The Right to Be Teenagers
Kids are a pain in the ass. The world has rules and kids hate rules. The world has figures of authority and kids hate figures of authority. Figures of authority can eat it, right guys? Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) understood this.
Rule-questioning, law-breaking, bullshit-calling, youth have been a staple of modern American culture for decades and have been immortalized and fetishized in films like Rebel without a Cause (1955), novels like Catcher in the Rye (1951), and musicals like Grease (1971). It is ingrained in American culture to see (specifically, white, middle class) delinquency as a rite of passage. Kids behaving badly, these movies tell us, aren’t necessarily always “bad kids.”
These movies tell us that it’s natural for young people to push at the rules: to trespass when it says “No Trespassing,” to drive 45 miles per hour when the speed limit clearly states that the speed limit is 35 miles per hour, to drink alcohol when they are not 21, to “loiter,” to smoke pot, to talk back. If pop culture is to be believed, teenagers have that right from time to time. They get to mess up a little bit. They’re just being teenagers.
My kids are a pain in the ass, too. But part of me is glad they don’t always follow orders blindly. I’m glad (even though I also hate) that they don’t assume I’m right all the time, just because I’m in charge. Kids needs to understand both; they need to listen but to listen critically. I know my kids will likely grow up to break some rules. I know I did.
My daughter, in particular, likes to ask a lot of questions. She’s a strong young woman. Lucky for me, I never have to worry that one day this critical, questioning attitude will get her pulled to the ground, her long hair wrapped around the hands of an adult, male police officer, who will then sit on top of her while she screams for help, all while another adult male police officer watches, doing nothing. That kind of brutality would never be visited upon my mouthy, back-talking, white daughter. That wouldn’t happen to her now, at age eight, and I doubt it would happen to her at age 14.
But that’s exactly what happened to someone else’s 14-year-old black daughter this weekend, who was swimming with friends at a neighborhood pool in McKinney, Texas. Full information about this incident — namely what transpired between the time the kids arrived at the pool and the filming of this incredibly disturbing video that has gone viral— has yet to be confirmed. A report from Buzzfeed News states that some adult, white neighborhood residents got into a physical altercation with the black children at the neighborhood pool. Racial slurs were tossed around and blows were thrown. A police officer pulled a gun.
But is there anything that this 14-year-old child could have done to warrant such disrespectful, abusive treatment? That could be my daughter, if my daughter were not white. My daughter gets to keep talking back, I guess.
I’m going to end this with something Mark Anthony Neal wrote this morning, because he effectively summarizes why the theater of police brutality is getting increasingly dangerous (the city hashtags are multiplying) and, more importantly, because he has daughters, too:
The 14-year-old Black girl, of course, posed no threat to the officer’s safety, but she was to be made an explicit example of his power, which she challenged, because she was willing to speak her mind; “keeping running your mouth…(and see what will happen)…
…Yet what what tore at my spirit was not simply what I saw, but what I heard: “Keep running your mouth…” a provocation from one of those said law enforcement officers, directed at a 14-year-old Black girl, whose only crime was being a Black girl who had the critical capacity to interpret her circumstances and those of her peers, and raise legitimate concerns about the absurdity of those circumstances. I have known many Black girls who would have acted the same way; I am helping to raise two of them.
