread It did seem to me that nobody else was bothered by the fact that "Larry" suffered almost no consequences for his actions, and that this sends a message to both Larry and the members of his social circle that this sort of behavior is OK. Until the next cyclist hits his head just the right way and "Larry" or the next "Larry" gets sent up for a long, long time.

I'm all for a serious inquiry into the reasons for high rates of criminality within certain segments of the American populace. And I agree with Mr. Coates that indeed Larry's next victim may well be black too. Likewise, I'm sure that going to be public school where there is an omnipresent threat of violence makes such school a worse learning environment.

But I still think that the concepts of "punishment" and "deterrence" were sadly lacking from the prior discussion, and that this lack made it a bit namby-pamby.

So fine, talk about why Larry did what he did. If you can find some nifty way to prevent future Larrys from doing what he did, great. Until then, well, let's think about some more serious consequences for assaults of this nature.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

Jimmy D — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:06:18 -0000

Im not worried about the average kid today. It's the small percentage of morally bankrupt children, raised by morally bankrupt - if at all present - parents that do this type of thing. Same as it was in 70s Detroit and everywhere else for that matter.

If it were as simple as allowing corporal punishment back in schools, it would be done. Unfortunately, I have no doubt in my mind that such punishments would have no significant impact on the type of kids we are talking about. This problem is far deeper.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

michael c. — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:07:34 -0000

The difficulty in teaching anyone to read is that little of the actual reading can take place with the teacher in a classroom with 15 or 30 classmates during the school day. Being a real reader almost always requires an almost infinite amount of reading outside the classroom. Classrooms and teachers and reading groups practice what individuals then either do or do not do outside the classroom.

What I often see in my teaching is kids who have acquired the skills and strategies to read, kids who are very bright and articulate, and yet do have a practiced fluency that most often only comes from plowing through books, magazines, newspapers and print generally.

to you and me these non-reading readers can look like real non-readers but we are not always right in calling them that. Many young readers are very shaky still,

The limits of what can really happen inside a 8 hour school day are most keenly seen in reading. if the noise and clutter and structure and layers of social interactions and opportunities inherent to a school setting are matched by noisy or busy homes that make reading taxing or almost impossible for some students then the reading ability looks even shakier.

that said, saying that breaking down scores into other quartiles- looking at kids who are substantially deficient- isn't done is not accurate. those numbers exist in every school, town, district, and state. Teachers work with those stats endlessly. They are published and available. You say the stats never tell how far below grade level groups of kids in a system are but that is exactly what the quartiles do tell you.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

Ulysses (not yet home) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:10:17 -0000

"It's fun to try and win an argument and say only 20% of a city's public school system can't read but it is very very far from the truth." ... Uhh, no it isn't. It's NOT far from the truth, and its 20% who CAN read.

Having recently sheparded my sister in law's child (now 19) through the Chicago Public School system, I am intimately familiar with the conditions in the schools and typical achievement of the students. When achievement is stated as "20% are reading at grade level" it is done so in an attempt to conceal the fact that a MUCH larger percentage are reading SIGNIFICANTLY below grade level. The more illustrative statistics would be "percentage below grade level in each grade, and HOW MUCH below grade level", two metrics I suspect we will never see.

You are correct when you state that it is a "polite fiction" that most American can read (how else to explain the birthers, the truthers, Rush, Glen or the persistence of Republican Party). As a hiring manager for IBM and AT&T I have seen first hand the lack of what should be minimal literacy in most college graduates. However, the educational disparity ("good schools" vs CPS) is so profound that when I make a sweeping generalization like "Larry can't read", it is because I know and speak to half a dozen Larry's every day, and none of them can read at a level that would remotely approach nominal, reading a newspaper, literacy.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

North — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:49:14 -0000

I used to be a teacher, and I'm awfully tired of the whole "there's no discipline in schools these days" thing. I mean, yeah, there's no discipline in schools these days. But corporal punishment would just make things a lot more violent (aside from being illegal), and I think michael c. is totally right on that teachers aren't good at judging how to impose discipline in high stress situations.

