The Image Of The Adolescent Minority
Friedenberg, Edgar Z.
In our society there are two kinds of minority status. One of these I will call the "hot-blooded" minorities, whose archetypical image is that of the Negro or Latin. In the United States,...
...Abraham Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey's classic, The Mark of Oppression (New York: Norton, 1951), for a fascinating study of these dynamics among American Negroes...
...Whether in childhood or in adolescence, the same quality of experience is starved out or repressed...
...She is not just omitted, she is excluded...
...but all our past ethnic groups have settled for suburbia, and the people who live there bear witness that freedom is somewhere else...
...it is not under tutelage...
...This prepares the ground against the subsequent assault of adolescence...
...But I am questioning the depth and significance of our interest in the cover or pin-up girl...
...A youth needs one today in order to hold a job that will permit even minimal participation in the dominant society...
...Most beasts recognize their own kind...
...It is in the process of being denatured...
...For the boy we suffer angry, paranoid remorse, as if he were Billy the Kid, or Budd...
...But what the movie presented, it seemed to me, was almost entirely an account of her rise to sexual power...
...The kids' opponents are merely in favor of the kind of American society that these evils flourish in, and the youngsters do not challenge the system itself, though they are appalled by its consequences...
...Her adolescence is treated as less crucial...
...There are so many more ways to get hung up on a boy...
...But the informal aspects of minority status are also imputed to him...
...Lolita's failure is the classic failure of identity in adolescence...
...Yet could they, as adolescents, be political...
...the conscientious "teener" sold by Pat Boone to soothe adults while the kids themselves buy Mad and Catcher...
...I do not think this is necessarily true of all politics...
...the community is proud of them, but they are such stuff as only the driest dreams are made of...
...Yet, it is precisely here that a crucial dilemma arises...
...but sentimentalized, roseate, to reassure us that we have done her no harm, and that she is well contented...
...Adolescent girls are not seen as members of a "hot-blooded" minority, and to this fact may be traced some interesting paradoxes in our perception of the total phenomenon of adolescence...
...Alberto Lleras Camargo, former president of Colombia, secretary-general of the OAS, speaking at Wellesley College Symposium on Latin America—quoted in The Christian Science Monitor, February 15, 1963...
...nobody asks "Would you want your son to marry a Negro...
...This, the well-lighted Public Squares cannot afford...
...People generally sympathetic with adolescents sometimes say, "Well, it really isn't fair...
...American males are certainly anxious to project a heterosexual public image, and even more anxious to believe in it themselves...
...Then, there are the "longsuffering minorities," whose archetype is the Jew, but which also, I should say, includes women...
...A Jewish girl can become a Jewish Mother, and this is a role which even Plato would have called essential...
...In any society, to be sure, the young occupy a subordinate or probationary status while under tutelage for adult life...
...there has recently been, for example, a number of tragic suicides reported among adolescent girls, though suicide generally is far less common among females...
...But it is a strong assault, and if adolescence wins, the future hangs in the balance...
...That is the sort of capitalism which understands by freedom of enterprise its own efforts to prevent the regulation of its expansion, and which, in the name of enterprise, withstands all obligations to serve and any attempt to convert it into an instrument of progress rather than of speculation...
...The fantasy underlying this stereotype, then, is erotic...
...Where she had only perfume we have oil...
...who would hire him...
...The minority group is a special American institution, created by the interaction between a history and an ideology which are not to be duplicated elsewhere...
...They are not licensing laws, requiring attendance until a certain defined minimum competence, presumed essential for adult life, has been demonstrated...
...A Honolulu paper, at least, described this scene of attempted murder as "an old-fashioned caning that had the audience cheering in its seats...
...One of these I will call the "hot-blooded" minorities, whose archetypical image is that of the Negro or Latin...
...the last I can recall was H. D. Thoreau, and he went on foot, through the woods, alone...
...We have had several cases in the past few years of boys sixteen and under being sentenced to death by the full apparatus of formal criminal law, who would not have been permitted to claim its protection had they been accused of theft or disorderly conduct...
...Leslie Fiedler, "The Fear of the Impulsive Life...
...The Adolescent Girl In this assault, adolescent boys play a very different role from adolescent girls...
