You can only communicate with people in a language they understand.
In the 80s and 90s, Massachusetts was still trying to establish racial integration in schools—tricky, of course, because as always, centuries of redlining and segregation wove those things into the very fabric of the city. Neighborhoods were divided mostly by race, cross-cut with socioeconomic biases that sometimes deviated from racial divisions. This was 30 years after Brown v. Board of Education, and it was and is a tough nut to crack.
Our city went down a common path:
- Group students into different classes, by level of academic advancement ("tracking").
- Decide that in addition to racial integration, some of the problem is that schools in marginalized neighborhoods don't have advanced classes.
- Turn them into "magnet schools" by placing the Talented & Gifted (TAG) programs there.
- The TAG kids are almost all white, and the marginalized neighborhoods are almost all non-white, so you bus the TAG kids to the magnet school, and Bob's your uncle: racial integration!
Wow, spelling it out makes it look even worse.
At any rate, I was a nerdy, troubled, abrasive, undiagnosed-ADHD kid who was forbidden from getting into fights, even for self-defense. (I was not protected in any other way, so this was the worst time of a life that has had some pretty bad times. If you don't protect your kid, and don't allow them to protect themselves, you might as well just tell them "You're not worth protecting" out loud.) My father, fond of pairing "violence is never the answer" with violence, scared me more than bullies.
This all sets the scene for my 7th-8th grade experience, at a decaying school that was 74% Hispanic (overwhelmingly Puerto Rican), 12% Black, and 11% white. I don't recall there being much mobility into the advanced classes, so the populations mostly mixed for things like gym, life skills (or whatever it was called: I had Cooking, Sewing, and two iterations of Drafting).
The changing areas for gym were in the basement—basically catacombs with showers and benches. There was a lot of waiting around for a teacher to come down and tell us we could leave.
One of my tormentors was George Cruz. On one fateful day, we were waiting in the gym catacombs, and he was hucking a little plastic figurine at me. It hurt! And then he would come over to demand it back. Refusing would provoke a fight, so I just did the World's Most Resentful Gandhi act and gave it back to him. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Until I was done. He came over to get the figurine back.
"Give it." "No. You're just going to throw it at me again."
He reached into my personal space to grab it.
I stood up quickly and punched him very hard in the stomach. When he doubled over, I pounded his spine twice. He stepped back and caught his breath.
I said "Here" and gave him the figurine back. For the rest of our time together, we were, if not BFFs, on quite peaceable and even friendly terms.
I don't think George was a "bad kid," whatever that means. I don't know why he was bullying classmates, whether it was boredom, sublimated experience from elsewhere at school, transmitting onward the abuse he got from others, or what. What I do know with 100% certainty is this:
- Talking to him at best did nothing, and seemed to make things worse.
- The moment I punched him, he started to see me as a peer.
For the two of us, right then, violence was the answer because that was the language he could hear. He couldn't, or wouldn't, be flexible enough to listen to other approaches. I had to express my boundaries physically.
I learned a lot of things from that hellish two years—sometimes in retrospect, but I learned this one in my bones, right then. You really need to try all the other answers first, but sometimes you have to go out of your comfort zone into forms of communication that you may find baffling or repellent. I haven't been in any fights since leaving that school; it turns out I'm really good at avoiding or escaping them.
I owe George a debt of gratitude, of sorts.