There was a thread somewhere - maybe on Crooked Timber? - about the whole situation with Henry Louis Gates: both he and the cop got stuck in this pissing match in which they were trying to demonstrate their own dominance. I've seen the same thing happen at school more times than I can count. I've been involved in more than one stupid pissing match of my own. It's really, really hard to keep your head out of it when that's the atmosphere of the school. So teachers, like students, are in this place where violence hangs in the air, and it really makes it so both just react defensively far too often.

Having taught in a comprehensive neighborhood public high school, I also really question the idea of expelling "the most disruptive kids." Charter schools, even if they're not academically selective, can kick kids out for fighting - which they did, right back to my classroom. Those "most disruptive kids" vary tremendously: some of them desperately need mental health treatment, some are bored as hell, some are traumatized, some have minimal control over themselves, some are in survival situations at home and care way more about that than about school. Regardless, when you kick a kid out, that kid *goes somewhere*. He or she doesn't just disappear. And unless you're suggesting some totally novel, far better-funded system for them to go to, kicking a lot more kids out isn't doing them or the rest of us a favor.

Though it's a real bind because if you can't kick kids out, you lose a lot of your incentive for compliance.

(To the side of the main conversation: I love how you put this, TNC.

The worst part of going to an inner-city school, for me, wasn't the teachers, or the schools themselves, but the way violence hung in the air, and made people crazy. The atmosphere of violence, the sense that it can always happen, that there are no safe places, even in school, alters everything.

Probably the best description of why being a teacher in an inner-city school was so intense. Doesn't matter how your own classroom is - all that stuff is still around.)

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

DaveinHackensack — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:13:41 -0000

Ta-Nehisi,

I'll abide by your request, and refrain from pointing this sort of thing out in the future, but I think there is a legitimate question here, about the bounds of discourse and what latitude should be given to a speaker based on his own backgroud. Perhaps you'll address it in general terms in a blog post at some point.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

michael c. — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:37:49 -0000

No one can guarantee that larry does not read and you guarantee that larry can't read. When anyone says that 20% of this city or that city can't read at grade level, it is not the same as saying that they cannot read. The statistics typically divides each grade into quartiles. The quartile you are talking about -at or above grade level- may be as low as 20% in some American cities. But the quartile right below there are kids who can read just below grade level. That is not to say they cannot read, it only says they are a year or so below grade level. this group of kids might be another 20% or it might be 40 %. It depends on the city. Being a year or two behind in your reading in 10th, 11th or 12th grade means you can read and understand everything in the NYTimes. Being a year or two behind in 7th, 8th, 9th grades means you can easily digest any other paper in America. being a year or two behind grade level in 5th or 6th grade means you can easily read USA today or any gannett newspaper.

It's fun to try and win an argument and say only 20% of a city's public school system can't read but it is very very far from the truth.

Most adults don't read. Most adults don't read anything that is close to 12th grade reading level in any given year. Most fiction sold in this country (is it even 20% of americans who buy or read books as adults?) is written way below the 10th grade reading level. it becomes only a polite lie to say most Americans read.

There is also the phenomena that some of the wildest kids in a class can read, are smart, and are bored, restless and resentful just like you and me.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

Ta-Nehisi Coates — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:35:06 -0000

Dave,

I like your presence here, but please don't make comments like this. It really is just concern-trolling.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

DaveinHackensack — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:12:41 -0000

If you hadn't self-identified as black in this comment, I wonder if you would have gotten heat for it by the readership here on racial grounds.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

metis — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:42:14 -0000

Additional anecdotal evidence:

My husband works as a prosecutor in a largish city. He has been repeatedly advised by the older hands on staff that people living in tougher or more violent neighborhoods generally make better jurors - in the sense of more prosecution friendly. The thinking is that people with more personal experience with violent crime, or living in violent areas are more willing to accept that someone might just attack another person, or might just be a little crazy, because they know a guy like that, and frankly, they would like to see him off the streets too.