...Her patrons are concerned to experience their own masculinity...
...The author's emphasis is on the way her angry betrayal of her lover marks the end of her childhood...
...But there was also a rather sound artistic reason...
...Young Jews talk volubly, play the violin, and go to medical school, though never on Saturday...
...In this respect, fiction is true to American life...
...Occasional efforts are made to counterbalance the, in my judgment, pornographic picture of a brutal teen-age gang by presenting "good" teen-agers unjustly suspected, and decent police trying to resist sadistic pressure from the gang's victim, who drives one of its members to suicide...
...It merely defines, in terms of age alone, a particular group as subject to legal restrictions not applicable to other persons...
...Since we define adulthood almost exclusively in economic terms, we obviously cannot concern ourselves as much about the growth of those members of society who are subject from birth to restricted economic opportunity...
...New York: Atheneum, 1962...
...Then, in middle-age, they have the same trouble with their former self that many ethnics do...
...Look: she even has her own telephone, with what is left of the boy dangling from the other end of the line...
...And of all the criticisms that might be directed against that way of life, this is the harshest...
...This is obviously true of the Negro at the present time...
...the same submergence of spontaneity to the exigencies of collective action, that mark the ruin of adolescence...
...If he does, as many do, for just these reasons, he becomes prima facie an offender...
...One reason that we do not take adolescent growth seriously in girls is that we do not much care what happens to people unless it has economic consequences: what would Holden ever be, since he never even graduates from high school...
...What was depicted here was neither Negro nor white nor really delinquent, but a comfortably vulgar middle-class dream of a "hotblooded" minority...
...Unlike Holden, she has no cult and is not vouchsafed any dignity...
...just as the comparative militance of the Catholic Church in proceeding toward integration in Louisiana may have less to do with Louisiana than Nigeria, which is in grave danger of falling into the hands of Black Muslims...
...she can no longer claim the exemptions of childhood...
...But the girl is merely squandered, and this wastage will continue all her life...
...We just don't see her...
...Sexuality, itself, has this power to resolve relationships into the immediate and interpersonal...
...The adolescent heroine in current fiction is not interpreted in the same way as the adolescent hero, even when the parallel is quite close...
...That capitalism hardly pays taxes, for it either blocks taxation enactments or circumvents them, and there is no law or power in the state that stands in the way of its monolithic advance...
...A high school diploma is a certificate of legitimacy, not of competence...
...We are consequence-oriented and future-oriented...
...This is true even when the author struggles against it...
...They can take care of other people and clean up after them...
...These are not the dreams that are wanted...
...the generosity of impulse that leads the champion lover of the high school to prance around the shower-room snapping a towel on the buttocks of his team-mates three hours before a hot date, just to remind them that life can be beautiful...
...Schachtel makes it clear how we go about building this kind of character in the child—by making it difficult for him to notice his delights when he has them, and obliterating the language in which he might recall them joyfully later...
...Experience repressed in adolescence does not, of course, result in amnesia, as does the repression of childhood experience...
...and are dealt with unconsciously by totally different dynamics...
...it leaves no temporal gaps in the memory...
...Exactly, and they serve a useful public function...
...The adolescent is now the only totally disfranchised minority group in the country...
...Nymphets are a public institution...
...Conventionally, it is he who threatens the virtue of our daughters and the integrity of our automobiles...
...Primitive peoples may initiate their youth...
...and must be based on a very different image in the minds of those who practice it and must have a different impact upon them...
...Adolescents are treated as a "hot-blooded" minority, then, because they seem so good at slap-and-tickle...
...the kids learn not to get fresh...
...But an adolescent boy who asks his father how he felt on the first night he spent in barracks or with a woman will be told what the father now thinks he felt because he ought to have...
...Is she then simply not much involved by our psychodynamics, or is she actively repressed...
...With occasional spectacular failures we do manage to assimilate the "teen-age" minority...
...We are left then, like the Macbeths, with the memory of an earlier fidelity...
...though we find their hot-bloodedness so exciting that we remain aware of them anyway...
...In the United States, "Teen-agers" are treated as a "hot-blooded" minority...
