socialization - corwin

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55Building Identity

Socialization

S ociology teaches us that humans don’t develop in a social vacuum. Other people,cultural practices, historical events, and social institutions shape what we do and

say, what we value, and who we become. Our self-concept, identity, and sense of self-worth are derived from our interactions with other people. We are especially tunedinto the reactions, real or imagined, of others.

Socialization is the process by which individuals learn their culture and learn tolive according to the norms of their society. Through socialization, we learn how toperceive our world, gain a sense of our own identity, and discover how to interactappropriately with others. This learning process occurs within the context of severalsocial institutions—schools, religious institutions, the media, and the family—and itextends beyond childhood. Adults must be resocialized into a new galaxy of norms,values, and expectations each time they leave or abandon current positions and enternew ones.

The conditions into which we are born shape our initial socialization in profoundways. Positions such as race and social class are particularly significant factors in social-ization processes. In “Life as the Maid’s Daughter: An Exploration of the EverydayBoundaries of Race, Class, and Gender,” sociologist Mary Romero describes a researchinterview with a young Chicana regarding her recollections of growing up as thedaughter of a live-in maid for a white, upper-class family living in Los Angeles. Romerodescribes the many ways in which this girl learns to move between different social set-tings, adapt to different expectations, and occupy different social positions. This girlmust constantly negotiate the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, as she strugglesbetween the socializing influence of her own ethnic group and that of the white,upper-class employers she and her mother live with. Through this juggling, she illus-trates the ways in which we manage the different, often contradictory, identities thatwe take on in different situations.

Negotiating the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion is also the theme of“Boyhood, Organized Sports, and the Construction of Masculinities.” MichaelMessner uses the world of organized sports to describe some of the ways boys learn tobe boys. He shows that many of the behaviors and traits commonly associated withmasculinity are not inborn but are learned, especially through organized competitivesports. Participation (and success) in sports is one very significant place where boyslearn the meaning and expression of masculinity and what it takes to be accepted bytheir peers.

In “The Code of the Streets,” Elijah Anderson looks at the complexities of gendersocialization in a very different context. He is particularly interested in the develop-ment of “manhood” and respect among young African Americans on the streets of theinner city. Here, manhood is less about competitive success and more about the

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Chapter 5 ♦ Building Identity: Socialization 77

appearance of fearsomeness and the willingness to use violence to defend oneself. Tosurvive, one must adopt the “code”—a complex system of norms, dress, rituals, andexpected behavior. So powerful are these expectations that even girls strive for theirown version of tough manhood.

Something to Consider as You Read

According to sociologists, we are shaped by our cultural environment and by the influ-ences of significant people and groups in our lives. Consider some of the people orgroups whose opinions matter to you. Can you imagine them as a kind of audience inyour head, observing and reacting to your behavior? Think about the desire to feelincluded. To what extent has this desire shaped your participation in a group that hashad an impact on your self-image? How important are “role models” in the socializa-tion process? If someone is managing conflicting identities and has no role models orothers in similar situations, how might this conflict affect her or his sense of self andrelationships with others? What do these readings suggest about the importance ofbeing the “right person in the right place” even if that’s not all you feel yourself to be?How do you think power and authority affect people’s sense of self and their right tobe whomever they want to be in any situation?


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♦

Introduction

. . . My current research attempts to expand thesociological understanding of the dynamics ofrace, class, and gender in the everyday routinesof family life and reproductive labor. . . . I amlured to the unique setting presented by domes-tic service . . . and I turn to the realities experi-enced by the children of private householdworkers. This focus is not entirely voluntary.While presenting my research on Chicana pri-vate household workers, I was approachedrepeatedly by Latina/os and African Americanswho wanted to share their knowledge aboutdomestic service—knowledge they obtained asthe daughters and sons of household workers.Listening to their accounts about their mothers’employment presents another reality to under-standing paid and unpaid reproductive laborand the way in which persons of color aresocialized into a class-based, gendered, racistsocial structure. The following discussionexplores issues of stratification in everyday lifeby analyzing the life story of a maid’s daughter.This life story illustrates the potential of thestandpoint of the maid’s daughter for generat-ing knowledge about race, class, and gender. . . .

Social BoundariesPresented in the Life Story

The first interview with Teresa,1 the daughter ofa live-in maid, eventually led to a life historyproject. I am intrigued by Teresa’s experienceswith her mother’s white, upper-middle-classemployers while maintaining close ties to her

relatives in Juarez, Mexico, and Mexican friendsin Los Angeles. While some may view Teresa’slife as a freak accident, living a life of “rags toriches,” and certainly not a common Chicana/oexperience, her story represents a microcosm ofpower relationships in the larger society. Life asthe maid’s daughter in an upper-middle-classneighborhood exemplifies many aspects ofthe Chicano/Mexicano experience as “racial eth-nics” in the United States, whereby the bound-aries of inclusion and exclusion are constantlychanging as we move from one social settingand one social role to another.

Teresa’s narrative contains descriptiveaccounts of negotiating boundaries in theemployers’ homes and in their community. Asthe maid’s daughter, the old adage “Just likeone of the family” is a reality, and Teresa has tolearn when she must act like the employer’schild and when she must assume the appropri-ate behavior as the maid’s daughter. She has torecognize all the social cues and interpret socialsettings correctly—when to expect the samerights and privileges as the employer’s childrenand when to fulfill the expectations and obli-gations as the maid’s daughter. Unlike theemployers’ families, Teresa and her mother relyon different ways of obtaining knowledge. Thetaken-for-granted reality of the employers’families do not contain conscious experiencesof negotiating race and class status, particularlynot in the intimate setting of the home. Teresa’sstatus is constantly changing in response to thewide range of social settings she encounters—from employers’ dinner parties with moviestars and corporate executives to Sunday dinners

Life as the Maid’s DaughterAn Exploration of the Everyday

Boundaries of Race, Class, and Gender

Mary Romero

(1995)


with Mexican garment workers in Los Angelesand factory workers in El Paso. Since Teresaremains bilingual and bicultural throughouther life, her story reflects the constant struggleand resistance to maintain her Mexican iden-tity, claiming a reality that is neither rewardednor acknowledged as valid.

Teresa’s account of her life as the maid’sdaughter is symbolic of the way that racialethnics participate in the United States;sometimes we are included and other timesexcluded or ignored. Teresa’s story capturesthe reality of social stratification in theUnited States, that is, a racist, sexist, and class-structured society upheld by an ideology ofequality. I will analyze the experiences of themaid’s daughter in an upper-middle-classneighborhood in Los Angeles to investigate theways that boundaries of race, class, and genderare maintained or diffused in everyday life. Ihave selected various excerpts from the tran-scripts that illustrate how knowledge about aclass-based and gendered, racist social order islearned, the type of information that is con-veyed, and how the boundaries betweensystems of domination impact everyday life.I begin with a brief history of Teresa and hermother, Carmen.

Learning SocialBoundaries: Background

Teresa’s mother was born in Piedras Negras, asmall town in Aguas Calientes in Mexico. Afterher father was seriously injured in a railroadaccident, the family moved to a small townoutside Ciudad Juarez. . . . By the time she wasfifteen she moved to Juarez and took a job as adomestic, making about eight dollars a week.She soon crossed the border and began work-ing for Anglo families in the country club areain El Paso. Like other domestics in El Paso,Teresa’s mother returned to Mexico on week-ends and helped support her mother and sis-ters. In her late twenties she joined several ofher friends in their search for better-payingjobs in Los Angeles. The women immediatelyfound jobs in the garment industry. Yet, after

six months in the sweatshops, Teresa’s motherwent to an agency in search of domestic work.She was placed in a very exclusive Los Angelesneighborhood. Several years later Teresa wasborn. Her friends took care of the baby whileCarmen continued working; childcare becamea burden, however, and she eventually returnedto Mexico. At the age of thirty-six Teresa’smother returned to Mexico with her newbornbaby. Leaving Teresa with her grandmotherand aunts, her mother sought work in thecountry club area. Three years later Teresa andher mother returned to Los Angeles.

Over the next fifteen years Teresa livedwith her mother in the employer’s (Smith)home, usually the two sharing the maid’sroom located off the kitchen. From the age ofthree until Teresa started school, she accompa-nied her mother to work. She continued tolive in the Smiths’ home until she left for col-lege. All of Teresa’s live-in years were spent inone employer’s household. The Smiths wereunable to afford a full-time maid, however,so Teresa’s mother began doing day workthroughout the neighborhood. After schoolTeresa went to whatever house her mother wascleaning and waited until her mother finishedworking, around 4 or 6 P.M., and then returnedto the Smiths’ home with her mother. Manyprominent families in the neighborhood knewTeresa as the maid’s daughter and treated heraccordingly. While Teresa wanted the relation-ship with the employers to cease when shewent to college and left the neighborhood, hermother continued to work as a live-in maidwith no residence other than the room in theemployer’s home; consequently, Teresa’s socialstatus as the maid’s daughter continued. . . .

One of the Family

As Teresa got older, the boundaries betweeninsider and outsider became more compli-cated, as employers referred to her and Carmenas “one of the family.” Entering into anemployer’s world as the maid’s daughter,Teresa was not only subjected to the rules ofan outsider but also had to recognize when



80 PART 1I ♦ THE CONSTRUCTION OF SELF AND SOCIETY

the rules changed, making her momentarilyan insider. While the boundaries dictatingCarmen’s work became blurred between theobligations of an employee and that of a friendor family member, Teresa was forced into situ-ations in which she was expected to be just likeone of the employer’s children, and yet sheremained the maid’s daughter. . . .

Living under conditions established bythe employers made Teresa and her mother’sefforts to maintain a distinction betweentheir family life and an employer’s family verydifficult. Analyzing incidents in which theboundaries between the worker’s family andemployer’s family were blurred highlights theissues that complicate the mother-daughterrelationship. Teresa’s account of her mother’shospitalization was the first of numerousconflicts between the two that stemmed fromthe live-in situation and their relationshipswith the employer’s family. The followingexcerpt demonstrates the difficulty in inter-acting as a family unit and the degree of influ-ence and power employers exerted over theirdaily lives:

When I was about ten my mother got real sick.That summer, instead of sleeping downstairsin my mother’s room when my mother wasn’tthere, one of the kids was gone away to college,so it was just Rosalyn, David and myself thatwere home. The other two were gone, so I wasgonna sleep upstairs in one of the rooms. I wasaround eight or nine, ten I guess. I lived in theback room. It was a really neat room becauseRosalyn was allowed to paint it. She got herfriend who was real good, painted a big treeand clouds and all this stuff on the walls. So Ireally loved it and I had my own room. I waswith the Smiths all the time, as my parents, forabout two months. My mother was in the hos-pital for about a month. Then when she camehome, she really couldn’t do anything. Wewould all have dinner, the Smiths were really,really supportive. I went to summer schooland I took math and English and stuff likethat. I was in this drama class and I did dramaand I got to do the leading role. Everybodyreally liked me and Ms. Smith would come

and see my play. So things started to changewhen I got a lot closer to them and I was withthem alone. I would go see my mother every-day, and my cousin was there. I think that mycousin kind of resented all the time that theSmiths spent with me. I think my mother wasreally afraid that now that she wasn’t there thatthey were going to steal me from her. I went tosee her, but I could only stay a couple of hoursand it was really weird. I didn’t like seeing mymother in pain and she was in a lot of pain. Iremember before she came home the Smithssaid that they thought it would be a reallygood idea if I stayed upstairs and I had myown room now that my mother was going tobe sick and I couldn’t sleep in the same bed‘cause I might hurt her. It was important formy mother to be alone. And how did I feelabout that? I was really excited about that[having her own room]—you know. Theysaid, “Your mom she is probably not going tolike it and she might get upset about it, but Ithink that we can convince her that it is ok.”When my mom came home, she understoodthat she couldn’t be touched and that she hadto be really careful, but she wanted it [havingher own room] to be temporary. Then mymother was really upset. She got into it withthem and said, “No, I don’t want it that way.”She would tell me, “No, I want you to be downhere. ¿Qué crees que eres hija de ellos? You’regonna be with me all the time, you can’t dothat.” So I would tell Ms. Smith. She would askme when we would go to the market together,“How does your mom seem, what does shefeel, what does she say?” She would get me torelay that. I would say, “I think my mom isreally upset about me moving upstairs. Shedoesn’t like it and she just says no.” I wouldn’ttell her everything. They would talk to her andfinally they convinced her, but my mom really,really resented it and was really angry about it.She was just generally afraid. All these timesthat my mother wasn’t there, things happenedand they would take me places with them, goout to dinner with them and their friends. Sothat was a real big change, in that I sleptupstairs and had different rules. Everythingchanged. I was more independent. I did myown homework; they would open the backdoor and yell that dinner was ready—youknow. Things were just real different.


