“in some ways i think mobility makes all the difference”

I wrote the following to a friend recently:

In the last e-mail that you sent me, you wrote

> in some ways i think mobility makes all the difference.

with regards to youth in Detroit dealing with the intensity of being in a
close-knit but somewhat marginalized community. You mentioned joy-ridingas an example of youth trying to achieve some mobility. I think what you say about mobility is very true, and I’ve been thinking somewhat about youth and mobility lately, though more about the mobility of culture and identity.

I watched a film with my mom called Mad Hot Ballroom because movies about kids are usually more interesting than ones about adults, and even watered-down, slickly produced documentaries are about as interesting as you can get in South Central Pennsylvania. The movie is about kids in New York City public schools taking part in a program where they learn ballroom dancing and compete with other schools. While its unfortunate that so many documentaries about kids seem to use competition to carry the narrative, the film still made me think about some things. Mostly, it made me think about how having the experience of dancing was extremely valuable to the kids, not because it taught them discipline or social refinement, as some of the interviews with adults proclaimed, but just because it was sort of a strange thing for a lot of these kids to do and something that a lot of other kids didn’t get to do. I think that its really important for youth to have experiences that let them define their identity as seperate from their peers. It allows them to participate equally in an important dialogue, as kids get older and begin to have some interaction with people outside of their family or neighborhood or immediate community, where people bring the experiences that they feel are formative, or important to their lives and try to reconcile the feelings and ideas that come from those experiences with others (who are doing the same with their own experiences). The young kids that I’ve met in the last few years, whether its at shows, or volunteering at schools, or around my parents neighborhood, seemed ill-equipped to do this whether its because economic pressures and the indifference of parents or educators make it hard for kids in inner-city Columbus to experience weird and different things or because kids in exurban Central Pennsylvania are caught up in a consumer culture so bland that it doesn’t allow for any variety of experience either. Kids, I think, who get to do something like dancing or other arts programs, or maybe discover some youth-oriented subculture have a much greater amount of mobility because they have a framework to craft a more personally-developed identity instead of one imposed by social stereotypes or aspirations to mimic popular culture.

I’m not sure if I’ve articulated this very well, but it just seems like thekids in the documentary, whether its by virtue of their involvement in the dance program, or just living in a place where multi-culturalism, or difference in general, is an unavoidable reality, have a movemement to their lives and a budding self-awareness that is totally lacking to much of the youth culture that I experience otherwise.

I was reading the story Mansion on the Hill from Tennessee Jones’ Deliver Me From Nowhere [buy this from boxcarbooks.org], which is a story where a woman tells of her childhood riding through upper-class neighborhoods at night with friends. Regarding the sneaking out, the riding around town at night, the drinking, the character says

I don’t know how I would feel about my own kids doing similar things. I want them to have something that will give them strength in the hard days ahead, and I understand that it will probably be something that I will never know about. This is one of the heartbreaks of being a parent, that you will never know your children as complete people.

This story is beautiful and it talks about childhood and parenthood, class, gender, and sexual awakening all in 14 pages.