...The adolescent boy must be altered to fit middleclass adult roles, and when he has been he becomes a much less vital creature...
...Bettelheim specifically mentions Goodman and myself...
...In America, no minority has ever gotten any respect or consistently decent treatment until it began to acquire political power...
...for, in cold fact, the compulsory attendance law guarantees him nothing, not even the services of qualified teachers...
...But this is what the adolescent is left with if he gives in and goes along...
...Such perversity is a kind of exuberant overflow from the mainstream of sexuality, not a di version of it...
...But so, of course, are the members of the "hotblooded" minorities...
...Teenagers" err on the hot side...
...Such a youngster has very little place in our way of life...
...A very bad—indeed, vicious—but remarkably ambivalent reenactment of the entire fantasy on which the minority-status of the teen-ager is based can be seen in the recent movie 13 West St...
...Jews can become kindly old Rabbis and philosophers and even psychoanalysts and lovable comic essayists...
...American adolescents are notably free from political interests...
...I am convinced that it is also the source of the specific hostility—and sometimes sentimentality— that adolescents arouse in adults...
...I have already asserted that, since she is not perceived as a member of the "hotblooded" minority she cannot take his place in the unconscious, which is apt to turn very nasty if it is fobbed off with the wrong sex...
...Uncle Tom...
...Women can become wives and mothers...
...They can become powers behind the power...
...Why has she not aroused more interest...
...they pass...
...and Finny dead of the horror of learning that his best friend, Gene, had unconsciously contrived the accident that broke up his beautifully articulated body...
...In the most formal sense, then, the adolescent is one of our second class citizens...
...hot-blooded" minorities in general and adolescent boys in particular...
...As a symbol the cocky adolescent boy stands, a little like Luther, an obstacle to compromise and accommodation...
...the boy whose Italian immigrant mother sees to it that he wears a clean shirt to school every day on his way to the Governor's mansion...
...Political effectiveness in our time requires just the kind of caginess, pseudo-realism, and stereotyping of thought and feeling...
...A Lonely Ride This is the fantasy...
...she knew next to nothing about industrial solvents...
...In a democracy, a dominant social group is called a majority and a part of its dominance consists in the power to arrange appropriate manifestations of public support...
...Personal clarity and commitment are not wanted in it and not furthered by it...
...On this basis the Beginner can identify himself...
...But we do not attack the girl...
...Lolita, for example, is every bit as much a tragic heroine of adolescence as Holden is a hero—she isn't as nice a girl as he is a boy, but they are both victims of the same kind of corruption in adult society and the same absence of any real opportunity to grow up to be themselves...
...You can't tell which the people are headed for until they are nearly there...
...Second-Class Citizen Legally, the adolescent comes pretty close to having no basic rights at all...
...But despite this, the picture ends with a scene of the gang's victim—a virile-type rocket scientist —beating the leader of the gang with his cane and attempting to drown the boy in a swimming pool—which the police dismiss as excusable under the circumstances...
...they take things personally...
...In our society, there are such lovely things for them to be...
...New York: Random House, 1960, p. 38...
...for, though I love and honor them for their courage and devotion, the causes they fight for are not what I would call political...
...Can the status of the "teen-ager" be improved...
...The guilts we retain for our treatments of "hot-blooded" and "longsuffering" minorities therefore affect us in contrasting ways...
...the marvelous book ends as he rushes out onto the tarmac at London Airport, bursting through the customs barrier, to stand at the foot of the gangway and greet a planeload of astonished immigrants by crying, "Here I am...
...Slap-and-tickle implies sexual vigor and attractiveness, warmth and aggression, salted with enough conventional perversity to lend spice to a long dull existence...
...but would you want your daughter to marry one...
...It is thought to be comical that, at fourteen, she is already a whore...
...Adolescents are, inherently, anti-mass...
...Many who saw the show must have wondered, as I did, why there were no Negroes in it—one of the best things about Juvenile Delinquency is that, at least, it is integrated...
...Not enough people want to go there...
...Teen-agers," too, may be all right...