The account illustrates how assuming therole of insider was an illusion because neitherthe worker’s daughter nor the worker everbecame a member of the white, middle-classfamily. Teresa was only allowed to move out ofthe maid’s quarter, where she shared a bedwith her mother, when two of the employer’schildren were leaving home, vacating twobedrooms. . . .

Teresa and Carmen did not experience theboundaries of insider and outsider in the sameway. Teresa was in a position to assume a moreactive family role when employers made certainrequests. Unlike her mother, she was not anemployee and was not expected to clean andserve the employer. Carmen’s responsibilityfor the housework never ceased, however,regardless of the emotional ties existingbetween employee and employers. She and heremployers understood that, whatever familyactivity she might be participating in, if the sit-uation called for someone to clean, pick up, orserve, that was Carmen’s job. When the Smithsrequested Teresa to sit at the dinner table withthe family, they placed Teresa in a different classposition than her mother, who was nowexpected to serve her daughter alongside heremployer. Moving Teresa upstairs in a bedroomalongside the employer and their children wasbound to drive a wedge between Teresa andCarmen. There is a long history of spatial def-erence in domestic service, including separateentrances, staircases, and eating and sleepingarrangements. Carmen’s room reflected herposition in the household. As the maid’s quar-ter, the room was separated from the rest of thebedrooms and was located near the maid’s cen-tral work area, the kitchen. The room was obvi-ously not large enough for two beds becauseCarmen and Teresa shared a bed. Once Teresawas moved upstairs, she no longer shared thesame social space in the employer’s home as hermother. Weakening the bonds between themaid and her daughter permitted the employ-ers to broaden their range of relationships andinteraction with Teresa.

Carmen’s feelings of betrayal and lossunderline how threatening the employers’

actions were. She understood that the employ-ers were in a position to buy her child’s love.They had already attempted to socialize Teresainto Euro-American ideals by planningTeresa’s education and deciding what coursesshe would take. Guided by the importance theyplace on European culture, the employersdefined the Mexican Spanish spoken by Teresaand her mother as inadequate and classifiedCastillan Spanish as “proper” Spanish. As aMexican immigrant woman working as a live-in maid, Carmen was able to experience cer-tain middle-class privileges, but her only accessto these privileges was through her relation-ship with employers. Therefore, without theemployers’ assistance, she did not have the nec-essary connections to enroll Teresa in privateschools or provide her with upper-middle-class experiences to help her develop the skillsneeded to survive in elite schools. Carmen onlygained these privileges for her daughter at aprice; she relinquished many of her parentalrights to her employers. To a large degree theSmiths determined Carmen’s role as a parent,and the other employers restricted the time shehad to attend school functions and the amountof energy left at the end of the day to motherher own child.

Carmen pointed to the myth of “being likeone of the family” in her comment, “¿Quécrees que eres hija de ellos? You’re gonna bewith me all the time, you can’t do that.” Thestatement underlines the fact that the bondbetween mother and daughter is for life,whereas the pseudofamily relationship withemployers is temporary and conditional.Carmen wanted her daughter to understandthat taking on the role of being one of theemployer’s family did not relinquish her fromthe responsibility of fulfilling her “real” familyobligations. The resentment Teresa felt fromher cousin who was keeping vigil at his aunt’shospital bed indicated that she had not been adutiful daughter. The outside pressure from anemployer did not remove her own familyobligations and responsibilities. Teresa’s rela-tives expected a daughter to be at her mother’sside providing any assistance possible as a




caretaker, even if it was limited to companion-ship. The employer determined Teresa’s activ-ity, however, and shaped her behavior into thatof a middle-class child; consequently, she waskept away from the hospital and protectedfrom the realities of her mother’s illness.Furthermore, she was submerged into theemployer’s world, dining at the country cluband interacting with their friends.

Her mother’s accusation that Teresa wantedto be the Smiths’ daughter signifies the feelingsof betrayal or loss and the degree to whichCarmen was threatened by the employer’spower and authority. Yet Teresa also felt betrayaland loss and viewed herself in competition withthe employers for her mother’s time, attention,and love. In this excerpt Teresa accuses hermother of wanting to be part of employers’families and community:

I couldn’t understand it—you know—until Iwas about eighteen and then I said, “It is yourfault. If I treat the Smiths differently, it is yourfault. you chose to have me live in this situa-tion. It was your decision to let me have twoparents, and for me to balance things off, soyou can’t tell me that I said this. You are theone who wanted this.” When I was about eigh-teen we got into a huge fight on Christmas. Ihated the holidays because I hated spendingthem with the Smiths. My mother alwaysworked. She worked on every holiday. Sheloved to work on the holidays! She would lookforward to working. My mother just workedall the time! I think that part of it was that shewanted to have power and control over thiscommunity, and she wanted the network, andshe wanted to go to different people’s houses.

As employers, Mr. and Mrs. Smith wereable to exert an enormous amount of powerover the relationship between Teresa and hermother. Carmen was employed in an occupa-tion in which the way to improve workingconditions, pay, and benefits was through themanipulation of personal relationships withemployers. Carmen obviously tried to takeadvantage of her relationship with the Smithsin order to provide the best for her daughter.

The more intimate and interpersonal therelationship, the more likely employers wereto give gifts, do favors, and provide financialassistance. Although speaking in anger andfilled with hurt, Teresa accused her mother ofchoosing to be with employers and theirfamilies rather than with her own daughter.Underneath Teresa’s accusation was theunderstanding that the only influence and sta-tus her mother had as a domestic was gainedthrough her personal relationships withemployers. Although her mother had limitedpower in rejecting the Smiths’ demands,Teresa held her responsible for giving themtoo much control. Teresa argued that the pos-itive relationship with the Smiths was doneout of obedience to her mother and deniedany familial feelings toward the employers.The web between employee and employers’families affected both mother and daughter,who were unable to separate the boundariesof work and family.

Maintaining Cultural Identity

A major theme in Teresa’s narrative was herstruggle to retain her Mexican culture and herpolitical commitment to social justice. Ratherthan internalizing meaning attached to Euro-American practices and redefining Mexican cul-ture and bilingualism as negative social traits,Teresa learned to be a competent social actor inboth white, upper-middle-class environmentsand in working- and middle-class Chicano andMexicano environments. To survive as a strangerin so many social settings, Teresa developed anacute skill for assessing the rules governing aparticular social setting and acting accordingly.Her ability to be competent in diverse social set-tings was only possible, however, because of herlife with the employers’ children. Teresa and hermother maintained another life—one that wasguarded and protected against any employerintrusion. Their other life was Mexican, notwhite, was Spanish speaking, not English speak-ing, was female dominated rather than maledominated, and was poor and working-class,not upper-middle-class. During the week Teresa


and her mother visited the other Mexican maidsin the neighborhoods, on weekends they occa-sionally took a bus into the Mexican barrio inLos Angeles to have dinner with friends, andevery summer they spent a month in CiudadJuarez with their family. . . .

Teresa’s description of evening activitywith the Mexican maids in the neighborhoodprovides insight into her daily socializationand explains how she learned to live in theemployer’s home without internalizing alltheir negative attitudes toward Mexican andworking-class culture. Within the white,upper-class neighborhood in which theyworked, the Mexican maids got together on aregular basis and cooked Mexican food, lis-tened to Mexican music, and gossiped inSpanish about their employers. Treated asinvisible or as confidants, the maids were fre-quently exposed to the intimate details of theiremployers’ marriages and family life. TheMexican maids voiced their disapproval of thelenient child-rearing practices and parentaldecisions, particularly surrounding drug usageand the importance of material possessions:

Raquel was the only one [maid] in the neighbor-hood who had her own room and own tv set. Soeverybody would go over to Raquel’s. . . . Thiswas my mother’s support system. After hours,they would go to different people’s [maid’s]rooms depending on what their rooms had.Some of them had kitchens and they would goand cook all together, or do things like playcards and talk all the time. I remember that inthose situations they would sit, and my motherwould talk about the Smiths, what they werelike. When they were going to negotiate forraises, when they didn’t like certain things,I would listen and hear all the different discus-sions about what was going on in differenthouses. And they would talk, also, about thefamily relationships. The way they interacted,the kids did this and that. At the time some ofthe kids were smoking pot and they would talkabout who was smoking marijuana. Howweird it was that the parents didn’t care. Theywould talk about what they saw as beingwrong. The marriage relationship, or how

weird it was they would go off to the beautyshop and spend all this money, go shoppingand do all these weird things and the effect thatit had on the kids.

The interaction among the maids pointsto the existence of another culture operatinginvisibly within a Euro-American and male-dominated community. The workers’ supportsystem did not include employers andaddressed their concerns as mothers, immi-grants, workers, and women. They created aMexican-dominated domain for themselves.Here they ate Mexican food, spoke Spanish, lis-tened to the Spanish radio station, andwatched novellas on TV. Here Teresa was not acultural artifact but, instead, a member of theMexican community.

In exchanging gossip and voicing theiropinions about the employers’ lifestyles, themaids rejected many of the employers’ priori-ties in life. Sharing stories about the employers’families allowed the Mexican immigrantwomen to be critical of white, upper-middle-class families and to affirm and enhance theirown cultural practices and beliefs. The regularevening sessions with other working-classMexican immigrant women were essential inpreserving Teresa and her mother’s culturalvalues and were an important agency of social-ization for Teresa. For instance, the maidshad a much higher regard for their duties andresponsibilities as mothers than as wives orlovers. In comparison to their mistresses, theywere not financially dependent on men, nordid they engage in the expensive and time-consuming activity of being an ideal wife, suchas dieting, exercising, and maintaining a cer-tain standard of beauty in their dress, makeup,and hairdos. Unlike the employers’ daughters,who attended cotillions and were socialized toacquire success through marriage, Teresa wasconstantly pushed to succeed academically inorder to pursue a career. The gender identitycultivated among the maids did not includedependence on men or the learned helpless-ness that was enforced in the employers’homes but, rather, promoted self-sufficiency.


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However, both white women employers andMexican women employees were expected tobe nurturing and caring. These traits were fur-ther reinforced when employers asked Teresato babysit for their children or to provide themwith companionship during their husbands’absences.

So, while Teresa observed her motheradapting to the employers’ standards in herinteraction with their children, she learnedthat her mother did not approve of theirlifestyle and understood that she had anotherset of expectations to adhere to. Teresaattended the same schools as employers’children, wore similar clothes, and conductedmost of her social life within the same socio-economic class, but she remained the maid’sdaughter—and learned the limitations of thatposition. Teresa watched her mother upholdhigher standards for her and apply a differentset of standards to the employers’ children;most of the time, however, it appeared toTeresa as if they had no rules at all.