The shorthand on those liberals from the safe neighborhoods - they think too much, and get too confused to convict.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

blackirish — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:50:51 -0000

My "violence history" is as follows: gun pulled on me in robbery [by a black man]; shot at [apparently by black neighbors ("the junkies next door") angry at my roommate for calling police to referee a dispute]; knife pulled on me by potential gay rapist [group, mostly black]; robbed with gun jammed into my temple [two white men]. My niece was stalked then kidnapped and choked [by a white man imprisoned for doing about the same thing 30 years before]. I really don't think race and violence are deeply related in any causation sense.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

michael c. — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:08:01 -0000

I teach in Hartford and two responses to these open threads.

1. the suggestion that teachers need more recourse to discipline kids does not ring true to me. Looking at my experiences and 12 years of interactions with colleagues I do not have faith that teachers can always measure their responses to students. Some teachers are very suited to the work they do and some teachers do not seem suited to its various pressures and intricacies at all. Building and district Administrators and the law are the proper place to start discipline.

Expulsions are not a terrific cure-all for most of what ails the public schools. You want kids in school. You want youth to get an education. The law promises the least restrictive setting and that is also a moral standard we should pay close attention to.

2. Many of the kids I have taught in Dorchester section in Boston and the various neighborhoods of Hartford have violence in their lives. Some get hit constantly by siblings and family members. Many of their parents believe in hitting. Other kids are only children and have never been punched and have never wrestled. Many of the students I've had over the years believe they will spank and hit when they have kids because it demonstrates how much a parent cares. While many of the students I work with never go out after school or on weekends or during summer and aren't allowed to go to the boys and girls clubs or community centers, other kids participate regularly in beat down tag or even just burn ball. Take a poll in my classes and many kids will tell you year-in and year-out that they like to fight.

All this said, school is the more predictable place for some kids. It took me a long time to figure that out. I grew up thinking school was a place to be done with, go home from, that it was like hamlet's denmark a prison and rotten. Slowly I have learned over many years it is not always that.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

Ulysses (not yet home) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:54:11 -0000

A few points:

Deterrence modifies behavior before the fact, punishment after the fact. Larry & Co are in fact deterred when, by their own assessment, someone "looks like trouble". That assessment is instinctive and made on an instantaneous basis. It is only tangentially related to whether someone is possibly "in a gang". They, and others far more sinister in their intentions, see people all of the time in situations exactly like Conroy's, and "self deter". They absolutely do NOT attack people who seem to pose potential threats, or who might carry additional penalties for having been attacked. The consequences of being mistaken tends to push the decision to the side of caution. They do this out of self preservation, just like a pride of lions will select a zebra in preference to a Cape Buffalo.

As I write this I am looking down on the Lake St el, a dozen blocks from where this took place. I have never been attacked, or even threatened. I have been told by people like Larry, once they got to know me, that, I "look like trouble" (6'2" a fit 220, bald, bearded & Black) or "you have that TAC unit look". Larry & Co would almost universally see me, and decide nothing at all (although I DO NOT rely on this). Like so many others, Larry is not a part of society as a member. He forages UPON society, and uses it byproducts to live, but has no connection to it as we might understand. I guarantee that Larry can't read (only 20% of Chicago public school students read at grade level). I guarantee that he, his friends, his family, are disconnected from that societal engagement that prevents these kinds of action from being even something that you might contemplate (show of hands... when was the last time you considered punching a random stranger in the face?). Larry and a million others exist as some sort of transitional societal form between pure tribal and the world of posters on blogs.

That he escaped punishment (completely escaped by his own light, I would guess) is simply another step on the random walk to prison and/or an unfortunate death. Some kind of punishment would have at least weighed in on the side of "stuff you don't want to do" , as opposed to stuff that you CAN do". Sadly enough, an early encounter with the judicial system, is likely to be his only hope.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

DaveinHackensack — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:28:56 -0000

"One of the reasons I loved your book Ta-Nehisi is the way you so accurately captured an inner-city school's seemingly perpetual looming threat of violence."

