Introduction
Diann “Sally” Bostick is a 73-year-old African American, retired Head Start administrator who has lived in Madera, California, since 9. She grew up with both parents, two brothers, and four sisters in the home. She attended Thomas Jefferson Middle School and then Madera High School. Growing up in a large, economically depressed black family in the 50s and 60s, Sally and her siblings had to be creative in their recreation activities. They would swim in the canal by the family home or play a game they called “Handy,” wherein they would split up into two teams, one team at the front of the house, the other team at the back of the house, then one member of the first team would yell “Handy,” and a member of the opposing team would yell “Here it comes” and throw a ball up and over the roof of the house, then the one that threw the ball, the “sender,” would run around to the other side to try to catch the ball before the opposing team could catch it.
Interview Questions and Responses
There was not much play time for Sally and her siblings, though, because everyone in the family was required to work to help support the family. Given the times and the lack of economic opportunities, the entire family would go to Oregon every summer to pick beans, cherries, berries, and grapes. This was a clear manifestation of poverty exacerbated by structural factors forcing young people of color to participate in family income generation (Seider et al., 2019). Everyone, even the youngest child, worked in the fields. In the off-season, they would “pick chickens,” meaning their family would kill, pluck and clean 100 chickens at a time. This, according to Sally, was her greatest source of stress and anxiety. She stated, “I didn’t want to work! It made me hate manual labor”. She goes on to state that while the experience taught her to be hard-working, dependable, and responsible, it also made her “overly sensitive” towards the things she didn’t like or want to do and made her “quick” to say what she wasn’t going to do. She also says that it made her “more determined to do better” than her parents, especially her mother, who never learned to drive and “only did what she was told” to do by her husband. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I definitely knew what I didn’t want to do!” she exclaims. These remarks underscored the late-adolescent Black and Latino understanding of the relationship between poverty and structural factors, such as racism, low wages, and joblessness (Seider et al., 2019). Sally goes on to say that this also led to her one “great” act of rebellion. She said she declared that she wouldn’t go to Oregon once she turned 18, and there was nothing anyone could do to make her go. But Sally didn’t get the satisfaction of her rebellion because the year she turned 18 was the year the family stopped going to Oregon. She says that hurt her feelings because she thought she was doing something big by refusing to go.
For Sally and her sisters, dating was not an option. Their father was a strict man who kept his daughters close to home. The entire base of their social life was the family unit and one or two families traveled and worked with them in Oregon. That is how Sally met and was “secretly” courted by her husband, George. She laughingly states that he was her only source of peer pressure. Consistently, middle and high school was “not good” for Sally and her siblings. They never had the money for the supplies that were required for them to achieve academic success. Sally was correct; studies consistently find that people of color score worse than whites in various demographic categories, including education, income, and health (Williams, 2013). I could see the deep regrets in her eyes as she made this statement: “We never had the stuff the other kids had; gym clothes, home economics supplies, whatever. And if you didn’t have the required materials or clothing to participate in the class fully, they just gave you an “F.” There was no help.”
Sally also reports that she was unaware of the major social/political issues within her school or age group because she was very sheltered from such things. The only thing that stood out to her was how racially divided her school environment was (Seider et al., 2019); the whites in one area, Hispanics in another, and blacks in a different section. She also recalled that the black kids weren’t encouraged to join the sports teams or be picked for extracurricular activities. She remembers one friend of her family who had shoulder-length hair and tried out for cheerleading and was told that her hair “didn’t bounce right,” and that’s why she wasn’t chosen for the team. Sally’s encounters as a Black adolescent girl in a racist system are not isolated. Indeed, research has shown that Black females are frequently portrayed as the extreme opposite of White womanhood and attractiveness, resulting in a devaluation of their appearance (Gadson & Lewis, 2022). According to Sally, racism was the main reason she and her siblings associated primarily with each other.
After graduation, Sally’s options were the same for all young women of the time, marriage and family or going to school to become a secretary or a nurse. In her wisdom, she chose the latter but quickly grew bored with that. According to Sally, life became even more complicated when she got pregnant and was forced to drop out of school. These bad outcomes in later life can be traced back to Sally’s negative experiences in high school, where she and other Black girls were isolated and unable to participate in meaningful co-curricular activities. According to Guest and Schneider (2003), this increased the likelihood of participating in high-risk behaviors such as smoking and led to poor academic performance. However, Sally could not give up easily and ultimately returned to school and studied Child Development and Management. When asked about her relationship with her parents, Sally answered, “There wasn’t one.” The follow-up question was, “Would you say it was detached?” and her answer was a somewhat bitter grunt. As mentioned before, her father was a very strict authoritarian. While she couldn’t remember him ever needing to discipline the girls, he did a lot of yelling and cursing and would physically discipline the boys with whatever was at hand. According to Sally, her mother was “quiet” and “never did anything other than cook and clean.”
Religion played an important role in Sally’s adolescence. She says they went to church; their dad was a “sometimes” preacher, and she could “feel the Lord protecting and sheltering” her. She states that she heard the Lord calling her to something; she didn’t know what, around the age of 12 or 13. This practice of seeking comfort in religion, especially by marginalized groups, is well documented in research. For instance, compelling evidence shows that lower-income youths and adults have stronger religious views and doctrinal fidelity (Joshi et al., 2009). Accordingly, when asked, Sally stated that if she could tell her younger self anything, it would be to ask more questions about the things going on at the time and be more involved, especially in the Civil Rights Movement. She said she believes she would have been very active in the Movement if she’d only asked more questions and gotten more involved.
Conclusion
My adolescent experiences were similar to Sally’s because I grew up in a very small, nearly white community where my grandmother (sole caregiver) and I stood out for being “non-white.” So I dealt with a lot of racism, but I didn’t fully understand it to be racism; I thought it was kids being mean and repeating things they had heard from their parents. I was very aware, however, that I was isolated for my differences. Aside from racism in a small community, the only similarity is that the development of our identities was somewhat stunted by an overbearing, emotionally detached, authoritarian parent figure. We both had to do the kind of self-discovery and trial-and-error necessary to develop a healthy sense of self later in life.
Unlike Sally and her siblings, I was raised as an only child by my grandmother, so I had very little sense of belonging to a community or understanding of how I “fit in” anywhere. I lacked the security of knowing there was always someone to look out for or care for me. It would be much later in life that I developed a sense of who I am and belonging to a community. For those reasons, I, like other “at-risk” teens, engaged in risky and impulsive behaviors: drinking, drugs, sex, and general thrill-seeking activities (Guest & Schneider, 2003). Consequently, I got pregnant and was made to get married at 16. My children paid the price for what I lacked.
References
Gadson, C. A., & Lewis, J. A. (2022). Devalued, overdisciplined, and stereotyped: An exploration of gendered racial microaggressions among Black adolescent girls. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 69(1), 14–26. Web.
Guest, A., & Schneider, B. (2003). Adolescents’ extracurricular participation in context: The mediating effects of schools, communities, and identity. Sociology of education, 89-109. Web.
Joshi, P., Hardy, E., & Hawkins, S. (2009). Role of Religiosity in the Lives of the Low-Income Population: A Comprehensive Review of the Evidence. ASPE. Web.
Seider, S., Clark, S., Graves, D., Kelly, L. L., Soutter, M., El-Amin, A., & Jennett, P. (2019). Black and Latinx adolescents’ developing beliefs about poverty and associations with their awareness of racism. Developmental Psychology, 55(3), 509–524. Web.
Williams, J. H. (2013). Disparities, disproportionalities, differences, and discrepancies. Social work research, 37(4), 309-311. Web.