...The processes involved have been dealt with in detail by Daniel Boorstin, Leslie Fiedler, Paul Goodman, and especially Ernest Schachtel.** Their effect is to starve out, through silence and misrepresentation, the capacity to have genuine and strongly felt experience, and to replace it by the conventional symbols that serve as the common currency of daily life...
...A SPECIAL TYPE OF CAPITALISM In Latin America, there is a "type of capitalism and free enterprise which abhors competition and the restraint of monopolies, possesses vast tracts of land —and the best—and controls agricultural and industrial credit, the raw material and manufacturing industries, mining, real estate in urban areas, and, in general, government and money, from the central banks...
...In the recent and very moving CORE film, Freedom Ride, one of the heroic group who suffered beatings and imprisonment for their efforts to end segregation says, as nearly as I can recall, "If the road to freedom leads through the jails of the South, then that's the road I'll take...
...They seek and welcome the conventional American middle-class status that has been partially or totally barred to them...
...But the system is against them, and they know it well...
...and the best defense against this sort of guilt is selective inattention...
...but it is a great deal like Porgy and Bess...
...Such symbols stick in the mind, though the reality can usually be handled...
...but it is the road to suburbia too...
...and I don't know that I would be pleased if they were...
...they get smart, they dry up...
...It is joyous excess and bounty...
...I must maintain this despite the recent advances of SANE kids and Freedom Riders...
...A parallel example is to be found in Rumer Godden's The Greengage Summer...
...I would ascribe the success of West Side Story to the functional equivalence in the minds of adults between adolescence, delinquency, and aggressive sexuality...
...Meet your first teen-ager...
...In each case, also, little counter-stereotypes, repulsively pallid in contrast to the alluring violence and conflict of the central scene, are held out enticingly by the dominant culture...
...In "Adolescence and the Conflict of Generations," Daedalus, Winter, 1962, p. 68...
...she is off-handedly accepted as a woman already...
...they talk jive, drive hot-rods and become juvenile delinquents...
...her opportunities are even more limited and her growth into a mature woman as effectively discouraged...
...279-322...
...When she doesn't know anything about him except how she feels—and what does that matter when they are both too young to know what they are doing...
...he has had more real contact with other human beings, including a very satisfactory father, and by his time there is such a thing as a "teen-ager," little as it is, for him to be...
...and Humbert knows this and accepts responsibility for it...
...Is she omitted from our fantasies or excluded from them...
...The minority stereotype, though affected by the actual characteristics of the minority group, develops to fit the purposes and expresses the anxieties of the dominant social group...
...it is his capacity for spontaneous commitment that endangers the opportunity of adults to live vicariously the life they never managed to live personally...
...West Side Story is not much like Romeo and Juliet...
...Their papers are in order and they speak the language adequately...
...the reality is very different, but it is bad enough to be a "Teen-ager...
...Why are none of these novels of adolescence political novels...
...but it is not surprising...
...her feelings are now too strong and confused, and too serious in their consequences, to be handled with childish irresponsibility...
...while a subordinate group is, by the logic of political morality, a minority...
...Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd...
...For this last consideration, paradoxically, also makes the boy, rather than the girl, the focus of anxiety...
...American politics is a cold-blooded business indeed...
...if they're old enough to be drafted, they're old enough to vote," which is about as naive as it is possible to get...
...He has no right to demand the particular protection of either due process or the juvenile administrative procedure—the state decides...
...if we did we wouldn't think of them as "babes...
...A juvenile may not legally withdraw from school even if he can establish that it is substandard or that he is being ill-treated there...
...It is still the spontaneous, vivid and immediate that is most feared, and feared the more because so much is desired...
...We had to do our duty, but how can we ever forget him...
...Daniel Boorstin, The Image...
...They hate and fear the kinds of spontaneity that remind them of what they have abandoned, and they hate themselves for having joined forces with and having come to resemble their oppressors.* This is the vicious spiral by which "hot-blooded" minority status maintains itself...
...It may seem very strange that I should find her so inconspicuous...
...In dreams a single symbolic boy can represent them all...
...Effects of Discrimination Clearly, this kind of discrimination is quite different from that experienced by the "hot-blooded" minorities...
...The court of naturalization is the public school...
...Playboy provides businessmen with a new playmate each month...
...We at least know that we no longer know what we felt as children...