Perhaps this would be a worthy topic for a future post, but how did "inner-city" get enshrined as an adjective? Matt Yglesias went to an "inner-city" school in a literal sense -- it was in New York City, not in the suburbs somewhere. But no one has Dalton in mind when they say "inner-city".

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

TKOEd — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:25:38 -0000

One of the reasons I loved your book Ta-Nehisi is the way you so accurately captured an inner-city school's seemingly perpetual looming threat of violence. Specifically not just as it might be perpetrated against oneself but that you might have to be the one doling out a beatdown over some dumb shit because if you didnt dudes would be coming out of the woodwork to test you.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

Matt D — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:10:54 -0000

Additionally, I think there's a pretty classic bully dynamic at work here, where even if the perpetrator can't accurately and honestly explain why he's targeted someone for harassment, it's obviously because he knows he's stronger than that person.

"We were playing basketball. We got off the train. Thirty seconds later, you came riding by on your bike."

What goes unsaid is "and you looked like an easy mark."

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

Matt D — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:04:51 -0000

Well, my problem with all this is that you're assuming the kid has the self-awareness and expressive abilities to accurately describe exactly what was going on. He may not understand why he did what he did, but that doesn't mean it's not understandable, and not subject to influence.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

sporcupine — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:36:09 -0000

MWF3kds

Alternately, we could put the basics in shorthand before we talk.

About twice a month, I find that stuff is relevant. Usually, I write my thoughts first, then see a way they could be read differently if I had a different background.

And it certainly would be hilarious.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

DaveinHackensack — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:58:21 -0000

"Contrary to popular belief, in the black community, in general, there isn't much sympathy for people who decide to batter other people for kicks."

One example of this, that I noticed recently: there was an NYT article about four young black men who attempted to hold up an electronics store in Harlem, while brandishing a weapon and pistol whipping one of the store workers. The store owner, a white guy, pulled out a shotgun and fired there shots, killing two of the perps and wounding the other two. The man-on-the-street interviews conducted by the Times in the neighborhood pretty much all condemned the perps and expressed support for the store owner.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

lawson1066 — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:26:57 -0000

I hear you and I wish I knew the answer. I'm just going on the experience of watching the kids I worked with. When they got in trouble, they would sort of shut down, even when people threatened violence. It just seemed to me that they were thinking, "I've survived beatings before. I can take what's coming."

Maybe I'm wrong, but it just didn't seem like a deterrent. I certainly can't claim to be an expert--I didn't work down there (Englewood) all that long and have never lived in anything approaching a rough neighborhood. However, it did clearly seem to teach those kids to resort to hitting as a punishment. It just seemed to add to the overall tension.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

albatross — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:23:30 -0000

I claim no knowledge at all here, but it sure seems like the consequences for jumping the gang lord might stick in the minds of the *next* bunch of kids looking to jump someone.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

gordon gartrelle — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:16:32 -0000

This is the same kind of argument many conservatives make when someone attempts to explain the motivations behind terroist acts. Utter disgust and condemnation is the ONLY acceptable response, and any attempt at explanation (aside from "they hate us because we're free.") is interpreted as a tacit defense of the deplorable acts. I cannot stand this uncritical mindset.

Having said that, I believe that people who brutalize other human beings are savages who deserve little of our sympathy and understanding.

I can see why someone might be frustrated by calls to understand violent criminals. It often seems as though these calls are motivated not out of concern for the criminal, but out of fear that condeming the criminals would reinforce the belifs and policy proposals of ideological adversaries.

Re: The Proper Response To The Bumrush

zinjanthropus — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:03:44 -0000

Spankings from parents and beat downs from older siblings used to be enough deterrent for the avearge kid in 70s Detroit.

I'm going to attract some ire here but; Here's a kid who lives with the tension and awarenesss of the possibility of daily beat downs at school. How can anyone expect stern words, detention or "time out" to be anything but laughable?