Sharing stories about the Smiths andother employers in a female, Mexican, andworker-dominated social setting providedTeresa with a clear image of the people shelived with as employers rather than as familymembers. Seeing the employers through theeyes of the employees forced Teresa to ques-tion their kindness and benevolence and torecognize their use of manipulation to obtainadditional physical and emotional labor fromthe employees. She became aware of the work-ers’ struggles and the long list of grievances,including no annual raises, no paid vacations,no social security or health benefits, little ifany privacy, and sexual harassment. Teresawas also exposed to the price that working-class immigrant women employed as live-inmaids paid in maintaining white, middle-class, patriarchal communities. Employers’careers and lifestyles, particularly the every-day rituals affirming male privilege, weremade possible through the labor womenprovided for men’s physical, social, and emo-tional needs. Female employers depended on

the maid’s labor to assist in the reproductionof their gendered class status. Householdlabor was expanded in order to accommodatethe male members of the employers’ familiesand to preserve their privilege. Additionalwork was created by rearranging mealsaround men’s work and recreation schedulesand by waiting on them and serving them.Teresa’s mother was frequently called uponto provide emotional labor for the wife,husband, mother, and father within anemployer’s family, thus freeing members towork or increase their leisure time.

Discussion

Teresa’s account offers insight into the waysracial ethnic women gain knowledge about thesocial order and use the knowledge to developsurvival strategies. As the college-educateddaughter of an immigrant Mexican womanemployed as a live-in maid, Teresa’s experi-ences in the employers’ homes, neighborhood,and school and her experiences in the homesof working-class Mexicano families and bar-rios provided her with the skills to cross theclass and cultural boundaries separating thetwo worlds. The process of negotiating socialboundaries involved an evaluation of Euro-American culture and its belief system in lightof an intimate knowledge of white, middle-class families. Being in the position to com-pare and contrast behavior within differentcommunities, Teresa debunked notions of“American family values” and resisted effortstoward assimilation. Learning to function inthe employers’ world was accomplished with-out internalizing its belief system, whichdefined ethnic culture as inferior. Unlike theemployers’ families, Teresa’s was not able toassume the taken-for-granted reality of hermother’s employers because her experiencesprovided a different kind of knowledge aboutthe social order.

While the employers’ children were sur-rounded by positive images of their race andclass status, Teresa faced negative sanctions




against her culture and powerless images ofher race. Among employers’ families shequickly learned that her “mother tongue” wasnot valued and that her culture was denied.All the Mexican adults in the neighborhoodwere in subordinate positions to the whiteadults and were responsible for caring for andnurturing white children. Most of the femaleemployers were full-time homemakers whoenjoyed the financial security provided bytheir husbands, whereas the Mexican immi-grant women in the neighborhood all workedas maids and were financially independent; inmany cases they were supporting children,husbands, and other family members. Bydirectly observing her mother serve, pick upafter, and nurture employers and their fami-lies, Teresa learned about white, middle-classprivileges. Her experiences with other working-class Mexicans were dominated by women’sresponsibility for their children and extendedfamilies. Here the major responsibility ofmothering was financial; caring and nurtur-ing were secondary and were provided by theextended family or children did without.Confronted with a working mother who wastoo tired to spend time with her, Teresa learnedabout the racial, class, and gender parametersof parenthood, including its privileges,rights, responsibilities, and obligations. Shealso learned that the role of a daughter includedhelping her mother with everyday householdtasks and, eventually, with the financial needsof the extended family. Unlike her uncles andmale cousins, Teresa was not exempt fromcooking and housework, regardless of herfinancial contributions. Within the extendedfamily Teresa was subjected to standards ofbeauty strongly weighted by male definitionsof women as modest beings, many timesrestricted in her dress and physical move-ments. Her social worlds became clearlymarked by race, ethnic, class, and gender differences.

Successfully negotiating movement froma white, male, and middle-class setting toone dominated by working-class, immigrant,

Mexican women involved a socialization pro-cess that provided Teresa with the skills to bebicultural. Since neither setting was bicultural,Teresa had to become that in order to be acompetent social actor in each. Being bicul-tural included having the ability to assess therules governing each setting and to under-stand her ethnic, class, and gender position.Her early socialization in the employers’households was not guided by principles ofcreativity, independence, and leadership but,rather, was based on conformity and accom-modation. Teresa’s experiences in two differ-ent cultural groups allowed her to separateeach and to fulfill the employers’ expectationswithout necessarily internalizing the meaningattached to the act. Therefore, she was able tolearn English without internalizing the ideathat English is superior to Spanish or thatmonolingualism is normal. The existence of aMexican community within the employers’neighborhood provided Teresa with a collec-tive experience of class-based racism, and themaids’ support system affirmed and enhancedtheir own belief system and culture. AsPhilomena Essed (1991, 294) points out, “Theproblem is not only how knowledge of racismis acquired but also what kind of knowledge isbeing transmitted.”

Teresa’s life story lends itself to a com-plex set of analyses because the pressures toassimilate were challenged by the positiveinteractions she experienced within her eth-nic community. Like other bilingual personsin the United States, Teresa’s linguistic abili-ties were shaped by the linguistic practices ofthe social settings she had access to. Teresalearned the appropriate behavior for eachsocial setting, each marked by different classand cultural dynamics and in which women’seconomic roles and relationships to menwere distinct. An overview of Teresa’s social-ization illustrates the process of biculturalism—a process that included different sets ofstandards and rules governing her actions asa woman, as a Chicana, and as the maid’sdaughter. . . .



NOTES

This essay was originally presented as a paper atthe University of Michigan, “Feminist Scholarship:Thinking through the Disciplines,” 30 January 1992.I want to thank Abigail J. Stewart and Donna Stantonfor their insightful comments and suggestions.

1. The names are pseudonyms.

REFERENCE

Essed, Philomena. 1991. Understanding EverydayRacism. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications.

THINKING ABOUT THE READING

Teresa’s childhood is unique in that she and her mother lived in several employers’homes, requiring her to learn different sets of rules and to adjust her behavior to thesenew expectations each time they moved. Unlike most children, who are free to explorethe world around them, her childhood was shaped by the need to read signals fromothers to determine her position in each social setting. What were some of the differ-ent influences in Teresa’s early socialization? Did she accept people’s attempts to moldher, or did she resist? How did she react to her mother’s employers’ referring to her as“one of the family”? Teresa came from a poor family, but she spent her childhood inaffluent households. With respect to socialization, what advantages do you think theseexperiences provided her? What were the disadvantages? How do you think these expe-riences would have changed if she was a son of a live-in maid rather than a daughter?If she was a poor white girl rather than Latina?


87

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. . . This article explores the relationshipbetween the construction of masculine iden-tity and boyhood participation in organizedsports. I view gender identity not as a “thing”that people “have,” but rather as a process ofconstruction that develops, comes into crisis,and changes as a person interacts with thesocial world. Through this perspective, itbecomes possible to speak of “gendering” iden-tities rather than “masculinity” or “femininity”as relatively fixed identities or statuses. . . .

In this study I explore and interpret themeanings that males themselves attribute totheir boyhood participation in organizedsports. In what ways do males construct mas-culine identities within the institution oforganized sports? In what ways do class andracial differences mediate this relationshipand perhaps lead to the construction of dif-ferent meanings, and perhaps different mas-culinities? And what are some of the problemsand contradictions within these constructionsof masculinity?

Description of Research

Between 1983 and 1985, I conducted inter-views with 30 male former athletes. Most ofthe men I interviewed had played the (U.S.)“major sports”—football, basketball, baseball,track. At the time of the interview, each hadbeen retired from playing organized sports forat least five years. Their ages ranged from 21 to48, with the median, 33; 14 were black, 14were white, and two were Hispanic; 15 of the16 black and Hispanic men had come frompoor or working-class families, while the

majority (9 of 14) of the white men had comefrom middle-class or professional families. Allhad at some time in their lives based theiridentities largely on their roles as athletes andcould therefore be said to have had “athleticcareers.” Twelve had played organized sportsthrough high school, 11 through college, andseven had been professional athletes. Thoughthe sample was not randomly selected, aneffort was made to see that the sample had arange of difference in terms of race and socialclass backgrounds, and that there was somevariety in terms of age, types of sports played,and levels of success in athletic careers. Withoutexception, each man contacted agreed to beinterviewed. . . .

In collecting what amounted to life histo-ries of these men, my overarching purposewas to use feminist theories of masculine gen-der identity to explore how masculinitydevelops and changes as boys and men inter-act within the socially constructed world oforganized sports. In addition to using thedata to move toward some generalizationsabout the relationship between “masculinityand sport,” I was also concerned with sortingout some of the variations among boys, basedon class and racial inequalities that led themto relate differently to athletic careers. Idivided my sample into two comparisongroups. The first group was made up of 10men from higher-status backgrounds, pri-marily white, middle-class, and professionalfamilies. The second group was made up of20 men from lower-status backgrounds,primarily minority, poor, and working-classfamilies.

Boyhood, Organized Sports, andthe Construction of Masculinities

Michael A. Messner

(1990)



Boyhood andthe Promise of Sports

Zane Grey once said, “All boys love baseball. Ifthey don’t they’re not real boys” (as cited inKimmel, 1990). This is, of course, an ideo-logical statement. In fact, some boys do notlove baseball, or any other sports, for thatmatter. There are millions of males who atan early age are rejected by, become alienatedfrom, or lose interest in organized sports. Yetall boys are, to a greater or lesser extent, judgedaccording to their ability, or lack of ability, incompetitive sports (Eitzen, 1975; Sabo, 1985).In this study I focus on those males whodid become athletes—males who eventuallypoured thousands of hours into the develop-ment of specific physical skills. It is in boyhoodthat we can discover the roots of their commit-ment to athletic careers.

How did organized sports come to playsuch a central role in these boys’ lives? Whenasked to recall how and why they initially gotinto playing sports, many of the men inter-viewed for this study seemed a bit puzzled:after all, playing sports was “just the thing todo.” A 42-year old black man who had playedcollege basketball put it this way:

It was just what you did. It’s kind of like, youwent to school, you played athletics, and if youdidn’t, there was something wrong with you. Itwas just like brushing your teeth: it’s just whatyou did. It’s part of your existence.

Spending one’s time playing sports withother boys seemed as natural as the cycle of theseasons: baseball in the spring and summer,football in the fall, basketball in the winter—and then it was time get out the old baseballglove and begin again. As a black 35-year-oldformer professional football star said:

I’d say when I wasn’t in school, 95% of the timewas spent in the park playing. It was the onlything to do. It just came as natural.

And a black, 34-year-old professional bas-ketball player explained his early experiencesin sports:

My principal and teacher said, “Now if youwork at this you might be pretty damnedgood.” So it was more or less a communitything—everybody in the community said,“Boy, if you work hard and keep your noseclean, you gonna be good.” Cause it was naturalinstinct.

“It was natural instinct.”“I was a natural.”Several athletes used words such as these toexplain their early attraction to sports. Butcertainly there is nothing “natural” aboutthrowing a ball through a hoop, hitting a ballwith a bat, or jumping over hurdles. A boy, forinstance, may have amazingly dexterousinborn hand-eye coordination, but this doesnot predispose him to a career of hitting base-balls any more than it predisposes him to alife as a brain surgeon. When one listensclosely to what these men said about theirearly experiences in sports, it becomes clearthat their adoption of the self-definition of“natural athlete” was the result of whatConnell (1990) has called “a collective prac-tice” that constructs masculinities. The boy-hood development of masculine identity andstatus—truly problematic in a society thatoffers no official rite of passage into adult-hood—results from a process of interactionwith people and social institutions. Thus, indiscussing early motivations in sports, mencommonly talk of the importance of relation-ships with family members, peers, and thebroader community.

