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Created: March 5, 2003
Latest Update: March 5, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Illocutionary Understanding that Produces Change

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, March 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay is based on Rescuing a Boy From the Streets
A policeman's decision to help a 9-year-old instead of taking him into custody transforms both lives in ways they didn't imagine.
By Sandy Banks
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer. February 26, 2003. Backup.

Sandy Banks tells the story of a young boy who catches the attention of a cop, a cop trying to keep him on the straight and narrow, a cop who listened in good faith well enough that he heard the boys complaint that "there was nothing to do." And so started a relationship, that according to Sandy's description was offered to others, but that few accepted. In the end the cop takes the boy under his wing.

Concepts I'd like you to consider here are:

• Social justice in the sense of equal access to opportunities. What precisely did the cop hear when he listend to the boy? Link to article at spot I had in mind.

• Class privilege in terms of better serviced schools and more opportunities for supervised activities in sports and the arts for schools in non-poverty areas. Link to article at spot I had in mind.

• Motivation as a human drive. This goes to the theory X - that people won't work or undertake any other achievement unless you force them to. Theory Y - that people work because achievement is satisfying in and of itself. Link to article at spot I had in mind.

• Illocutionary understanding as including the many facets of those who are different from us. Illocutionary discussion is discussion aimed at helping us to understand and accept the many differences which seem to be endemic to our world. Such discussion is aimed at filling in status characteristics and categorical impressions with far more complete narratives of who these Others really are. Link to article at spot I had in mind.

  Private sphere and public sphere in the sense that some things are up to the individual and other things depend on our social standing and the fairness with which goods are distributed in the society. Link to article at spot I had in mind.

• Complicit in the sense of sharing to some extent in the guilt of denial. Those of us who never partook of slavery can still be complicit if we stand silently by and say and do nothing before the racism that is slavery's legacy. No, we are not as guilty as those who enslaved others; and we are not as guilty as those who captured and sold freemen into slavery; but to the extent that we condone the present as it derives privilege and benefit from those actions, we are complicit. Not specifically referenced in the article, as I recall it. jeanne

• Denial in the sense of refusing to consider those alternative perspectives that would not support the gains we receive from the system as it exists. Denial is an insistence upon seeing the situation from a perspective that provides apologetics for our own situatedness. An example can be seen when Terrance brought one small bundle, while Officer Henderson imagined suitcases or duffel bags or more.

Discussion Questions

1. Did Officer Derwin Henderson start out to get poor and needy kids off the states and give them a chance at achievement?

   Consider what Officer Henderson tells of us his first ten years on the force.

2. What made Officer Henderson notice Terrance? Was it his good behavior? Or was it what he said?

   Consider what Officer Henderson tells us of his first encounter with Terrance.

3. Did Terrance eagerly accept Officer Henderson's offer to let him play on the team? No. Explain.

   Suppose that Officer Henderson had accepted Terrance's refusal and later said, "well, we offered him the chance and he turned it down." Could you explain this as the poor don't really want our help or as sometimes the poor can't afford to accept our help? or some other explanation? Can you link this to class privilege? Did Terrance have class privilege? Was Officer Henderson exercising class privilege? Refer to the reason the article gives for Terrance's hesitation to accept.

4. Was Terrance's transformation effected overnight? What might this tell us about the setting of limits and standards?

   Consider that limits must be set, so that expectations can be formed in an organized infrastructure of some sort. It's hard to get things done without some amount of bureaucratic infrastructure that permits one department to plan with some security on what the others are doing. But there also needs to be some flexibility, because fact patterns, the same sets of facts in regularly occurring situations are almost never identical. When we look at bureaucratic exigencies at an individual level, it becomes clear that ritualized, regulated behavior assures primarily that the routine tasks will go on as usual, not that the bureaucracy itself is adaptive to changing patterns and conditions. Refer to Terrance's back sliding into expulsion from school.

5. What did change in Terrance's environment? What did not change? With what results?

   Consider what Officer Henderson tells us.

6. What might this story suggest about our knee jerk reaction to cut extra curricular activities the minute the budget is tight? How does that fit in with social justice? Where did the extracurricular activity in this story come from? Was it free? Was Terrance limited in his ability to get extracurricular activities because his mother didn't really want to spend the money on him?

   Consider that the baseball or football team wasn't free. The boys needed uniforms, rides, supervision. Is this a reasonable approach to the needs that Officer Henderson had come to recognize? to expect that he give up the money he saved for a house to provide them privately? Consider where the responsibility of the state ends in such matters.

7. Is this story about one kid, or about kids? Public sphere or private sphere?

   Consider whose life we come to know about. Whose connections do we come to understand? What's the beginning? Kid in trouble. What's the middle? Officer reaches out to kid. What's the end? Kid gets chance to succeed. So whose story is it? Notice that it's one on one. It doesn't start out that way. We're told there was a whole team full of kids. But the story is about one kid who gets the big chance. Is that understandable when the solution is being handled one on one, privately? What does this say about the indadequacy of our schools? What if Terrance hadn't been talented at baseball or football or whatever? Does this suggest one way in which we should come to understand public and private spheres of action? Do the choices we make at this level affect who gets a chance to succeed and who doesn't? Is that class privilege?

   Consider that Officer Henderson's admonition to Terrance to "prove them wrong" sees the problem and the solution as in Terrance's control. i.e., private. Now, as we study denial, people like Derrick Bell and O.W. Wilson would tell us that through the acceptance of both the problem and the solution as private, on Terrance, we are denying that the state turns its head and ignores the many kids who share Terrance's circumstances. That doesn't mean that Terrance doesn't have responsibility for his own private struggle. But we, the state, have responsibility for the infrastructure that denies him an equal opportunity at achievement, and we are complicit to the extent that we deny that.