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So let's talk about this because honestly the worst bullying I ever witnessed was between white kids. In Downers Grove which is a majority white well off suburb of Chicago. And y'all...the shit they do to each other is unreal... https://twitter.com/Ebonyteach/status/1343638990210166788
So here's the thing while I hated DGN and it remains the high school I don't claim (Whitney Young for life), I can honestly say that my willingness to fight limited how much harm I experienced. I only dodged one fight & that was with a Black girl and it was because it was stupid
I didn't know what the fight was about and I wasn't mad at her so I wasn't fighting her. But I had plenty of "I don't speak passive aggressive white girl" fights. And tbh most of them weren't even close to physical because they'd do that weird shove thing and I hit. Fight over
But Black girls are not their first target despite later claims to have been bullied by us in 6th grade or whatever. No, they would pick the smallest, weakest, mousiest white kids and turn on them. And the stories they cheerfully told were...I know why we had a pipe bomb kid
White boys on sports teams would teabag the smaller kids in the locker room & never thought it was sexual assault. White girls would start vicious life altering rumors, take pics in lockers rooms of other girls, and generally try to ruin their lives. And do it for years.
There was a girl named Meredith who would say the cruelest things to her particular target & wait gleefully for the tears to start. I might have tried to put Meredith into a locker one day. Maybe. She had it coming.
And the thing was, as dumb as any high school fight might be, these kids weren't being bullied because of something they did or said. They were the targets because they were there and they were different and they didn't fight back well. It was cruelty as a sport.
And I know a bunch of characteristics of victims is usually the focus but what I remember personally, more than anything else was how much the bullies enjoyed it. There was a total lack of empathy & it wasn't all white kids before you get pressed. It was just a few but whew
I would argue that most of the bullying problems at DGN which had something like 1800 students came from less than 10% of the students. The same ones were awful over and over all day. And their prowess in sports or whatever meant the administration did nothing about it.
So they escalated into some weird frenzies and usually the kids who checked them were A. BIPOC or B. Poor white kids. Arguably the biggest impediment to the bullying was the kids who were technically "troubled". It's amazing how many "bad boys" only punched jocks for instance.
There was a white girl who was very clearly marked as "wrong side of the tracks" for reasons that won't make any sense, but anyway she was fine ignoring 99% of the shit they said to her, but she was a girl's bathroom champ when it came to beating up bullies.
And tbh one of the reasons I think I push back so hard about "Mean Black Girl" memes is because I've seen the "Shove head in recently used and unflushed toilet" kind of bullying. Flick lit cigarettes in faces bullying. DGN was actually hell for a lot of people.
There were weirdly hard lines drawn socially, the kids were not taught to be kind in any meaningful way by the school, and the administration just ignored whatever they could. There was a literal "set hair on fire" incident and still...nothing. They called it a prank IIRC.
Anyway, those were the kids the administration mostly empowered. They were cheerleaders and played sports and were "popular" in the sense that everyone knew them. I don't know anyone who liked them, but that didn't seem to matter. They're who I think of when I think of bullies
