Tina Bell
English 5870
4 May 2009

Power

The struggle for power is everywhere. I can point to drastic examples such as slavery, child abuse, and animal cruelty, but I can also see examples of this struggle in the prison guard who makes up rules on visitor’s day to exert his power, or the youth who slowly walks down the middle of the street daring the driver to do something. I believe it must be innate for all people to want some type of power, and if they are denied access, they will create their own opportunities.

The children in Ann Ferguson’s chapter from Bad Boys: Public Schools and the Making of Black Masculinity also sought to exert some type of power in a system that allowed them none. While Ferguson was reading discipline records one frequently trouble-making student bragged about his file. “I got a lot in there, don’t I? Who else got one that big?” (9) This young man was unable to gain any power in school so he created his own. Many of the other African American boys from this school created their own power in the same way. The effect was that they were then punished more often than other students.

Ferguson’s article raises some interesting questions about our school system. Do we create many of the behavior problems we fight so hard to eliminate? Do we treat students differently, denying some power while allowing access to others? Is the system geared for one type of student to the exclusion of others who do not fit the mold? Ferguson discovered hat the students she studied “knew what was ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the context of school” (13). They chose to do what was considered wrong. These students who were “classified as lazy, belligerent, incorrigible at school could be respectful, diligent, and responsible in other contexts” (15).

Ferguson’s discoveries lead me to believe that we need to investigate the questions above much more thoroughly. Although I realize that some of these problems are created by those who consciously deny access to power for certain groups, I believe that much of this withholding is unconscious. This unconscious behavior makes the problems more difficult to recognize and change, more difficult to achieve. The idea of the unconscious nature of this discriminating behavior was made apparent in Ferguson’s example of desegregation. She stated that we admitted that when schools were segregated, children were treated unequally. After schools became desegregated, our conscious mind believed that this inequality disappeared. That was, after all, one of the purposes for desegregation. But, I wonder if this means of promoting inequality simply moved from a conscious act to an unconscious one.