Family Influences

Though most of the men in this study spoke oftheir mothers with love, respect, even rever-ence, their descriptions of their earliest experi-ences in sports are stories of an exclusivelymale world. The existence of older brothers oruncles who served as teachers and athletic rolemodels—as well as sources of competition forattention and status within the family—wasvery common. An older brother, uncle, or evenclose friend of the family who was a successfulathlete appears to have acted as a sort ofstandard of achievement against whom to


measure oneself. A 34-year-old black man whohad been a three-sport star in high school said:

My uncles—my Uncle Harold went to theDetroit Tigers, played pro ball—all of ‘em, every-body played sports, so I wanted to be better thananybody else. I knew that everybody in this townknew them—their names were something. Iwanted my name to be just like theirs.

Similarly, a black 41-year-old formerprofessional football player recalled:

I was the younger of three brothers and every-body played sports, so consequently I wasmore or less forced into it. ‘Cause one brother was always better than the next brother andthen I came along and had to show them thatI was just as good as them. My oldest brotherwas an all-city ballplayer, then my otherbrother comes along and he’s all-city andall-state, and then I have to come along.

For some, attempting to emulate or sur-pass the athletic accomplishments of oldermale family members created pressures thatwere difficult to deal with. A 33-year-old whiteman explained that he was a good athlete dur-ing boyhood, but the constant awareness thathis two older brothers had been better made itdifficult for him to feel good about himself, orto have fun in sports:

I had this sort of reputation that I followedfrom the playgrounds through grade school,and through high school. I followed these guyswho were all-conference and all-state.

Most of these men, however, saw theirrelationships with their athletic older brothersand uncles in a positive light; it was withinthese relationships that they gained experienceand developed motivations that gave them acompetitive “edge” within their same-aged peergroup. As a 33-year-old black man describes hisearliest athletic experiences:

My brothers were role models. I wanted toprove—especially to my brothers—that I hadheart, you know, that I was a man.

When asked, “What did it mean to you tobe ‘a man’ at that age?” he replied:

Well, it meant that I didn’t want to be a so-called scaredy-cat. You want to hit a guy eventhough he’s bigger than you to show that, youknow, you’ve got this macho image. I remem-ber that at that young an age, that feeling wasexciting to me. And that carried over, and asI got older, I got better and I began to lookaround me and see, well hey! I’m competitivewith these guys, even though I’m younger,you know? And then of course all the compli-ments come—and I began to notice a change,even in my parents—especially in my father—he was proud of that, and that was veryimportant to me. He was extremely impor-tant . . . he showed me more affection, nowthat I think of it.

As this man’s words suggest, if men talkof their older brothers and uncles mostly asrole models, teachers, and “names” to emu-late, their talk of their relationships with theirfathers is more deeply layered and complex.Athletic skills and competition for status mayoften be learned from older brothers, but it isin boys’ relationships with fathers that we findmany of the keys to the emotional salience ofsports in the development of masculineidentity.

Relationships With Fathers

The fact that boys’ introductions to organizedsports are often made by fathers who mightotherwise be absent or emotionally distantadds a powerful emotional charge to theseearly experiences (Osherson, 1986). Althoughplaying organized sports eventually came tofeel “natural” for all of the men interviewed inthis study, many needed to be “exposed” tosports, or even gently “pushed” by their fathersto become involved in activities like LittleLeague baseball. A white, 33-year-old manexplained:

I still remember it like it was yesterday—Dadand I driving up in his truck, and I had myglove and my hat and all that—and I said,




“Dad, I don’t want to do it.” He says, “What?” Isays, “I don’t want to do it.” I was nervous. ThatI might fail. And he says, “Don’t be silly. Lookit:There’s Joey and Petey and all your friends outthere.” And so Dad says, “You’re gonna do it,come on.” And in my memory he’s never saidthat about anything else; he just knew I neededa little kick in the pants and I’d do it. And onceyou’re out there and you see all the other kidsmaking errors and stuff, and you know you’rebetter than those guys, you know: Maybe I dobelong here. As it turned out, Little League wasa good experience.

Some who were similarly “pushed” bytheir fathers were not so successful as theaforementioned man had been in Little Leaguebaseball, and thus the experience was not alto-gether a joyous affair. One 34-year-old whiteman, for instance, said he “inherited” his inter-est in sports from his father, who started play-ing catch with him at the age of four. Once hegot into Little League, he felt pressured by hisfather, one of the coaches, who expected him tobe the star of the team:

I’d go 0-for-four sometimes, strike out threetimes in a Little League game, and I’d dreadthe ride home. I’d come home and he’d say,“Go in the bathroom and swing the bat in themirror for an hour,” to get my swing level. . . . Itdidn’t help much, though, I’d go out and strikeout three or four times again the next game too[laughs ironically].

When asked if he had been concerned withhaving his father’s approval, he responded:

Failure in his eyes? Yeah, I always thought thathe wanted me to get some kind of [athletic]scholarship. I guess I was afraid of him whenI was a kid. He didn’t hit that much, but he hada rage about him—he’d rage, and that voicewould just rattle you.

Similarly, a 24-year-old black man des-cribed his awe of his father’s physical powerand presence, and his sense of inadequacy inattempting to emulate him:

My father had a voice that sounded like rollingthunder. Whether it was intentional on his partor not, I don’t know, but my father gave me asense, an image of him being the most power-ful being on earth, and that no matter whatI ever did I would never come close tohim. . . . There were definite feelings of physicalinadequacy that I couldn’t work around.

It is interesting to note how these feelingsof physical inadequacy relative to the fatherlived on as part of this young man’s permanentinternalized image. He eventually became a“feared” high school football player and brokeschool records in weight-lifting, yet,

As I grew older, my mother and friends told methat I had actually grown to be a larger manthan my father. Even though in time I requiredlarger clothes than he, which should have beena very concrete indication, neither my brothernor I could ever bring ourselves to say thatI was bigger. We simply couldn’t conceive of it.

Using sports activities as a means of iden-tifying with and “living up to” the power andstatus of one’s father was not always such apainful and difficult task for the men I inter-viewed. Most did not describe fathers who“pushed” them to become sports star. The rela-tionship between their athletic strivings andtheir identification with their fathers was moresubtle. A 48-year-old black man, for instance,explained that he was not pushed into sportsby his father, but was aware from an early ageof the community status his father had gainedthrough sports. He saw his own athleticaccomplishments as a way to connect with andemulate his father:

I wanted to play baseball because my fatherhad been quite a good baseball player in theNegro leagues before baseball was integrated,and so he was kind of a model for me. Iremember, quite young, going to a baseballgame he was in—this was before the war andall—I remember being in the stands with mymother and seeing him on first base, and being


aware of the crowd. . . . I was aware of people’sconfidence in him as a serious baseball player.I don’t think my father ever said anything tome like “play sports.” . . . [But] I knew hewould like it if I did well. His admiration wasimportant . . . he mattered.

Similarly, a 24-year-old white man describedhis father as a somewhat distant “role model”whose approval mattered:

My father was more of an example . . . he defi-nitely was very much in touch with and stillhad very fond memories of being an athleteand talked about it, bragged about it. . . . Buthe really didn’t do that much to teach me skills,and he didn’t always go to every game I playedlike some parents. But he approved and thatwas important, you know. That was importantto get his approval. I always knew that playingsports was important to him, so I knew implic-itly that it was good and there was definitely avalue on it.

First experiences in sports might oftencome through relationships with brothers orolder male relatives, and the early emotionalsalience of sports was often directly related to aboy’s relationship with his father. The sense ofcommitment that these young boys eventuallymade to the development of athletic careersis best explained as a process of developmentof masculine gender identity and status inrelation to same-sex peers.

Masculine Identity and EarlyCommitment to Sports

When many of the men in this study said thatduring childhood they played sports because“it’s just what everybody did,” they of coursemeant that it was just what boys did. They wereintroduced to organized sports by older broth-ers and fathers, and once involved, foundthemselves playing within an exclusively male world. Though the separate (andunequal) gendered worlds of boys and girlscame to appear as “natural,” they were in factsocially constructed. Thorne’s observations of

children’s activities in schools indicated thatrather than “naturally” constituting “separategendered cultures,” there is considerable inter-action between boys and girls in classroomsand on playgrounds. When adults set up legit-imate contact between boys and girls, Thorneobserved, this usually results in “relaxed inter-actions.” But when activities in the classroomor on the playground are presented to childrenas sex-segregated activities and gender ismarked by teachers and other adults (“boysline up here, girls over there”), “gender bound-aries are heightened, and mixed-sex interac-tion becomes an explicit arena of risk”(Thorne, 1986, p. 70). Thus sex-segregatedactivities such as organized sports, as struc-tured by adults, provide the context in whichgendered identities and separate “genderedcultures” develop and come to appear natural.For the boys in this study, it became “natural”to equate masculinity with competition,physical strength, and skills. Girls simply didnot (could not, it was believed) participate inthese activities.

Yet it is not simply the separation ofchildren, by adults, into separate activitiesthat explains why many boys came to feel suchstrong connection with sports activities, whileso few girls did. As I listened to men recall theirearliest experiences in organized sports, Iheard them talk of insecurity, loneliness, andespecially a need to connect with other peopleas a primary motivation in their early sportsstrivings. As a 42-year-old white man stated,“The most important thing was just being outthere with the rest of the guys—being friends.”Another 32-year-old interviewee was born inMexico and moved to the United States at afairly young age. He never knew his father, andhis mother died when he was only nine yearsold. Suddenly he felt rootless, and threw him-self into sports. His initial motivations, how-ever, do not appear to be based on a need tocompete and win:

Actually, what I think sports did for me is itbrought me into kind of an instant family. By



being on a Little League team, or even justplaying with all kinds of different kids in theneighborhood, it brought what I really wanted,which was some kind of closeness. It was justbeing there, and being friends.

Clearly, what these boys needed andcraved was that which was most problematicfor them: connection and unity with otherpeople. But why do these young males findorganized sports such an attractive context inwhich to establish “a kind of closeness” withothers? Comparative observations of youngboys’ and girls’ game-playing behaviors yieldimportant insights into this question. Piaget(1965) and Lever (1976) both observed thatgirls tend to have more “pragmatic” and “flex-ible” orientations to the rules of games; theyare more prone to make exceptions and inno-vations in the middle of a game in order tomake the game more “fair.” Boys, on the otherhand, tend to have a more firm, even [in]flex-ible orientation to the rules of a game; tothem, the rules are what protect any fairness.This difference, according to Gilligan (1982),is based on the fact that early developmentalexperiences have yielded deeply rooted differ-ences between males’ and females’ devel-opmental tasks, needs, and moral reasoning.Girls, who tend to define themselves primar-ily through connection with others, experi-ence highly competitive situations (whetherin organized sports or in other hierarchicalinstitutions) as threats to relationships, andthus to their identities. For boys, the develop-ment of gender identity involves the con-struction of positional identities, where asense of self is solidified through separationfrom others (Chodorow, 1978). Yet feministpsychoanalytic theory has tended to oversim-plify the internal lives of men (Lichterman,1986). Males do appear to develop positionalidentities, yet despite their fears of intimacy,they also retain a human need for closenessand unity with others. This ambivalencetoward intimate relationships is a majorthread running through masculine develop-ment throughout the life course. Here we can

conceptualize what Craib (1987) calls the“elective affinity” between personality andsocial structure: For the boy who both seeksand fears attachment with others, the rule-bound structure of organized sports canpromise to be a safe place in which to seeknonintimate attachment with others within acontext that maintains clear boundaries, dis-tance, and separation.