...the best novels about adolescents of the past decade or so have been, I think there would be fair agreement, Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, John Knowles' A Separate Peace, and Colin Maclnnes' less well known but superb Absolute Beginners...
...I am not questioning our sincerity...
...What is surprising is that the sons and daughters of the dominant adult group should be treated as a minority group merely because of their age...
...This still may be the only way to get there...
...Try, for a second, to picture a Jewish "teenager," and you may sense a tendency for the image to grate...
...a fine old law firm runs on the brains of its anonymous young Jews just as a husband's best asset is his loyal and unobtrusive wife...
...let the symbol turn real and the dreamer wakes up screaming...
...the author's Metamor phosis...
...Drum-majorettes and cheerleaders are ubiquitous...
...it is, as Yum-Yum remarked to Nanki-Poo, such a stuffy death...
...But girls, like Jews, are not supposed to fight back...
...All these have adolescent boys as heroes...
...But a number of interesting implications flow from this...
...Yet our laws governing school attendance do not deal with education...
...This is what makes it impossible to stop Freedom Rides...
...The Absolute Beginner, a happier boy in a less tense society, fares better...
...I think, indeed, that in contrast to the boy, of whom we are hyperaware, we repress our awareness of the girl...
...Adolescents, loved, respected, taught to accept, enjoy, and discipline their feelings, grow up...
...Here, the legal impotence of the "teen-ager" is taken absolutely for granted, and sadistic hostility of adults against him, though deplored, is condoned and accepted as natural...
...He has a problem...
...In my experience, it is just not possible to discuss adolescence with a group of American adults without being forced onto the topic of juvenile delinquency...
...Particularly, in the case of the adolescent, the effect on the adult of practicing these two kinds of discrimination will be different...
...It serves as a slimy coating over the sharp realities of cultural difference, protecting the social organism until the irritant can be absorbed...
...It may be the road to freedom...
...The "teen-ager," like the Latin or Negro, is seen as joyous, playful, lazy, and irresponsible, with brutality lurking just below the surface and ready to break out into violence.* All these groups are seen as childish and excitable, imprudent and improvident, sexually aggressive, and dangerous, but possessed of superb and sustained power to satisfy sexual demands...
...They go prancing to their destinies...
...Joss had become a Babe at last...
...who retain their minority status, their spontaneous feelings, their power to act out and act up...
...Hollywood, doubtless, was as usual reluctant to show a member of an enfranchised minority group in an unfavorable light...
...of becoming, under social stress, something more acceptable to the dominant society, but essentially different from what its own growth and experience would lead to...
...we only neglect her and leave her to wither gradually through an unfulfilled life...
...But from the point of view of the dominant society nothing special is done to the female in adolescence—the same squeeze continues throughout life, even though this is when it hurts most...
...though he long ago lost his claim to be treated as an adult...
...instead, we see a caricature, not brutalized as in the case of the boy, to justify our own brutality...
...We leave Holden in a mental hospital, being adjusted to reality...
...Now, when one is dealing with a group that actually is genetically or culturally different from the dominant social group, this is perhaps to be expected...
...Putting a real Negro boy in West Side Story would have been like scoring the second movement of the Pastorale for an eagle rather than flute...
...All the others are struggling to obtain what the adolescent is struggling to avoid...
...Teen-agers" don't...
...Since adolescence is, for boy and girl alike, the time of life in which the self must be established, the girl suffers as much from being wasted as the boy does from being cut down...
...He alone bears the terrible burden of parental aspirations...
...Widely anthologized, cf...
...and this is very dangerous nonsense indeed...
...But a minority group is not merely subordinate...
...Minority status has little to do with size or proportion...
...But what destiny can we imagine for them...
...But this is not the way Lolita—the character, not the book—is generally received...
...Why then, do they not try to change it...
...Among us, to prefer present delights is a sign of either low or high status, and both are feared...
...Many critics of the current literature on adolescence—Bruno Bettelheim* perhaps most cogently—have pointed out that most contemporary writing about adolescents ignores the adolescent girl almost completely...
...but it becomes true when the basic economic and social assumptions are as irrational as ours...
...For the aspirations of the adolescent minority are completely different from those of other minorities...
