Abstract
“Katie, what’re you doing sitting back there? Move up to the big table. This is my Staffing and I want you at the big table.” Derrick tells me as he saunters into the meeting room of the main administration building on Havenwood’s campus. I am sitting at a smaller table tucked in a corner, trying to be the unobtrusive anthropologist in the room, taking verbatim notes from afar. I collect my stuff and move to the “big table,” the large round table that fills the room. I spend every Monday morning from 9 a.m.–12 p.m. at this table, observing the Intake Meeting and taking notes about who is being admitted to Havenwood and why, what their initial treatment plan will be, including treatment objectives, goals, and interventions. Today, I am observing Derrick’s “Staffing,” a quarterly meeting where the initial treatment goals, objectives, and interventions are reviewed, discussed, and revised.1 Unlike other assessment meetings, Staffings include the youth and external individuals such as parents, state workers, lawyers, and representatives of the funding sources paying for the child’s treatment. Havenwood employees who attend Staffings include teachers, individual therapists, music or art therapists, the director of religious services, line staff, cottage directors, cottage case workers, and cottage supervisors.
In our society, [total institutions] are the forcing houses for changing persons; each is a natural experiment on what can be done to the self.
—Erving Goffman Asylums
Alls I gotta do is stay focused. You know what I’m sayin’? ‘Cause I can leave here, master everything, the skills… but I don’t use it? I don’t stay focused? What I have? Nothin. But if I use them to stay focused, I’m a good man.
—Derrick’s Life History Interview
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
I return to a more in-depth analysis of types of meetings in the institution, but for a discussion of Staffings see David R. Buckholdt and Jaber F. Gubrium’s “Doing Staffings,” Human Organization 38 no. 3 (1979): 255–264.
This conflation has a long and complex history. For an extensive analysis of how African American were vilified throughout American history as well as responses to this vilification in folklore and social banditry see William Van Deburg’s Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Imani Perry’s Chapter 4, “The Glorious Outlaw,” in Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
For more on basic trust between infant and caregiver, object relations, see the work of psychologist D.W. Winnicot. See also Paul Tillich for a philosophical approach to trust. Anthony Gidden’s analysis of the relationships between self-identity, trust, risk, and anxiety, and modernity are the subject of his book Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). My approach to “trust” is much like my approach to “love.” It is not something that the young people give much to others, but what they are given, or feel they are given. This is the opposite direction of Winnicot’s trust, which is when the child trusts the caregiver. William, and others, hope that they can earn the trust of their caregivers.
For an extensive survey of gangs, see Youth Gangs in American Society, fourth edition, (Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2012) by Randall G. Sheldon, Sharon K. Tracy, William B. Brown. For a classic text on gangs, see Albert K. Cohen’s Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang (New York: The Free Press, 1955). See Victor Rios’s Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New York: New York University Press, 2011) for a discussion of gang databases and the criminalization of young men of color.
See, for example, Bourgois’s In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Bario, second edition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
See, for example, R. W. Connell’s Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) and Gender (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002) and Michael Messner’s “Boyhood, Organized Sports, and the Construction of Masculinities,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 18 (1990): 416–444. For a focus on Black masculinities, see Edmund Gordon’s “Cultural Politics of Black Masculinity,” Transforming Anthropology 6 nos.1 & 2 (1997): 36–53, Jafari Allen’s ¡Venceremos?: The Politics of Black Self-making in Cuba (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), Phillip Harper’s Are We Not Men?: Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), David John’s “Re-imagining Black Masculine Identity: An Investigation of the ‘Problem’ Surrounding the Construction of Black Masculinity in America,” in The State of Black America 2007: Portrait of the Black Male. An Official Publication of the National Urban League, Stephanie J. Jones, editor (Silver Springs, MD: Beckham Publications Group, 2007) pp. 59–73, Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), bell hook’s We Real Cool.
Copyright information
© 2015 Katie Rose Hejtmanek
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hejtmanek, K.R. (2015). Becoming Good Men. In: Friendship, Love, and Hip Hop. Culture, Mind and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137544735_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137544735_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-54472-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54473-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social Sciences CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)