So during our episodes on Ron Brown HS, a high school here in DC built on a model of restorative justice, we kept coming back to this question about how to refer to the school's students.
n.pr/2CZ1F3R
n.pr/2CZ1F3R
The faculty refers to its students, who are all Black males, as "kings"; the school's literature refers to them as "young men of color."
I was worried that by not calling them "boys" — they were HS freshmen, after all — we were contributing to dangerously aging them up.
I was worried that by not calling them "boys" — they were HS freshmen, after all — we were contributing to dangerously aging them up.
Cory and Kavitha were understandably sensitive to how it might sound for them, as non-Black reporters, to refer to those teenagers as "boys" given how loaded that word has been for so long in relation to Black men.
(In an amicus brief in an workplace discrimination suit that eventually landed before the Supreme Court, some notable civil rights organizers wrote that "if [boy] is not a proxy for 'nigger,' than it is at least a close cousin.")
This might seem like some weird picayune point, but think about the way those notions played out in the coverage of the police shooting of Mike Brown.
Was Mike Brown a man? He was 18, old enough to vote or join the military.
Was Mike Brown a man? He was 18, old enough to vote or join the military.
But if a blonde 18-year-old who was about 8 weeks removed from his high school graduation, like Brown was, had gone missing or was killed, it's hard to imagine her referred to as a "woman" in the news coverage.
Her not-quite-adulthood would be a big part of the story.
Her not-quite-adulthood would be a big part of the story.
whether we think someone is a child or is an adult plays a big role in how innocent or culpable we understand them to be. In a study by @DrPhilGoff, cops regularly estimated that Black boys were 4.5 years older than they actually were.
bit.ly/2CXkSmw
bit.ly/2CXkSmw
In that same study, the cops aged white *down* — they were viewed as younger than they actually were.
that has huge ramifications for whether Black boys have force used on them, or how judges or juries perceive them.
that has huge ramifications for whether Black boys have force used on them, or how judges or juries perceive them.
And apologies for reminding y'all of the Kavanaugh hearings, but the crux of his defense was, essentially, that he was behaving like a red-blooded adolescent male. His defenders worried about what fate might hold for their sons and their own little boys.
He was now a fiftysomething, enormously powerful man, but the invocation of his once-boyhood was somehow still exculpatory.
It was something.
It was something.
Anyway, those disjointed thoughts and more here: npr.org/sections/codes…
