You really don't want to go there, dun. It's now cliche for white folks looking to justify their own paranoia and fears to invoke rowdy black kids on the train, with no parents, acting a fool. Word up, I hate it to. But my ability to see this threw a racial lens is undercut by one observable fact--white kids act a fool in full view of their parents. In the last three months, I've seen a white child hit his mother, tell her mother to shut up, and run up and down a subway car, ignoring his parents pleas to stop. Yesterday, on my plane to Denver, I watched a white kid get up and walk the aisle--while the plane was ascending. He kept going even after the stewardess warned him.
I've been watching scenes like this for much of my adult life, and there are some pretty good stats which show that white parents are much more permissive than black parents. This doesn't just mean that black parents are more likely to spank (though they are) but punishment in general:
...black parents punish their children more than white parents in all ways. If you're black and you misbehave, you're both more likely to get spanked and more likely to lose your allowance than your white neighbor, who in turn is both more likely to get spanked and more likely to lose his allowance than the Hispanic kid down the street. So on average, poor people spank more and withdraw allowances less, whereas black people spank more and withdraw allowances more.
Anyway, it's always amazes me how white folks--and black folks--will talk about how black kids act in public, but miss the obvious parallel among white folks. I know the white kid with his mother is just rude, while the black kid is "scary," but to me, they're just annoying--both of them. And that brings me back to a sort of equality I can embrace--Black and white folks, please yoke up your kids, so I don't have to.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Well, I think that the behavior of black kids is commented on more because people are waiting in the wings to say, "See? See? That's just what I expected." so to speak. Walk through the mall on a Saturday and you'll see that most kids have behavioral problems, no matter what color they are. No race has a monopoly on bad kids.
"The only difference between white pathology and black pathology is that white pathology is underreported. " -- Ishmael Reed, The Black Pathology Biz
"The only difference between white pathology and black pathology is that white pathology is underreported. " -- Ishmael Reed, The Black Pathology Biz
Would that that were so. White juvenile pathology is more likely to be handled through the mental health system, whereas black pathology ends up in juvenile court.
I remember back in the 90s, when everyone was talking about how black kids need to emulate white middle class values. I thought that was crazy, cause I went to school with white middle class kids, and they were fuckin out of control. My parents would have lost their damn minds if I had tried some of the stuff they did.
Well, I dislike any generalizations about "black kids" or "white kids" or "black parents" and "white parents".
Period.
Your point is off target.
The amount -- or forms of -- punishment have nothing to do with how much kids act up.
Perhaps black parents punish their children more because their kids break conventional norms of public behavior more often?
Perhaps black parents punish their children more because their kids break conventional norms of public behavior more often? - Poolside
You have no way to back up that statement.
Teenagers in packs are always a mixture of irritating and terrifying. There should be a 7pm curfew on all minors.
The difference between white pathology and black pathology is that white people and white pathologies exceed the number of black people and black pathologies. Thus, white pathologies seem "normal" and excuseable as "kids being kids". White pathologies are also seen as relatively harmless because many people did the same thing when they were kids. (The media happily reinforces this.) For example, college frat-party style binge drinking. It's a pretty destructive thing. But lots of privileged white adults did this and "they turned out fine". So it's normal and excuseable as kids being kids.
Black pathologies are labled abnormal and dangerous because they're different and foreign. White person sits on the train, sees black kids acting rowdy, and has zero frame of reference from which to judge the activity. And thus, finds it patently offensive and inexcusable. Black person sits on the same train, sees the same thing, and remembers how she did the same thing when she was 15 years old and turned out just fine. She inwardly rolls her eyes, conceals a smirk, and goes back to reading her book.
You haven't lived until you've seen 8 year old white girls on trains doing their best imitation Ciara moves... and their parents laugh and applaud.
I'm not sure about this one. While children acting up on the train of any race is annoying the issue of Black kids has a particular level of gravity to me. I'm not sure if you can really compare a child telling their parent to shut up (ugly as it is) or just being bratty with a group of teenagers who are spouting all manner of profanity loud and incessantly? The fact that anecdotally I see black teenagers behaving like this more often than others might be a fluke but that's been my experience, maybe I'm overly sensitive. I'm by no means a prude but it just gets tiresome seeing other black people act out like that over and over and it makes me sad for the future
I think ML pretty much captures the source of this observation. For white folks, black people are the Other, so their habits are scary. You gotta understand, about 80% of the time we can't even understand what they're saying! Sometimes even the swear words are incomprehensible. But there are few acceptable ways to say "black people and their habits are unfamiliar and scary," so people identify the annoying habits of black teenagers as an easy target, and use it to justify the further segregation in their lives.
that was kinda lame....
when black people are in the same position as white people are in this country we can start to worry about white kids acting the fool...
we KNOW the consequences of black kids acting the fool.. lots of those white kids will wind up on wall street or living a nice comfortable life... lots of those black kids aint... that's the difference...
I think almost all of the non-straight-up rascist "kids acting the fool on the train" and "gee, why do they play their music so loud" stems from differing attitudes that split fairly cleanly along class more than race.
Poor folks generally don't have big backyards or roof decks or whatever. Also central (or any) AC seems to be negatively correlated with, y'know, not having a lot of money. So, especially on a hot summer evening you'll see folks in poorer neighborhoods out, with family and friends "in public." Eating, drinking, joking around, playing games, courting, just living.
Richer folks have friends and family over into their more private (and privately owned) homes, yards, co-op recreation spaces, or they go to destination activities that, surprise, cost money and tend toward some form of exclusivity or "privacy."
This creates a vastly different set of attitudes about public space. For poor folks, it is generally an extension of their homes and lives in a way that richer (in a relative, not absolute scale) folks just cannot conceive.
Richer folks tend to see the public realm as a "no man's land" where expressions of individuality, personal "appropriation, or use for person comfort or enjoyment tend to be viewed as encroachment or "taking" from the commons.
There are LOTS of exceptions to this, but as broad brush it does as okay as any broadbrush.
That said, there are some white folks who are raising some f-ing monster kids - rude entitled, narcissistic and willfully ignorant. But as Jim says we know the concequences of those kids....
...they go to Yale, get elected President through family connections, and get a lot of people killed. So, y'know no biggie.
Sorry. In my experiences on the DC subway, I've seen so much more unruliness from black kids than white. It's not close. I otherwise don't complain or draw any conclusions from it, though.
asl, that's because they're busy hot-boxing on the Beltway.
...in their parent's Saab.
Umm...the worst public behavior isn't from kids, my friends (as Johnny Mac would say), it's from adults, particularly young adults in their 20s and 30s.
Sure, on public transit most of those folks are well behaved during rush hours, but try riding a train at bar time and tell me who behaves worse? The black kids acting the fool after school? Or the white kids drunk of their asses after the bars close?
PS-I'm one of those obnoxious white kids, so I know of what I speak.
I wasn't aiming to excuse the black kids in the earlier post by comparing them to the dancing white girl. I was worried about her parents and riders like them, who had no problem with it, but would have had a problem with me, and not necessarily thought it was cute or clapped, were I dancing on trains at 8 or were some other black kids dancing or acting out. The perception behind white and black kids acting out on trains is the problem, not the acting out in and of itself. All kids act out. Some get worse treatment because of it. No, we don't have to sit in the back anymore, but we're basically saying the seats still are not the same.