Competitive Structures andConditional Self-Worth

Young boys may initially find that sports givethem the opportunity to experience “somekind of closeness” with others, but the struc-ture of sports and athletic careers often under-mines the possibility of boys learning totranscend their fears of intimacy, thus becom-ing able to develop truly close intimate rela-tionships with others (Kidd, 1990; Messner,1987). The sports world is extremely hierarchi-cal, and an incredible amount of importance isplaced on winning, on “being number one.”For instance, a few years ago I observed a bas-ketball camp put on for boys by a professionalbasketball coach and his staff. The youngestboys, about eight years old (who could barelyreach the basket with their shots) played a briefscrimmage. Afterwards, the coaches linedthem up in a row in front of the older boyswho were sitting in the grandstands. One byone, the coach would stand behind each boy,put his hand on the boy’s head (much in themanner of a priestly benediction), and theolder boys in the stands would applaud andcheer, louder or softer, depending on how wellor poorly the young boy was judged to haveperformed. The two or three boys who wereclearly the exceptional players looked confi-dent that they would receive the praise theywere due. Most of the boys, though, hadexpressions ranging from puzzlement to thinlydisguised terror on their faces as they awaitedthe judgments of the older boys.

This kind of experience teaches boys that itis not “just being out there with the guys—being




friends” that ensures the kind of attentionand connection that they crave; it is beingbetter than the other guys—beating them—that is the key to acceptance. Most of the boysin this study did have some early successes insports, and thus their ambivalent need forconnection with others was met, at least for atime. But the institution of sport tends toencourage the development of what Schafer(1975) has called “conditional self-worth” inboys. As boys become aware that acceptanceby others is contingent upon being good—a“winner”—narrow definitions of success,based upon performance and winning,become increasingly important to them. A33-year-old black man said that by the timehe was in his early teens:

It was expected of me to do well in all mycontests—I mean by my coaches, my peers,and my family. So I in turn expected to dowell, and if I didn’t do well, then I’d be verydisappointed.

The man from Mexico, discussed above,who said that he had sought “some kind ofcloseness” in his early sports experiences beganto notice in his early teens that if he playedwell, was a winner, he would get attention fromothers:

It got to the point where I started realizing,noticing that people were always there for me,backing me all the time—sports got to bereally fun because I always had some peoplethere backing me. Finally my oldest brotherstarted going to all my games, even though Ihad never really seen who he was [laughs]—after the game, you know, we never really saweach other, but he was at all my baseballgames, and it seemed like we shared a kind ofcloseness there, but only in those situations.Off the field, when I wasn’t in uniform, he wasnever around.

By high school, he said, he felt “up againstthe wall.” Sports hadn’t delivered what he hadhoped it would, but he thought if he just tried

harder, won one more championship trophy,he would get the attention he truly craved.Despite his efforts, this attention was notforthcoming. And, sadly, the pressures he hadput on himself to excel in sports had takenmost of the fun out of playing.

For many of the men in this study,throughout boyhood and into adolescence,this conscious striving for successful achieve-ment became the primary means throughwhich they sought connection with otherpeople (Messner, 1987). But it is importantto recognize that young males’ internalizedambivalence about intimacy do not fullydetermine the contours and directions oftheir lives. Masculinity continues to developthrough interaction with the social world—and because boys from different back-grounds are interacting with substantiallydifferent familial, educational, and other insti-tutions, these differences will lead them tomake different choices and define situations indifferent ways. Next, I examine the differencesin the ways that boys from higher- and lower-status families and communities related toorganized sports.

Status Differences andCommitments to Sports

In discussing early attractions to sports, theexperiences of boys from higher- and lower-status backgrounds are quite similar. Bothgroups indicate the importance of fathers andolder brothers in introducing them to sports.Both groups speak of the joys of receivingattention and acceptance among family andpeers for early successes in sports. Note thesimilarities, for instance, in the followingdescriptions of boyhood athletic experiencesof two men. First, a man born in a white,middle-class family:

I loved playing sports so much from a veryearly age because of early exposure. A lot of thesports came easy at an early age, and becausethey did, and because you were successful atsomething, I think that you’re inclined to strive



for that gratification. It’s like, if you’re good,you like it, because it’s instant gratification. I’mdoing something that I’m good at and I’mgonna keep doing it.

Second, a black man from a poor family:

Fortunately I had some athletic ability, and,quite naturally, once you start doing good inwhatever it is—I don’t care if it’s jacks—youshow off what you do. That’s your ability, that’syour blessing, so you show it off as much asyou can.

For boys from both groups, early expo-sure to sports, the discovery that they hadsome “ability,” shortly followed by some sortof family, peer, and community recognition,all eventually led to the commitment of hun-dreds and thousands of hours of playing,practicing, and dreaming of future stardom.Despite these similarities, there are also someidentifiable differences that begin to explainthe tendency of males from lower-status back-grounds to develop higher levels of commit-ment to sports careers. The most clear-cutdifference was that while men from higher-status backgrounds are likely to describe theirearliest athletic experiences and motivationsalmost exclusively in terms of immediatefamily, men from lower-status backgroundsmore commonly describe the importance of abroader community context. For instance, a46-year-old man who grew up in a “poorworking class” black family in a small town inArkansas explained:

In that community, at the age of third orfourth grade, if you’re a male, they expectyou to show some kind of inclination, somekind of skill in football or basketball. It was anexpected thing, you know? My mom and mydad, they didn’t push at all. It was the generalenvironment.

A 48-year-old man describes sports activi-ties as a survival strategy in his poor blackcommunity:

Sports protected me from having to competein gang stuff, or having to be good with myfists. If you were an athlete and got into the fistworld, that was your business, and that wasokay—but you didn’t have to if you didn’twant to. People would generally defer to you,give you your space away from trouble.

A 35-year-old man who grew up in “apoor black ghetto” described his boyhood rela-tionship to sports similarly:

Where I came from, either you were one of twothings: you were in sports or you were out onthe streets being a drug addict, or breaking intoplaces. The guys who were in sports, we had ita little easier, because we were accepted by bothgroups. . . . So it worked out to my advantage,cause I didn’t get into a lot of trouble—sometrouble, but not a lot.

The fact that boys in lower-status com-munities faced these kinds of realities gavesalience to their developing athletic identities.In contrast, sports were important to boysfrom higher-status backgrounds, yet the mid-dle-class environment seemed more secure,less threatening, and offered far more options.By the time most of these boys got into juniorhigh or high school, many had made con-scious decisions to shift their attentions awayfrom athletic careers to educational and(nonathletic) career goals. A 32-year-oldwhite college athletic director told me that hehad seen his chance to pursue a pro baseballcareer as “pissing in the wind,” and instead,focused on education. Similarly, a 33-year-oldwhite dentist who was a three-sport star inhigh school, decided not to play sports in col-lege, so he could focus on getting into dentalschool. As he put it,

I think I kind of downgraded the stardomthing. I thought it was small potatoes. Andsure, that’s nice in high school and all that, buton a broad scale, I didn’t think it amounted toall that much.


This statement offers an important key tounderstanding the construction of masculineidentity within a middle-class context. The sta-tus that this boy got through sports had beenvery important to him, yet he could see that“on a broad scale,” this sort of status was “smallpotatoes.” This sort of early recognition ismore than a result of the oft-noted middle-class tendency to raise “future-oriented”children (Rubin, 1976; Sennett and Cobb,1973). Perhaps more important, it is that thekinds of future orientations developed by boysfrom higher-status backgrounds are consistentwith the middle-class context. These men’sdescriptions of their boyhoods reveal that theygrew up immersed in a wide range of institu-tional frameworks, of which organized sportswas just one. And—importantly—they couldsee that the status of adult males around themwas clearly linked to their positions withinvarious professions, public institutions, andbureaucratic organizations. It was clear thataccess to this sort of institutional status camethrough educational achievement, not athleticprowess. A 32-year-old black man who grewup in a professional-class family recalled thathe had idolized Wilt Chamberlain anddreamed of being a pro basketball player, yethis father discouraged his athletic strivings:

He knew I liked the game. I loved the game.But basketball was not recommended; my dadwould say, “That’s a stereotyped image forblack youth. . . . When your basketball is goneand finished, what are you gonna do? One day,you might get injured. What are you gonnalook forward to?” He stressed education.

Similarly, a 32-year-old man who wasraised in a white, middle-class family, had foundin sports a key means of gaining acceptance andconnection in his peer group. Yet he was simul-taneously developing an image of himself as a“smart student,” and becoming aware of a widerange of non-sports life options:

My mother was constantly telling me howsmart I was, how good I was, what a nice

person I was, and giving me all sorts of positivestrokes, and those positive strokes became aself-motivating kind of thing. I had this imageof myself as smart, and I lived up to that image.

It is not that parents of boys in lower-status families did not also encourage their boysto work hard in school. Several reported thattheir parents “stressed books first, sports sec-ond.” It’s just that the broader social context—education, economy, and community—wasmore likely to narrow lower-status boys’ per-ceptions of real-life options, while boys fromhigher-status backgrounds faced an expandingworld of options. For instance, with a differentsocioeconomic background, one 35-year-oldblack man might have become a great musicianinstead of a star professional football runningback. But he did not. When he was a child, hesaid, he was most interested in music:

I wanted to be a drummer. But we couldn’tafford drums. My dad couldn’t go out andbuy me a drum set or a guitar even—it was justone of those things; he was just trying to makeends meet.

But he could afford, as could so many inhis socioeconomic condition, to spend count-less hours at the local park, where he was toldby the park supervisor

that I was a natural—not only in gymnastics orbaseball—whatever I did, I was a natural. Hetold me I shouldn’t waste this talent, and so Iimmediately started watching the big guys then.

In retrospect, this man had potential to bea musician or any number of things, but hisenvironment limited his options to sports, andhe made the best of it. Even within sports, he,like most boys in the ghetto, was limited:

We didn’t have any tennis courts in theghetto—we used to have a lot of tennis balls,but not racquets. I wonder today how good Imight be in tennis if I had gotten a racquet inmy hands at an early age.




It is within this limited structure of oppor-tunity that many lower-status young boysfound sports to be the place, rather than aplace, within which to construct masculineidentity, status, and relationships. A 36-year-old white man explained that his father leftthe family when he was very young and thismother faced a very difficult struggle to makeends meet. As his words suggest, the more lim-ited a boy’s options, and the more insecure hisfamily situation, the more likely he is to makean early commitment to an athletic career:

I used to ride my bicycle to Little Leaguepractice—if I’d waited for someone to pick meup and take me to the ball park I’d have neverplayed. I’d get to the ball park and all the otherkids would have their dad bring them to prac-tice or games. But I’d park my bike to the sideand when it was over I’d get on it and go home.Sports was the way for me to move every-thing to the side—family problems, just all theembarrassments—and think about one thing,and that was sports. . . . In the third grade,when the teacher went around the classroomand asked everybody, “What do you want to bewhen your grow up?” I said, “I want to be amajor league baseball player,” and everybodylaughed their heads off.