...and its subject is male...
...The "hot-blooded" minorities are always represented by a masculine stereotype...
...we expect them, instead, to insinuate themselves coyly into the roles available...
...Ernest Schachtel, "On Memory and Childhood Amnesia...
...when he may never have the makings of an executive, or she of an executive's wife...
...the essence of my point is that in what we call maturity we feel what we are supposed to feel, and nothing else...
...extravagant foreplay in the well-worn marriage-bed...
...Why have their heroes no political interests at all...
...This, perhaps, is the crux of the matter...
...They are not contractual, they offer no remedy for failure of the school to provide services of a minimum quality...
...The vote comes before anything else...
...Her image gets so much publicity...
...Each of these executions has so far been forestalled by various legal procedures, but none in such a way as to establish the right of a juvenile to be tried as a juvenile...
...In the rectilinear planning of Jonesville these are set aside conspicuously as Public Squares, but at dusk they are little frequented...
...For those with plenty of guts, compassion, and dedi cation to social justice, who nevertheless dislike walking alone through the woods, or feel it to be a Quixotic extravagance, a freedom ride is a noble enterprise...
...Holden, Finny, and the unnamed narrator of Absolute Beginners, are adolescent boys who do not pass...
...The state generally retains the final right even to strip him of his minority status...
...Only, presumably, through increased political effectiveness...
...There are demonstrable reasons for the prominence of the adolescent boy in our culture...
...this is the crime he expiates...
...New York: Basic Books, 1959, pp...
...The Girl as Woman This is how we use the boy, but what about the girl...
...WFMT Perspective, October, 1961, pp...
...One need hardly labor the point that what the dominant society seeks to control by imposing "hot-blooded" minority status is not the actual aggressiveness and sexuality of the Negro, the Latin, or the JD, but its own wish for what the British working classes used to call "a nice game of slap and tickle," on the unimpeachable assumption that a little of what you fancy does you good...
...Here the story is explicitly about Joss's growing up...
...they didn't know how to act...
...Partly this is an expression of legitimate concern, but partly it is because only the JD has any emotional vividness for them...
...Compared to them, the individual boy or girl on a solitary journey must seem an anachronism...
...Lolita could always be a waitress or something, what more could she expect...
...No controversy over basic policy is involved, because nobody advocates atomic disaster or racial persecution...
...The provocative, surly, sexy dancing kids who come to a bad end are not meant realistically...
...None of us, surely, wishes to feel obligated to hang himself out of respect for the United States Senate...
...It is the capitalism which, when the power of its opposition is thwarted, flees abroad to sneak into the sanctuary of some foreign bank under the disguise of a code number...
...his recent advances have all been made under—sometimes reluctant—Federal auspices because, nationally, Negroes vote, and Northern Negroes are able to cast a ballot on which their buffeted Southern rural fellows may be pulled to firmer political ground...
...I am not sure there is a road to freedom in America...
...This makes it more dangerous, because the adult is then quite unaware that his memory is incomplete, that the most significant components of feeling have been lost or driven out...
...It is neither desirable nor inevitable, for xenophobia is neither desirable nor inevitable...
...I don't think so...
...they are not much interested in her: I reject the celebration of "babes" in song and story as evidence that we have adolescent girls much on our minds...
...since it begins to explain why our kind of society should be so easily plunged into conflict by * Cf...
...Yet, as Bettelheim points out, the adolescent girl is as important as the adolescent boy, and her actual plight in society is just as severe...
...Efforts to use real street-adolescents in West Side Story had to be abandoned...
...we insist that ours be naturalized, though it is what is most natural about them that disturbs adults almost...
...But there is a difference in focus and emphasis because in adolescence spontaneity can lead to much more serious consequences...
...But Lady Macbeth was less resource ful than ourselves...
...Political Disinterest There are still enough Finnys and Holdens running around free to give me much joy and some hope, and they are flexible enough to come to their own terms with reality...
...Experience Repressed When a society sees impulsiveness and sexual exuberance as minority characteristics which unsuit the individual for membership until he is successfully naturalized, it is in pretty bad shape...
Vol. 10 • April 1963 • No. 2
