We're Still Here by Jennifer M. Silva

Author:Jennifer M. Silva
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

“I Ain’t Got No Quit Button”

For George, a twenty-six-year-old black man, suffering crystallizes his identity and makes him even stronger. George asks me to give him the pseudonym of “Mr. Steal Your Girl.” When I protest that such a name might be distracting to the reader, he settles for George—as in, “George Clooney.” After just a few minutes of conversation, George observes that I smile often, and he demands: “How you do sociology and you so happy? Hearing everybody else’s problems?” I shrug, explaining that it is just my personality. “You know what I call that?” he retorts. “White girl spirit!”

George grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, where “for a young black youth growing up in the area I did, it was serious, no jokes.” His mother, a certified nursing assistant, was not home much. George recalls an incident when, “I was like thirteen. Something had happened and some guys came through shooting. And me, not even having nothing to do with it, almost got shot.” George explains that he was constantly “getting into little situations,” “getting into trouble,” from the time he was thirteen. He stopped going to school in ninth grade—“I didn’t get expelled, I really just stopped going. Like I just got fed up, and my mom was really, she was always at work so it was like, who was gonna stop me from not going to school?”

George was placed in a juvenile detention center from age thirteen to seventeen, which he reports “was not at all for my best interest.” His life spiraled into more and more surveillance: “The situations that I was placed in got me in more trouble. Like every time I got into a fight or something like, and that’s not even, it’s beyond my control at certain points, you know what I’m saying? After that it’s like, I’m getting more time, doing more time in here.” He recalls his release at age seventeen, and how woefully unprepared and unsupported he felt to transition to adulthood:

What do you want me to do now? I didn’t even grow up on the streets. So it’s just really like alright, y’all want me to come out here and be this upstanding citizen, but what do I know? How do I know to be, to be that citizen? I mean they had school in there, they had school in there. But the teachers, all the teachers that did come in to teach, they were all voluntary. So basically like some days we didn’t have school, know what I mean?

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