This man eventually did enjoy a majorleague baseball career. Most boys from lower-status backgrounds who make similar earlycommitments to athletic careers are not sosuccessful. As stated earlier, the career struc-ture of organized sports is highly competitiveand hierarchical. In fact, the chances ofattaining professional status in sports areapproximately 4:100,000 for a white man,2:100,000 for a black man, and 3:1 million fora Hispanic man in the United States (Leonardand Reyman, 1988). Nevertheless, the imme-diate rewards (fun, status, attention), alongwith the constricted (nonsports) structure ofopportunity, attract disproportionately largenumbers of boys from lower-status back-grounds to athletic careers as their majormeans of constructing a masculine identity.These are the boys who later, as young men,

had to struggle with “conditional selfworth,”and, more often than not, occupational deadends. Boys from higher-status backgrounds,on the other hand, bolstered their boyhood,adolescent, and early adult status throughtheir athletic accomplishments. Their widerange of experiences and life changes led toan early shift away from sports careers as themajor basis of identity (Messner, 1989).

Conclusion

The conception of the masculinity-sportsrelationship developed here begins to illustratethe idea of an “elective affinity” between socialstructure and personality. Organized sportsis a “gendered institution”—an institutionconstructed by gender relations. As such, itsstructure and values (rules, formal organiza-tion, sex composition, etc.) reflect dominantconceptions of masculinity and femininity.Organized sports is also a “gendering institu-tion”—an institution that helps to constructthe current gender order. Part of this construc-tion of gender is accomplished through the“masculinizing” of male bodies and minds.

Yet boys do not come to their first experi-ences in organized sports as “blank slates,” butarrive with already “gendering” identities dueto early developmental experiences and previ-ous socialization. I have suggested here that animportant thread running through the devel-opment of masculine identity is males’ambivalence toward intimate unity withothers. Those boys who experience early ath-letic success find in the structure of organizedsports an affinity with this masculine ambiva-lence toward intimacy: The rule-bound, com-petitive, hierarchical world of sport offers boysan attractive means of establishing an emo-tionally distant (and thus “safe”) connectionwith others. Yet as boys begin to define them-selves as “athletes,” they learn that in order tobe accepted (to have connection) throughsports, they must be winners. And in order tobe winners, they must construct relationshipswith others (and with themselves) that are


consistent with the competitive and hierarchi-cal values and structure of the sports world. Asa result, they often develop a “conditional self-worth” that leads them to construct moreinstrumental relationships with themselvesand others. This ultimately exacerbates theirdifficulties in constructing intimate relation-ships with others. In effect, the interactionbetween the young male’s preexisting internal-ized ambivalence toward intimacy with thecompetitive hierarchical institution of sportshas resulted in the construction of a masculinepersonality that is characterized by instrumen-tal rationality, goal-orientation, and difficultieswith intimate connection and expression(Messner, 1987).

This theoretical line of inquiry invites usnot simply to examine how social institutions“socialize” boys, but also to explore the waysthat boys’ already-gendering identities inter-act with social institutions (which, like orga-nized sports, are themselves the product ofgender relations). This study has also sug-gested that it is not some singular “masculin-ity” that is being constructed through athleticcareers. It may be correct, from a psychoana-lytic perspective, to suggest that all malesbring ambivalences toward intimacy to theirinteraction with the world, but “the world” isa very different place for males from differentracial and socioeconomic backgrounds.Because males have substantially differentinteractions with the world, based on class,race, and other differences and inequalities,we might expect the construction of mas-culinity to take on different meanings for boysand men from differing backgrounds(Messner, 1989). Indeed, this study has sug-gested that boys from higher-status back-grounds face a much broader range of optionsthan do their lower-status counterparts. As aresult, athletic careers take on different mean-ings for these boys. Lower-status boys arelikely to see athletic careers as the institutionalcontext for the construction of their mascu-line status and identities, while higher-statusmales make an early shift away from athletic

careers toward other institutions (usually edu-cation and nonsports careers). A key line ofinquiry for future studies might begin byexploring this irony of sports careers: Despitethe fact that “the athlete” is currently anexample of an exemplary form of masculinityin public ideology, the vast majority of boyswho became most committed to athleticcareers are never well-rewarded for theirefforts. The fact that class and racial dynamicslead boys from higher status backgrounds,unlike their lower-status counterparts, tomove into nonsports careers illustrates howthe construction of different kinds of mas-culinities is a key component of the overallconstruction of the gender order.

REFERENCES

Chodorow, N. (1978) The Reproduction ofMothering. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

Connell, R. W. (1990) “An iron man: the body andsome contradictions of hegemonic masculin-ity,” in M. A. Messner and D. F. Sabo (eds.) Sport,Men and the Gender Order: Critical FeministPerspectives. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

Craib, I. (1987) “Masculinity and male dominance.”Soc. Rev. 38:721–743.

Eitzen, D. S. (1975) “Athletics in the status systemof male adolescents: a replication of Coleman’sThe Adolescent Society.” Adolescence 10:268–276.

Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice: PsychologicalTheory and Women’s Development. Cambridge,MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

Kidd, B. (1990) “The men’s cultural centre: sportsand the dynamic of women’s oppression/men’srepression,” in M. A. Messner and D. F. Sabo(eds.) Sport, Men and the Gender Order:Critical Feminist Perspective. Champaign, IL:Human Kinetics.

Kimmel, M. S. (1990) “Baseball and the reconsti-tution of American masculinity: 1880–1920,”in M. A. Messner and D. F. Sabo (eds.) Sport,Men and the Gender Order: Critical FeministPerspectives. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

Leonard, W. M. II and J. M. Reyman (1988) “Theodds of attaining professional athlete status:refining the computations.” Sociology of Sport J.5:162–169.




Lever, J. (1976) “Sex differences in the gameschildren play.” Social Problems 23:478–487.

Lichterman, P. (1986) “Chodorow’s psychoanalyticsociology: a project half-completed.” CaliforniaSociologist 9:147–166.

Messner, M. (1987) “The meaning of success: theathletic experience and the development ofmale identity,” pp. 193–210 in H. Brod (ed.)The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’sStudies. Boston: Allen & Unwin.

Messner, M. (1989) “Masculinity and athleticcareers.” Gender and Society 3:71–88.

Osherson, S. (1986) Finding our Fathers: How aMan’s Life Is Shaped by His Relationship withHis Father. New York: Fawcett Columbine.

Piaget, J. H. (1965) The Moral Judgment of the Child.New York: Free Press.

Rubin, L. B. (1976) Worlds of Pain: Life in theWorking Class Family. New York: Basic Books.

Sabo, D. (1985) “Sport, patriarchy and male iden-tity: new questions about men and sport.”Arena Rev. 9:2.

Schafer, W. E. (1975) “Sport and male sex rolesocialization.” Sport Sociology Bull. 4:47–54.

Sennett, R. and J. Cobb (1973) The Hidden Injuriesof Class. New York: Random House.

Thorne, B. (1986) “Girls and boys together . . .but mostly apart: gender arrangements inelementary schools,” pp. 167–184 in W. W.Hartup and Z. Rubin (eds.) Relationshipsand Development. Hillsdale, NJ: LawrenceErlbaum.


What does Messner mean when he calls organized sports a “gendered” as well as a “gen-dering” institution? In what ways do sports provide men with opportunities to estab-lish their masculinity? How does the rule-bound structure of organized sports provideboys with a “safe place” to express feelings of closeness to other boys? Why do you sup-pose athletic success is such an important source of masculine identity for adolescentboys? Why do you suppose adolescent boys aren’t able to achieve as much esteem fromacademic success as they are from athletic success? What role do you think the mediaplay in perpetuating this ideal? How does social class influence the relationshipbetween sports and masculine self-worth? As girls’ athletics become more popular anda more visible feature in the culture, what is the likelihood that girls will begin to definetheir self-worth in terms of athletic success?


The Code of the Streets

Elijah Anderson

(1994)

99

♦

Of all the problems besetting the poor inner-city black community, none is more pressingthan that of interpersonal violence and aggres-sion. It wreaks havoc daily with the lives ofcommunity residents and increasingly spillsover into downtown and residential middle-class areas. Muggings, burglaries, carjackings,and drug-related shootings, all of which mayleave their victims or innocent bystandersdead, are now common enough to concern allurban and many suburban residents. The incli-nation to violence springs from the circum-stances of life among the ghetto poor—thelack of jobs that pay a living wage, the stigmaof race, the fallout from rampant drug use anddrug trafficking, and the resulting alienationand lack of hope for the future.

Simply living in such an environmentplaces young people at special risk of fallingvictim to aggressive behavior. Although thereare often forces in the community which cancounteract the negative influences, by far themost powerful being a strong, loving,“decent” (as inner-city residents put it)family committed to middle-class values, thedespair is pervasive enough to have spawnedan oppositional culture, that of “the streets,”whose norms are often consciously opposedto those of mainstream society. These twoorientations—decent and street—sociallyorganize the community, and their coexis-tence has important consequences for resi-dents, particularly children growing up in theinner city. Above all, this environment meansthat even youngsters whose home lives reflectmainstream values—and the majority ofhomes in the community do—must be able

to handle themselves in a street-orientedenvironment.

This is because the street culture hasevolved what may be called a code of thestreets, which amounts to a set of informalrules governing interpersonal public behav-ior, including violence. The rules prescribeboth a proper comportment and a properway to respond if challenged. They regulatethe use of violence and so allow those whoare inclined to aggression to precipitate vio-lent encounters in an approved way. Therules have been established and are enforcedmainly by the street-oriented, but on thestreets the distinction between street anddecent is often irrelevant; everybody knowsthat if the rules are violated, there are penal-ties. Knowledge of the code is thus largelydefensive; it is literally necessary for operat-ing in public. Therefore, even though fami-lies with a decency orientation are usuallyopposed to the values of the code, they oftenreluctantly encourage their children’s famil-iarity with it to enable them to negotiate theinner-city environment.

At the heart of the code is the issue ofrespect—loosely defined as being treated“right,” or granted the deference onedeserves. However, in the troublesome publicenvironment of the inner city, as peopleincreasingly feel buffeted by forces beyondtheir control, what one deserves in the way ofrespect becomes more and more problematicand uncertain. This in turn further opens theissue of respect to sometimes intense inter-personal negotiation. In the street culture,especially among young people, respect is



viewed as almost an external entity that ishard-won but easily lost, and so must con-stantly be guarded. The rules of the code infact provide a framework for negotiatingrespect. The person whose very appearance—including his clothing, demeanor, and way ofmoving—deters transgressions feels that hepossesses, and may be considered by othersto possess, a measure of respect. With theright amount of respect, for instance, he canavoid “being bothered” in public. If he isbothered, not only may he be in physicaldanger but he has been disgraced or “dissed”(disrespected). Many of the forms that diss-ing can take might seem petty to middle-classpeople (maintaining eye contact for too long,for example), but to those invested in thestreet code, these actions become seriousindications of the other person’s intentions.Consequently, such people become very sen-sitive to advances and slights, which couldwell serve as warnings of imminent physicalconfrontation.

This hard reality can be traced to theprofound sense of alienation from main-stream society and its institutions felt bymany poor inner-city black people, particu-larly the young. The code of the streets isactually a cultural adaptation to a profoundlack of faith in the police and the judicialsystem. The police are most often seen as rep-resenting the dominant white society and notcaring to protect inner-city residents. Whencalled, they may not respond, which is onereason many residents feel they must be pre-pared to take extraordinary measures todefend themselves and their loved onesagainst those who are inclined to aggression.Lack of police accountability has in fact beenincorporated into the status system: Theperson who is believed capable of “takingcare of himself ” is accorded a certain defer-ence, which translates into a sense of physicaland psychological control. Thus the streetcode emerges where the influence of thepolice ends and personal responsibility forone’s safety is felt to begin. Exacerbated by

the proliferation of drugs and easy access toguns, this volatile situation results in the abil-ity of the street-oriented minority (or thosewho effectively “go for bad”) to dominate thepublic spaces.

