roachboy

ohh_shesus:
yikes, this is complex.
first i would seperate your recognition of the scope of these rules/socal games from your ability to impact on them--in other words i would try not to let your analytic observations twist themselves into normative ones: it is perhaps as important that you understand something of the social routines/patterns that you encounter in order to situate conflict as it is that you do something about it, particularly in the short term.

secondly: conflict seems a terribly difficult phenomenon to use as a point of access to these social norms because--well--how do you think about it exactly? for example: is conflict a breakdown in rules or is it as much hierarchy adjustment within them? is it inside or outside the game? or both? neither? how do you assign meanings to conflict?

third: i am interested in the generality in your characterization of (if you like--it is early and i cant think of a better way to say this) the input and output ends of this school/situation: "the family" "the culture" "the inner city" on one end--"the real world" on the other. within this seems to float a second ambiguity--whether you understand yourself as in a de facto sociologist role (which is not in itself a bad place to be) who is looking at this particular school as an analytic object (and who is finding that this object is not self-contained) or if you are in a position of something of a political militant, who is interested in a more general understanding of the situation with the idea of introducing change.

it seems to me that you are running into a rather brutal lesson in the effects of class stratification in the united states.
it seems to me that something in your programme encourages you to treat these effects as if they were a form of social deviance the causes for which can be traced back to misshapen rules (relative to what?) transmitted by broken families (relative to what)--a view that is perhaps not wrong in itself, but is certainly not adequate as either an understanding or as a point of departure for action---because the problem you may be hitting is how to look at class stratification as a process, and what evaluative criteria to bring to the matter--if you naturalize class stratification, then the situation you are encountering might look deviant: if you understand class stratification as a politics, and as a problem, then what you are seeing might be understood as adaptive in a strange way.

either way, welcome to the reality of social reproduction in america.
to maintain this particular type of hierarchical society, it seems necessary that a significant number of people be encouraged to neutralize themselves.
welcome to what hegemony means--you dont need direct physical domination if you can figure ways to encourage teh dominated to internalilze and act out/through their own domination.
and welcome to the world of ideology as it impacts on trying to understand what is going on around you--the exclusion of economic conditions, of the social correlates of these conditions as they unfold through the system of social reproduction is of a piece with the naturalization of the economic order.

what to do? first, i should tell you that i teach at the university level. and so here i cross the line between what i understand analytically and how i act politically myself--which is also a crossing of boundaries that might make what follows irrelevant for you--but an outline of my experience on this kind of question follows anyway:

well, for what its worth, i tend to see class stratification as the consequences of particular political choices. so my inclination would be to expose the process to the students, bit by bit, and hope by doing that to give them ways to situate how the are/what their options are etc.
here is the system of stratification
here is where this school fits into it
here are the kind of patterns of interaction i have been able to assemble through observation at this school
here is an idea of how i see the more general patterns
here is the outcome: you are in a system that works to normalize the trashing of possibilities for entire classes of people in the states--you are from a poor background, you are expendable--if you obey the social rules you encounter here, you internalize the assumption that you are expendable, redundant in the bigger (capitalist) scheme of things---at the limit, you reproduce the notion that your life if worth less than those of middle class kids by treating yourself and those around you as if their lives were worth less....you perform your own exclusion....something like this...because one conclusion i have come to is that i cannot necessarily change the entire system of social reproduction as a single teacher--but i can try to bring an idea of the situation to the students, presented in as calm and complete a manner as i can manage, in order to try to put them in a position to choose at least whether they are going to continue to perform themselves through sets of rules designed to keep them seperate and powerless.

dunno if this is helpful--like i said at the outset, this is a terribly complex cluster of questions you are bumping into.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite