Odd Girl Out (32 page)

No one answered. They were thinking.

For some girls, silence and indirection are neither attractive nor an option. They are instead signs of weakness. I found this to be true especially among the girls I met whose lives were marked by oppression. For them, assertiveness and anger were tools of spiritual strength. These young women might encounter the misogyny of families and neighbors, the racism of teachers, and threats of violence in their neighborhoods. Where economic struggle and disenfranchisement prevail, self-assertion and aggression become as much a part of the social landscape as playgrounds and ice-cream trucks. In this world, silence can mean invisibility and danger.

Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan have found that girls on the margins of their school communities, whether because of race or class, "were more likely to stay in touch with their thoughts and feelings and to have close, confiding relationships."
⁶⁴
Researchers studying the self-esteem and emotional health of some working-class girls and girls of color report findings that run directly counter to the signs of loss so epidemic in white, middle-class girls.

Indeed, the now-famous American Association of University Women's 1990 report on girls found that black girls scored highest on self-esteem measures throughout adolescence.
⁶⁵
In interviews with urban adolescents, psychologist Niobe Way discovered a unique tendency to "speak one's mind" in relationships. The girls she interviewed, who came from predominantly working-class African American families, described relationships empowered, not dissolved, by conflict.
⁶⁶

These girls are exceptional. The heart of their resistance appears to be an ease with truth telling, a willingness to know and voice their negative emotions. When girls make a choice to value their emotions, they value themselves. They tell the truth because their survival may depend on raising their voices in a hostile culture.

How might the face of girls' anger take on a different appearance, and why? Not all girls resort to alternative aggressions as a primary means of releasing negative feelings. In this chapter, I explore the use and origins of truth telling as a means of resisting silence and oppression. I conclude with the story of a target of bullying, whose despair prompted her to fight back.

My own white, middle-class background made me especially aware of my difference when I spoke with girls in less-privileged communities. At times, I was positively floored by some girls' courage and outspokenness, which felt so different from my own. In spite of this, I repeated to myself—and now share with you, the reader—the words of bell hooks, who cautions us to avoid romanticizing the truth telling of African American girls. Truth telling and assertiveness, she argues, are "not necessarily traits associated with building self-esteem. An outspoken girl might still feel worthless because her skin was not light enough or the right texture."

hooks urges us to remember that "[t]here is no one story of black girlhood."
⁶⁷
Indeed, now that the white, middle-class experience is being dislodged as the exclusive model for research, it is especially important to heed hooks's words. To imagine a universal minority female experience would be to repeat exclusive patterns of research. Girls from all walks of life have different experiences. Not all white, middle-class girls avoid conflict, and not all other girls embrace it. Every child is her own person, with her own unique set of life circumstances.

Indeed, dominant middle-class notions of femininity are foreign to the experience of many white girls. "I know where I come from," writes author and essayist Dorothy Allison, "and it is not that part of the world."
⁶⁸
Research confirms that some working-class white children are socialized by their parents to use physical aggression to protect themselves from peers. After spending a year in the working-class Maine town of Mansfield, Lyn Mikel Brown noticed how the girls she studied resisted some aspects of the middle-class model of femininity while embracing others.

Although these girls are care-givers and nurturers, they reveal, often with pride, that part of themselves that is outspoken and direct, that knows and expresses deep, passionate anger, even that part of themselves prone to uncontrollable rage.... While their experience of themselves and their perception of relationships contest the selflessness and purity typically associated with white middle-class notions of motherhood and femininity, care-taking, nurturance, and responsiveness hold a central place in their lives.

Although Brown would find, as I did, many working-class girls who were unwilling to bring anger into their close relationships, she concludes that "they do so, not because anger is a culturally inappropriate emotion, but because they need their friends."
⁶⁹
The Mansfield girls at once appreciate and elude anger, presenting an alternative picture of girls' relationship to aggression.