Decent and Street Families

Although almost everyone in poor inner-cityneighborhoods is struggling financially andtherefore feels a certain distance from the restof America, the decent and the street family ina real sense represent two poles of value orien-tation, two contrasting conceptual categories.The labels “decent” and “street,” which the res-idents themselves use, amount to evaluativejudgments that confer status on local residents.The labeling is often the result of a social con-test among individuals and families of theneighborhood. Individuals of the two orienta-tions often coexist in the same extendedfamily. Decent residents judge themselves to beso while judging others to be of the street, andstreet individuals often present themselves asdecent, drawing distinctions between them-selves and other people. In addition, there isquite a bit of circumstantial behavior—that is,one person may at different times exhibit bothdecent and street orientations, depending onthe circumstances. Although these designa-tions result from so much social jockeying,there do exist concrete features that defineeach conceptual category.

Generally, so-called decent families tendto accept mainstream values more fully andattempt to instill them in their children.Whether married couples with children orsingle-parent (usually female) households,they are generally “working poor” and sotend to be better off financially than theirstreet-oriented neighbors. They value hardwork and self-reliance and are willing to sac-rifice for their children. Because they have acertain amount of faith in mainstreamsociety, they harbor hopes for a better futurefor their children, if not for themselves.Many of them go to church and take a strong


interest in their children’s schooling. Ratherthan dwelling on the real hardships andinequities facing them, many such decentpeople, particularly the increasing numberof grandmothers raising grandchildren, seetheir difficult situation as a test from Godand derive great support from their faith andfrom the church community.

Extremely aware of the problematic andoften dangerous environment in which theyreside, decent parents tend to be strict in theirchild-rearing practices, encouraging childrento respect authority and walk a straight moralline. They have an almost obsessive concernabout trouble of any kind and remind theirchildren to be on the lookout for people andsituations that might lead to it. At the sametime, they are themselves polite and consider-ate of others, and teach their children to be thesame way. At home, at work, and in church,they strive hard to maintain a positive mentalattitude and a spirit of cooperation.

So-called street parents, in contrast, oftenshow a lack of consideration for other peopleand have a rather superficial sense of familyand community. Though they may love theirchildren, many of them are unable to copewith the physical and emotional demands ofparenthood and find it difficult to reconciletheir needs with those of their children. Thesefamilies, who are more fully invested in thecode of the streets than the decent people are,may aggressively socialize their children into itin a normative way. They believe in the codeand judge themselves and others according toits values.

Campaigning for Respect

[The] realities of inner-city life are largelyabsorbed on the streets. At an early age, ofteneven before they start school, children fromstreet-oriented homes gravitate to the streets,where they “hang”—socialize with their peers.Children from these generally permissivehomes have a great deal of latitude and areallowed to “rip and run” up and down the

street. They often come home from school, puttheir books down, and go right back out thedoor. On school nights eight- and nine-year-olds remain out until nine or ten o’clock (andteenagers typically come in whenever theywant to). On the streets they play in groupsthat often become the source of their primarysocial bonds. Children from decent homestend to be more carefully supervised and arethus likely to have curfews and to be taughthow to stay out of trouble.

When decent and street kids cometogether, a kind of social shuffle occurs inwhich children have a chance to go either way.Tension builds as a child comes to realize thathe must choose an orientation. The kind ofhome he comes from influences but does notdetermine the way he will ultimately turnout—although it is unlikely that a child from athoroughly street-oriented family will easilyabsorb decent values on the streets. Youthswho emerge from street-oriented families butdevelop a decency orientation almost alwayslearn those values in another setting—inschool, in a youth group, in church. Often it isthe result of their involvement with a caring“old head” (adult role model).

In the street, through their play, childrenpour their individual life experiences into acommon knowledge pool, affirming, con-firming, and elaborating on what they haveobserved in the home and matching theirskills against those of others. And they learnto fight. Even small children test one another,pushing and shoving, and are ready to hitother children over circumstances not to theirliking. In turn, they are readily hit by otherchildren, and the child who is toughest pre-vails. Thus the violent resolution of disputes,the hitting and cursing, gains social reinforce-ment. The child in effect is initiated into asystem that is really a way of campaigning forrespect.

In addition, younger children witness thedisputes of older children, which are oftenresolved through cursing and abusive talk, ifnot aggression or outright violence. They see




that one child succumbs to the greaterphysical and mental abilities of the other.They are also alert and attentive witnesses tothe verbal and physical fights of adults, afterwhich they compare notes and share theirinterpretations of the event. In almost everycase the victor is the person who physicallywon the altercation, and this person oftenenjoys the esteem and respect of onlookers.These experiences reinforce the lessons thechildren have learned at home: Might makesright, and toughness is a virtue, while humil-ity is not. In effect they learn the social mean-ing of fighting. When it is left virtuallyunchallenged, this understanding becomesan ever more important part of the child’sworking conception of the world. Over timethe code of the streets becomes refined.

Those street-oriented adults with whomchildren come in contact—including mothers,fathers, brothers, sisters, boyfriends, cousins,neighbors, and friends—help them along informing this understanding by verbalizing themessages they are getting through experience:“Watch your back.” “Protect yourself.” “Don’tpunk out.” “If somebody messes with you, yougot to pay them back.” “If someone disses you,you got to straighten them out.” Many parentsactually impose sanctions if a child is not suf-ficiently aggressive. For example, if a childloses a fight and comes home upset, the parentmight respond, “Don’t you come in here cry-ing that somebody beat you up; you better getback out there and whup his ass. I didn’t raiseno punks! Get back out there and whup his ass.If you don’t whup his ass, I’ll whup your asswhen you come home.” Thus the child obtainsreinforcement for being tough and showingnerve.

While fighting, some children cry asthough they are doing something they areambivalent about. The fight may be againsttheir wishes, yet they may feel constrained tofight or face the consequences—not just frompeers but also from caretakers or parents, whomay administer another beating if they back

down. Some adults recall receiving such lessonsfrom their own parents and justify repeatingthem to their children as a way to toughenthem up. Looking capable of taking care ofoneself as a form of self-defense is a dominanttheme among both street-oriented and decentadults who worry about the safety of theirchildren. There is thus at times a convergencein their child-rearing practices, although therationales behind them may differ.

Self-Image Based on “Juice”

By the time they are teenagers, most youthshave either internalized the code of thestreets or at least learned the need to com-port themselves in accordance with its rules,which chiefly have to do with interpersonalcommunication. The code revolves aroundthe presentation of self. Its basic require-ment is the display of a certain predisposi-tion to violence. Accordingly, one’s bearingmust send the unmistakable if sometimessubtle message to “the next person” in publicthat one is capable of violence and mayhemwhen the situation requires it, that one cantake care of oneself. The nature of this com-munication is largely determined by thedemands of the circumstances but caninclude facial expressions, gait, and verbalexpressions—all of which are geared mainlyto deterring aggression. Physical appearance,including clothes, jewelry, and grooming,also plays an important part in how a personis viewed; to be respected, it is important tohave the right look.

Even so, there are no guarantees againstchallenges because there are always peoplearound looking for a fight to increase theirshare of respect—or “juice,” as it is sometimescalled on the street. Moreover, if a person isassaulted, it is important, not only in the eyes ofhis opponent but also in the eyes of his “run-ning buddies,” for him to avenge himself.Otherwise he risks being “tried” (challenged)or “moved on” by any number of others. To


maintain his honor he must show he is notsomeone to be “messed with” or “dissed.” Ingeneral, the person must “keep himself straight”by managing his position of respect amongothers; this involves in part his self-image,which is shaped by what he thinks others arethinking of him in relation to his peers.

Objects play an important and compli-cated role in establishing self-image. Jackets,sneakers, gold jewelry, reflect not just aperson’s taste, which tends to be tightly reg-ulated among adolescents of all socialclasses, but also a willingness to possessthings that may require defending. A boywearing a fashionable, expensive jacket, forexample, is vulnerable to attack by anotherwho covets the jacket and either cannotafford to buy one or wants the added satis-faction of depriving someone else of his.However, if the boy forgoes the desirablejacket and wears one that isn’t “hip,” he runsthe risk of being teased and possibly evenassaulted as an unworthy person. To beallowed to hang with certain prestigiouscrowds, a boy must wear a different set ofexpensive clothes—sneakers and athleticsuit—every day. Not to be able to do somight make him appear socially deficient. Theyouth comes to covet such items—especiallywhen he sees easy prey wearing them.

In acquiring valued things, therefore, aperson shores up his identity—but since it isan identity based on having things, it ishighly precarious. This very precariousnessgives a heightened sense of urgency to stayingeven with peers, with whom the person isactually competing. Young men and womenwho are able to command respect throughtheir presentation of self—by allowing theirpossessions and their body language to speakfor them—may not have to campaign forregard but may, rather, gain it by the force oftheir manner. Those who are unable to com-mand respect in this way must actively cam-paign for it—and are thus particularly aliveto slights.

One way of campaigning for status is bytaking the possessions of others. In this context,seemingly ordinary objects can become tro-phies imbued with symbolic value that farexceeds their monetary worth. Possession ofthe trophy can symbolize the ability to vio-late somebody—to “get in his face,” to takesomething of value from him, to “dis” him,and thus to enhance one’s own worth bystealing someone else’s. The trophy does nothave to be something material. It can beanother person’s sense of honor, snatchedaway with a derogatory remark. It can be theoutcome of a fight. It can be the impositionof a certain standard, such as a girl’s gettingherself recognized as the most beautiful.Material things, however, fit easily into thepattern. Sneakers, a pistol, even somebodyelse’s girlfriend, can become a trophy. Whena person can take something from anotherand then flaunt it, he gains a certain regardby being the owner, or the controller, of thatthing. But this display of ownership can thenprovoke other people to challenge him. Thisgame of who controls what is thus con-stantly being played out on inner-citystreets, and the trophy—extrinsic or intrin-sic, tangible or intangible—identifies thecurrent winner.

An important aspect of this often violentgive-and-take is its zero-sum quality. That is,the extent to which one person can raise him-self up depends on his ability to put anotherperson down. This underscores the alienationthat permeates the inner-city ghetto commu-nity. There is a generalized sense that very littlerespect is to be had, and therefore everyonecompetes to get what affirmation he can of thelittle that is available. The craving for respectthat results gives people thin skins. Showsof deference by others can be highly sooth-ing, contributing to a sense of security,comfort, self-confidence, and self-respect.Transgressions by others which go unanswereddiminish these feelings and are believed toencourage further transgressions. Hence one




must be ever vigilant against the transgressionsof others or even appearing as if transgressionswill be tolerated. Among young people, whosesense of self-esteem is particularly vulnerable,there is an especially heightened concern withbeing disrespected. Many inner-city youngmen in particular crave respect to such adegree that they will risk their lives to attainand maintain it.

The issue of respect is thus closely tied towhether a person has an inclination to be vio-lent, even as a victim. In the wider societypeople may not feel required to retaliate phys-ically after an attack, even though they areaware that they have been degraded or takenadvantage of. They may feel a great need todefend themselves during an attack, or tobehave in such a way as to deter aggression(middle-class people certainly can and dobecome victims of street-oriented youths),but they are much more likely than street-oriented people to feel that they can walk awayfrom a possible altercation with their self-esteem intact. Some people may even have thestrength of character to flee, without anythought that their self-respect or esteem willbe diminished.

In impoverished inner-city black commu-nities, however, particularly among youngmales and perhaps increasingly amongfemales, such flight would be extremely diffi-cult. To run away would likely leave one’s self-esteem in tatters. Hence people often feelconstrained not only to stand up and at leastattempt to resist during an assault but also to“pay back”—to seek revenge—after a success-ful assault on their person. This may includegoing to get a weapon or even getting relativesinvolved. Their very identity and self-respect,their honor, is often intricately tied up withthe way they perform on the streets duringand after such encounters. This outlookreflects the circumscribed opportunities of theinner-city poor. Generally people outside theghetto have other ways of gaining status andregard, and thus do not feel so dependent onsuch physical displays.

