When The World Sees Thug, We Must See Student

by JESSE SCACCIA

As part of my teaching work in South Africa I read a book called Gangs, Politics & Dignity in Cape Town by a writer named Steffen Jensen.

This is a very academic look at the coloured township of Heideveld in the Cape Flats. The Cape Flats are so called not because the area is flat (though it is), but because the area is made up of cheap, almost tenement style apartments (flats) just outside of the city of Cape Town. The Cape Flats are literally a buffer zone between the more decrepit  black townships and the white areas. It was set up this way because coloured people were thought of as closer to white, and the whites were more comfortable with this.

Much of the book focuses on the concept of the ‘skollie.’ Skollie is the common stereotype applied to young coloured men in South Africa. As Jensen writes, “this Afrikaans word is best translated as scavenger; someone who refuses to work for a living. In Cape Town it also came to denote a violent hooligan or thug, lurking around urban spaces, seizing the moment and terrorizing hard-working people.”

Do you see a thug or a student? (Photo: ThugPoetry)

The equivalent, I would say, is the use of the word ‘thug’ to describe young, hip-hop-styled black or Hispanic man in America.

A focus of this book is the way that dignity is transferred. Is dignity something born in us, in other words, transferred from God? Is it handed down in the form of humiliation from welfare officials, the police, and gangs? Or, maybe, “domination exists only in so far as it is able to produce (induce) humiliation. In this way, dignity and domination (offence and humiliation) are co-produced: they are interdependent.”

The coloured young men I worked with in South Africa had clearly been marked by the label of skollie. If it is not how the world sees them, it is certainly how they believe the world sees them. They are dangerous. They are lazy. They are not to be trusted with a good man’s daughters and wife. They are not David or Carl or Sammy. They are, all, as individuals and together: skollie.

While the book dealt specifically with South Africa, this concept of transferred dignity spreads across culture. I saw my Dominican and Peurto Rican students struggle with this in Brooklyn, my Mexican students in San Diego, and my black students in Hartford. This is something that poor whites have to overcome too, with labels like ‘white trash.’ It was like they were fighting off this invisible force that pulled them toward bad choices. And that invisible force, to a large degree, was the identity we put on them as a society.

So the question is, how do we extract this concept from their identity? How do we get our students to believe they are simply who they are, for all their individual failures and successes, and not just a skollie?

There’s no quick or easy answer to this question, but it certainly starts with one thing: respect. Even if we disagree with our students, or we disapprove of their lifestyle, the way to lead them to a positive change is not through endless detentions or having them write mea culpa on the black board 500 times.

It is by communicating. It is by not being afraid. It is by looking them in the eyes and being maybe the only authority figure in their whole lives that sees the sweet child inside them, and not the skollie or thug or white trash on the outside.