 

getting physical

The e-mail came a few days after the 2000 New Year. "I am a Caucasian female who often experienced physical confrontations by African American and Mexican American females.
I was not the aggressor.
I protected myself and my two sisters were always looking out for me. We did not tolerate any crap, we knocked the shit out of these girls. Do not get me wrong, though, I never looked for, or wanted to fight."

Bonnie was twenty-eight and studying at a midwestern university for her master's in social work. "I was in so many fights," she wrote in her e-mail, "that I was expelled from the entire county school district. Basically my high school education was ruined. I finally graduated with a GED from the Job Corps in 1989." The youngest of three girls and a boy, she grew up in rural Southern California. Shortly after her brother died, the family moved to a working-class neighborhood in San Jose, "a suburb-city," she noted, "but it certainly didn't seem like [a suburb] to me."

The family was raised by Bonnie's mother, a survivor of multiple violent relationships with men, including a husband who beat Bonnie and her sisters. When Bonnie began her freshman year, her two sisters were already upperclassmen. They were everything to her. If anything truly anchored Bonnie during this stormy time, it was the almost religious devotion the sisters had to one another. "If there was some sort of crisis," she explained, "we would always know about it and be right there for each other.... We were very tight. No matter how angry we were." She recalls one sister as a guardian angel. "She would appear at these strange moments when I was in trouble."

Bonnie's new school was a confusing patchwork of the cliques and fervent musical subcultures that marked 1980s America. African American students were embracing hip-hop, while Bonnie was swept up in the culture of Lita Ford-style rock and roll. Pictures show Bonnie's hair blond and feathered back, her Levi's tight and tapered down the leg. She struggled through her first year, and by January was failing nearly all of her classes. She was cutting school more than she attended it.

Bonnie clashed often with her African American peers. Nasty looks were exchanged in the halls, insults were traded about clothing and style. Remembering the hostility, Bonnie was unrepentant about her own role in the conflicts, refusing to take responsibility for provoking anyone's anger. "I never considered myself to be a bully," she insisted, "or someone that would harass or assault anybody, although if someone assaulted me, I was going to protect myself and what I perceived as my own honor."

Bonnie does concede that her social skills weren't great, but she is quick to point out that she prized friendship above all else. "That was one of the things we prided ourselves on—making friends. Being accepting of others," she said. "I wasn't lacking in the fact that I knew how to treat people, and that you don't hit people unless you expect to be hit back."

One day, along the south side of the school, the rock-and-roll and heavy-metal crowd mingled on their part of the block, colonizing their patch of curb. An acquaintance of Bonnie's ran up, breathless. She had turned away an interested African American boy, and another girl who had been interested in him, also African American, was angry.

Twenty minutes later, the girls saw a crowd of African American girls coming toward them up Elm Street. "White trash!" they shouted. One of the girls came dangerously close to Bonnie. She told me she still can't remember who grabbed who first. "I think it was us—we grabbed her and threw her on the ground and jumped on top of her." A melee ensued. Bonnie looked up and saw one of her sisters surrounded by three girls, one of whom began swinging.

Once again, she couldn't remember what came next. "I went blank. I must have flipped out," she told me. "My friend said I threw the girls up against fences and went crazy."

Bonnie was expelled and sent to another high school. She could return to her old school if she went without a fight for six months. At the new school, determined as she was to return to her sisters, there were more fights. Bonnie was sent to yet another school for troubled youth, or, as Bonnie put it, "where all the fuckups went." Bonnie grew angrier and skipped even more school.

Cat had been Bonnie's best friend for two years. Pugnacious, rowdy, and an inveterate rule breaker, Cat inspired suspicion in everyone around her. Bonnie was no exception, not least when she finally got her first serious boyfriend. "I said, 'You can do anything you want. You can have anyone you want, but don't fUck with me and don't fuck my boyfriend.'...I said, 'Listen to me. You sleep with my boyfriend, I will kick your ass. I will do this to you.'"