By Trial of Manhood

On the street, among males these concernsabout things and identity have come to beexpressed in the concept of “manhood.”Manhood in the inner city means taking theprerogatives of men with respect to strangers,other men, and women—being distinguishedas a man. It implies physicality and a certainruthlessness. Regard and respect are associatedwith this concept in large part because of itspractical application: If others have little or noregard for a person’s manhood, his very lifeand those of his loved ones could be in jeop-ardy. But there is a chicken-and-egg aspect tothis situation: One’s physical safety is morelikely to be jeopardized in public because man-hood is associated with respect. In otherwords, an existential link has been createdbetween the idea of manhood and one’s self-esteem, so that it has become hard to say whichis primary. For many inner-city youths, man-hood and respect are flip sides of the samecoin; physical and psychological well-being areinseparable, and both require a sense of con-trol, of being in charge.

The operating assumption is that a man,especially a real man, knows what other menknow—the code of the streets. And if one isnot a real man, one is somehow diminished asa person, and there are certain valued thingsone simply does not deserve. There is thusbelieved to be a certain justice to the code,since it is considered that everyone has theopportunity to know it. Implicit in this is thateverybody is held responsible for being famil-iar with the code. If the victim of a mugging,for example, does not know the code and soresponds “wrong,” the perpetrator may feeljustified even in killing him and may feel noremorse. He may think, “Too bad, but it’s hisfault. He should have known better.”

So when a person ventures outside, hemust adopt the code—a kind of shield,really—to prevent others from “messing with”him. In these circumstances it is easy forpeople to think they are being tried or tested


by others even when this is not the case. For itis sensed that something extremely valuable isat stake in every interaction, and people areencouraged to rise to the occasion, particularlywith strangers. For people who are unfamiliarwith the code—generally people who live out-side the inner city—the concern with respectin the most ordinary interactions can befrightening and incomprehensible. But forthose who are invested in the code, the clearobject of their demeanor is to discouragestrangers from even thinking about testingtheir manhood. And the sense of power thatattends the ability to deter others can be allur-ing even to those who know the code withoutbeing heavily invested in it—the decent inner-city youths. Thus a boy who has been leading abasically decent life can, in trying circum-stances, suddenly resort to deadly force.

Central to the issue of manhood is thewidespread belief that one of the most effectiveways of gaining respect is to manifest “nerve.”Nerve is shown when one takes another person’spossessions (the more valuable the better),“messes with” someone’s woman, throws thefirst punch, “gets in someone’s face,” or pulls atrigger. Its proper display helps on the spot tocheck others who would violate one’s personand also helps to build a reputation that worksto prevent future challenges. But since such ashow of nerve is a forceful expression of disre-spect toward the person on the receiving end,the victim may be greatly offended and seek toretaliate with equal or greater force. A display of nerve, therefore, can easily provoke a life-threatening response, and the backgroundknowledge of that possibility has often beenincorporated into the concept of nerve.

True nerve exposes a lack of fear of dying.Many feel that it is acceptable to risk dyingover the principle of respect. In fact, amongthe hard-core street-oriented, the clear risk ofviolent death may be preferable to being“dissed” by another. The youths who haveinternalized this attitude and convincinglydisplay it in their public bearing are amongthe most threatening people of all, for it is

commonly assumed that they fear no man. Asthe people of the community say,“They are thebaddest dudes on the street.” They often leadan existential life that may acquire meaningonly when they are faced with the possibility ofimminent death. Not to be afraid to die is byimplication to have few compunctions abouttaking another’s life. Not to be afraid to die isthe quid pro quo of being able to take some-body else’s life—for the right reasons, if the sit-uation demands it. When others believe this isone’s position, it gives one a real sense ofpower on the streets. Such credibility is whatmany inner-city youths strive to achieve,whether they are decent or street-oriented,both because of its practical defensive valueand because of the positive way it makes themfeel about themselves. The difference betweenthe decent and the street-oriented youth isoften that the decent youth makes a consciousdecision to appear tough and manly; inanother setting—with teachers, say, or at hispart-time job—he can be polite and deferen-tial. The street-oriented youth, on the otherhand, has made the concept of manhood apart of his very identity; he has difficultymanipulating it—it often controls him.

Girls and Boys

Increasingly, teenage girls are mimicking theboys and trying to have their own version of“manhood.” Their goal is the same—to getrespect, to be recognized as capable of settingor maintaining a certain standard. They try toachieve this end in the ways that have beenestablished by the boys, including posturing,abusive language, and the use of violence toresolve disputes, but the issues for the girls aredifferent. Although conflicts over turf andstatus exist among the girls, the majority ofdisputes seem rooted in assessments ofbeauty (which girl in a group is “the cutest”),competition over boyfriends, and attempts toregulate other people’s knowledge of andopinions about a girl’s behavior or that ofsomeone close to her, especially her mother.




A major cause of conflicts among girls is“he say, she say.” This practice begins in theearly school years and continues through highschool. It occurs when “people,” particularlygirls, talk about others, thus putting their“business in the streets.” Usually one girl willsay something negative about another in thegroup, most often behind the person’s back.The remark will then get back to the persontalked about. She may retaliate or her friendsmay feel required to “take up for” her. Inessence this is a form of group gossiping inwhich individuals are negatively assessed andevaluated. As with much gossip, the things saidmay or may not be true, but the point is thatsuch imputations can cast aspersions on aperson’s good name. The accused is required todefend herself against the slander, which canresult in arguments and fights, often over littleof real substance. Here again is the problem oflow self-esteem, which encourages youngstersto be highly sensitive to slights and to be vul-nerable to feeling easily “dissed.” To avenge thedissing, a fight is usually necessary.

Because boys are believed to control vio-lence, girls tend to defer to them in situationsof conflict. Often if a girl is attacked or feelsslighted, she will get a brother, uncle, or cousinto do her fighting for her. Increasingly, how-ever, girls are doing their own fighting and areeven asking their male relatives to teach themhow to fight. Some girls form groups thatattack other girls or take things from them. Ahard-core segment of inner-city girls inclinedtoward violence seems to be developing. Asone 13-year-old girl in a detention center, foryouths who have committed violent acts toldme, “To get people to leave you alone, yougotta fight. Talking don’t always get you out ofstuff.” One major difference between girls andboys: Girls rarely use guns. Their fights aretherefore not life-or-death struggles. Girls arenot often willing to put their lives on the linefor “manhood.” The ultimate form of respecton the male-dominated inner-city street isthus reserved for men.

“Going for Bad”

In the most fearsome youths such a cavalierattitude toward death grows out of a very lim-ited view of life. Many are uncertain about howlong they are going to live and believe theycould die violently at any time. They acceptthis fate; they live on the edge. Their mannerconveys the message that nothing intimidatesthem; whatever turn the encounter takes, theymaintain their attack—rather like a pit bull,whose spirit many such boys admire. Thedemonstration of such tenacity “shows heart”and earns their respect.

This fearlessness has implications for lawenforcement. Many street-oriented boys aremuch more concerned about the threat of“justice” at the hands of a peer than at the handsof the police. Moreover, many feel not only thatthey have little to lose by going to prison butthat they have something to gain. The toughen-ing-up one experiences in prison can actuallyenhance one’s reputation on the streets. Hencethe system loses influence over the hard corewho are without jobs, with little perceptiblestake in the system. If mainstream society hasdone nothing for them, they counter by makingsure it can do nothing to them.

At the same time, however, a competingview maintains that the true nerve consists inbacking down, walking away from a fight, andgoing on with one’s business. One fights onlyin self-defense. This view emerges from thedecent philosophy that life is precious, and it isan important part of the socialization processcommon in decent homes. It discouragesviolence as the primary means of resolvingdisputes and encourages youngsters to acceptnonviolence and talk as confrontational strate-gies. But “if the deal goes down,” self-defense isgreatly encouraged. When there is enough pos-itive support for this orientation, either in thehome or among one’s peers, then nonviolencehas a chance to prevail. But it prevails at thecost of relinquishing a claim to being bad andtough, and therefore sets a young person up as


at the very least alienated from street-orientedpeers and quite possibly a target of derision oreven violence.

Although the nonviolent orientation rarelyovercomes the impulse to strike back in anencounter, it does introduce a certain confusionand so can prompt a measure of soul-searching,or even profound ambivalence. Did the personback down with his respect intact or did he backdown only to be judged a “punk”—a personlacking manhood? Should he or she have acted?Should he or she have hit the other person inthe mouth? These questions beset many youngmen and women during public confrontations.What is the “right” thing to do? In the quest forhonor, respect, and local status—which fewyoung people are uninterested in—commonsense most often prevails, which leads many toopt for the tough approach, enacting their ownparticular versions of the display of nerve. Thepresentation of oneself as rough and tough isvery often quite acceptable until one is tested.And then that presentation may help the personpass the test, because it will cause fewer ques-tions to be asked about what he did and why. Itis hard for a person to explain why he lost thefight or why he backed down. Hence many willstrive to appear to “go for bad,” while hopingthey will never be tested. But when they aretested, the outcome of the situation may quicklybe out of their hands, as they become wrappedup in the circumstances of the moment.

An Oppositional Culture

The attitudes of the wider society are deeplyimplicated in the code of the streets. Mostpeople in inner-city communities are nottotally invested in the code, but the significantminority of hard-core street youths who arehave to maintain the code in order to establishreputations, because they have—or feel theyhave—few other ways to assert themselves. Forthese young people the standards of the streetcode are the only game in town. The extent towhich some children—particularly those who

through upbringing have become most alien-ated and those lacking in strong and conven-tional social support—experience, feel, andinternalize racist rejection and contempt frommainstream society may strongly encouragethem to express contempt for the more con-ventional society in turn. In dealing with thiscontempt and rejection, some youngsters willconsciously invest themselves and their con-siderable mental resources in what amounts toan oppositional culture to preserve themselvesand their self-respect. Once they do, anyrespect they might be able to garner in thewider system pales in comparison with therespect available in the local system; thus theyoften lose interest in even attempting to nego-tiate the mainstream system.

At the same time, many less alienatedyoung blacks have assumed a street-orienteddemeanor as a way of expressing their black-ness while really embracing a much moremoderate way of life; they, too want a nonvio-lent setting in which to live and raise a family.These decent people are trying hard to be partof the mainstream culture, but the racism, realand perceived, that they encounter helps tolegitimate the oppositional culture. And so onoccasion they adopt street behavior. In fact,depending on the demands of the situation,many people in the community slip back andforth between decent and street behavior.

A vicious cycle has thus been formed. Thehopelessness and alienation many younginner-city black men and women feel, largelyas a result of endemic joblessness and persis-tent racism, fuels the violence they engage in.This violence serves to confirm the negativefeelings many whites and some middle-classblacks harbor toward the ghetto poor, furtherlegitimating the oppositional culture and thecode of the streets in the eyes of many pooryoung blacks. Unless this cycle is broken, atti-tudes on both sides will become increasinglyentrenched, and the violence, which claimsvictims black and white, poor and affluent, willonly escalate.





What are some of the differences between “street” and “decent” people according toAnderson? What are some of the central ideals or values of the street code? Where dosome of these values come from? Consider some of the “codes” or values of suburbanyouth who are inclined to resist or live in opposition to their “decent” families. Whatkind of behaviors do these youth engage in, and how is it the same or different fromthe behaviors described by Anderson? How do economic opportunities affect thesebehaviors and codes?


socialization - corwin

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