Marian Ronan

Teenage Innocence

I have been trying to stay out of the discussion over Brett Kavanaugh; surely enough has been said without the addition of my two cents.

But one element of the conversation, not to say brawl, that caught my attention was the assertion by some that the actions of a person during his (I use the word advisedly) teenage years shouldn’t be held against him. I sat up straight when I heard that because trying teenagers as adults has been a major component  of the US criminal (so-called) justice system, especially since the year 2000. Admittedly, there have been legislative moves recently to roll some of this back, but there are still many thousands of juveniles who have been tried as adults in this country; a good number of them are in prison right now. And I’m sure you will be shocked! shocked! to hear that a disproportionate number of these juveniles are black or brown.

The day after I had been thinking about all this I was down on the living room floor doing the exercises for my deteriorating back disc while listening to “Democracy Now” with Amy Goodman, and presto! Goodman  began talking about the same thing: the claims that the accusations against Kavanaugh were over-the-top because he had been a mere teenager when whatever happened happened. She then interviewed three activists involved in the educational justice movement, which, among other things, fights the “school to prison pipeline.”  But what blew me away about that particular news segment was that the activists Goodman interviewed explained that the “school-to-prison pipeline” did not begin with teenagers being tried as adults but with pre-school students–three and four-year olds–being suspended for misbehavior. And kids who have been suspended earlier in school, we learned, are much more likely to end up in prison later in life. And guess who the vast majority of pre-K kids thus suspended are? Black and brown boys.

Now let me clarify a few things here. I have a lot of sympathy for teachers trying to keep control in the classroom. I taught school for three years, between 1970 and 1975, and it was the hardest work I have ever done. And I was teaching the fourth grade–nine and ten-year olds. I simply cannot imagine trying to work with pre-schoolers.

I should also admit that the hardest of my three years as a teacher was in a Black parent-run community school in Harlem, though part of the reason for that was that there were 40 kids in the class, while the other two classes I taught had 20 and 12 students respectively, and most of them were white. I was also fairly clueless about inner city culture.

But the real reason for my difficulty, in Harlem and the other two schools, was that I just wasn’t very good at teaching kids. And as I am given to saying, one day the Lord Jesus appeared to me and said,”Marian, you are terrible at this!! Stop it!” So I did.

This leads us back to the very idea of three and four-year olds getting suspended, or even eight or nine-year olds for that matter. And they are not getting suspended for bringing guns to school, or even fighting; they’re getting suspended for “insubordination” and “defying authority,” an interpretation of behavior common to children that age that is applied to kids–boys–of color much more often than to white boys.  What does it do to a kid’s attitudes and expectations if he gets suspended at the age of four?

This brings us back to the national conversation about Brett Kavanaugh. Americans may, and do, hold different positions regarding the accusations against him. But surely we can all grasp the hypocrisy involved in suggesting that such actions shouldn’t be held against a privileged white teenager when three and four-year old children are getting suspended for talking back to a quite possibly incompetent teacher?