Race and bus bullies

School bus beating. Nerdy Looking Kid attempt to sit with Bully. Bully punches Nerdy Looking Kid. Other kids cheer.

Oh yeah, Bully was black, Nerdy Looking Kid was white. Other kids were mostly black, but not all.

Rush Limbaugh on the incident:

You put your kids on a school bus you expect safety but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering 'yeah, right on, right on, right on.' Of course everybody said the white kid deserved it he was born a racist, he's white.

Yeah, right. I'm going to outsource the fairly easy Limbaugh takedown to non-insane conservative blogger Rod Dreher (thanks for the link, Ry).

During my junior high years, I rode a bus with a large number of bullies on it (this is why I have no qualms about sending my dad my therapy bills), and my bus was also 75% black, so I think I have a few things to say on the topic of race, bullies, and buses.

The black kids I rode with were less likely to be bullies than the white kids, who were mostly of the "Southern redneck" variety. As a nerdy-looking white kid, I always got grief when I sat next to the Southern redneck white kids, so I tried to always sit with black kids. Even the most notorious "thug" black guys - towering ripped dudes with dreadlocks who had been held back a couple of years and were rumored to sell drugs - would never object when I sat next to them. The Southern redneck whites would wait until the black kids left the bus to come over and start picking on me.

Black-on-white violence did happen, however - twice, that I saw. Both times were initiated by Southern redneck white boys, who challenged black boys in some way (one swung first, one called a black kid a "nigger"). I interpreted this as Southern white redneck boys playing their usual dominance games, and black kids retaliating in the one black-friendly environment in which they were free to do so. In school, the fact that Southern redneck whites outnumbered blacks by more than 2 to 1 would have prevented such retaliation.

And as for crowds cheering when kids got into fights, that was pretty universal in every public school I attended, and the cheering crowds were typically multiracial. Bloodthirst united humanity across all racial boundaries.

If you think this sounds like the dynamics of a state correctional facility, you're not alone. I've often argued that one of the primary societal benefits of public school is "school as jail" - we send our most violent, irresponsible people (teenage boys) to a structured environment so that we don't have them roaming the streets and turning our nation into a reenactment of City of God. Our violent, tribalistic, and anti-intellectual culture makes public education ever so much more vital to the U.S. than to, say, Japan, where there are no truancy officers, 10% of kids just skip school, and the worst trouble they get into is some nonviolent drug use and teen prostitution.

But for the inmates in America's prison-schools, life is harsh. Those of us who came to school to learn - who would have been studying physics, instead of driving around waving guns, even had the law not required it - lived in constant fear of attack. The injustice that needs denouncing is not that black kids are beating up whites, but that bullies are beating up nerdy kids in communities of every race, color, and creed. The kids on that video could have been any color - go to schools ruled by Tongan gangs in San Diego and see who takes a beating from who - but it would always be Nerdy Kid getting whupped.

What we need to change our culture is not a race war, but a zero-tolerance policy toward violence in schools (focused on delivering punishment only toward those who start fights). Too long has America taken the attitude of "boys will be boys," hearkening back to the imaginary days when a school fight meant Tom Sawyer learning to stand up and be a man by giving the bully a pop on the nose. Many fights turn into gang fights. Many people pull weapons, with tragic consequences (and many more carry them just in case). And the supposed purpose of our schools - educating kids - takes a beating as well, as the daily bus ride turns into the opening of Shawshank Redemption.

(Note: A slightly pathetic side story here...one time, on that bus, I was being accosted by a Southern white redneck bully, and Ry came to my aid and fought the bully...I sat there paralyzed with fear, not of fighting but of getting punished and having my parents be disappointed with me...so I did nothing, and Ry got sent to "in-school suspension" for helping me out...the assistant principal in charge of the punishment raged at me and said that he wished he could punish me too, for being a "coward"...not one of my best days, but definitely not one of our school-prison system's best days...Ry, however, was quite a heroic 14-year-old...)