When she heard that Cat had hooked up with her boyfriend, Bonnie marched up to Cat in the hallway at school. "I didn't want to," Bonnie told me, "but people had known that I said that, and I had a reputation to protect. I was forced to. I had no choice but to put my hands on her. I said, 'What the fuck do you think you're doing? I don't even want to kick your ass and now I have to.'" Bonnie led her off school property to avoid further disciplinary action.

"I knew if I didn't, people were going to lose respect for me," she said, "and that opened me to more potential threats, disrespect. I told her straight out, over and over again, 'Don't do this or these will be the consequences.' I guess," she added, probably for my sake, "I was being a bully but in a way I was showing consequence to her."

Bonnie knew if she didn't fight Cat, she would disgrace her sisters' reputation, something she could not live with. "We had a real reputation for not taking anyone's shit," she explained. "If I would have backed down, everyone would have felt free to walk all over us." Bonnie stood opposite Cat, having repeated for the last time the terms of the deal. Cat had broken the rule. Bonnie grabbed Cat and punched her in the chest. Cat didn't move. Bonnie punched her four or five times, in the arm, in the stomach. Cat fell limply on the ground and lay there silent, refusing to fight.

"Don't you get it?" Bonnie yelled. "You do this, and this is what happens. I
told
you."

Cat didn't answer.

"I didn't want to hurt her," Bonnie said, "but I felt like I was in too deep."

Where many white, middle-class girls dispense justice in covert ways, Bonnie described a world in which anger and vengeance are in- scribed deeply into the school culture. Here, aggression is not ignored or avoided but is a tool used to confer or maintain social status. Moreover, conflict for Bonnie and her sisters was an essential part of preserving their dignity.

Bonnie's comfort with physical aggression was the product of a life of struggle, including a childhood spent in a home marked by family violence. Her defiance of feminine social norms was not a matter of conscious, political resistance. Her ferocity was balanced by a cautious, at times socially avoidant, personality. She told me, "It's hard when someone's not there for you, when you hardly ever need anybody. I'm very independent-minded, strong. Very much do-it myself. I won't introduce myself to you. I won't show you who I am and I won't be honest.... I see people very clearly sometimes. I see people the way I do because I've been conditioned. I've lived in a hostile environment and I can recognize potential threats."

Bonnie's self-imposed isolation has been observed in some working-class girls and girls of color, especially those who feel showing emotion or vulnerability is a sign of weakness. "Even among those who feel more free to express their anger, power, or sexual interest," write Jill McLean Taylor and her colleagues, "the overriding move is to 'stay to myself,' 'not talk to anybody,' 'keep my feelings bottled up,' and 'not tell anybody about anything.'"
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Long-term isolation can impede cognitive and emotional development.

 

keeping it real

Waiting outside Ridgewood Junior High for my next interview, I noticed a tall, thin African American girl sitting bone straight on a stone bench by the main doors. She was so still I could hardly see her breathing. It was twenty minutes after the last yellow bus had pulled out of the parking lot. A white pickup truck approached, stopping in front of the main doors and raising orbs of milky brown dust. An elderly African American woman emerged. She was stately and gray, regal looking. She strode toward the girl on the slab, raising a thick arm.

"I
told
you, girl, whenever anyone hits you, you hit 'em back! You should have took off your sneaker and hit her in the face!" The girl stared straight ahead as her grandmother swished past through the school's main doors. The passenger door of the truck swung open and another girl hopped out. She ran toward the first girl, shouting, "I'm gonna get her! I'm gonna get her!"

"You're going to get me
expelled!
" the tall girl cried, suddenly standing. "Is that what you want?"

"Then after school," she replied, winded, "when it's nobody's business."

The tall girl sat back down on the bench, mouth pursed in defiance, tapping her sneaker. The girls' soccer team was trickling into the parking lot, and I barely noticed the assistant principal, Pam Bank, suddenly standing next to me. She apologized for being late and jerked her head over at the sisters, now silent. "She tried to beat up the sister of the boy who was pickin' on her brother. She got the shit beat out of her, and she wants to fight again. I told her, girl, you got your shirt torn off!"