Listen to thisOver the years, as I have spent time with CYC workers and students, I have heard many terms applied to young people. Some of them I have found problematic, such as referring to a young person by their psychiatric diagnosis i.e. the borderline girl, or the schizophrenic kid. Other times, I have been bothered by staff calling young people delinquents, defiant, or resistant, as though that encompassed something central about who they were. But, the term that has bothered me the most is actually less clinical. It is when I hear adults use the phrase, ‘bad” kid or kids to describe an individual or group of young people they are engaged with at work or know in another context. Whenever I have heard workers describe young people in this way, it is always jarring and stops my world in its tracks for a moment. The term makes my entire body wince. The reaction is visceral but, perhaps because it seems so banal, I have never really given it much thought. However, recently I began to investigate two powerful ideas that put the power of the term “bad kids” in a different light.
The two ideas are grace and evil. Both of these terms are remarkably simple on the surface and incredibly nuanced and complicated as you dig deeper. At the most superficial level, grace is undeserved divine favor. That is a divine gift given to us without any relation to what we have done or not done to earn it. Evil, on the other hand can be defined as the absence of good, or the causation of harm to others. The two terms have a long and entangled relation in Christian thought and both have powerful effects in moral discourse arising from that tradition. Notions such as morality have deep ties to the good/evil dichotomy and one of the key driving complexes of settler/colonial/capitalist consciousness is tied to the idea of faith with or without works. That is to say, do we earn our salvation by works or by divine grace?
The idea of working hard to transform the world, as opposed to accepting the grace/gift of life lived harmoniously in a state of nature, has been used to build moral hierarchies of rule that place hard work as a hallmark of the “civilized” subject. Of course, what constitutes work is also complicated here. The animal who is domesticated and labors to benefit the human master is not technically seen to be working. Instead, they are understood as simply acting within the scope of their nature. Work, in this framework, has to entail working beyond one’s nature. The ox who plows a field is not working.
This notion of natural acts and abilities has been used to justify the subjugation of colonial subjects and women as not working, but simply acting within the scope of their nature. Enslaved colonial subjects and women are not fully human within the colonial framework. They are so closely aligned with nature that their labor is natural and not real work. Real work is done by men, who use their efforts to perfect and dominate the natural world, reshaping it and all its inhabitants to the will of the divine. A certain segment of colonial subjects, women and other subaltern others can aspire to the level of real work, if they can adequately leave their nature behind and masculinize their labor into the activities of domination. In this, the settler/capitalist understanding of labor and work in relation to salvation comprises those who will be saved through their assertion of will over nature. Those who remain within the world of nature can only be saved by grace.
Evil, has a similar complicated colonial history, with a defined dichotomy between goodness and evil. In the colonial vernacular, goodness is heavily associated with mainstream Christian values that associate the good with the divine. In this reading, what is good is situated in the realm of heaven or God. As a result, the good does not reside in the world per se but is always aspirational. Goodness comes from God, and humans can only access the good by following the teachings of the bible as the word of God. Humans are inherently flawed and without being saved by God’s grace are inherently evil or fallen. As such they must be redeemed.
The implications of this for the European colonial project is that the source of all goodness resides outside this world. The world itself is fallen and nature itself is evil and must be brought forcefully into a state of grace, In another term, colonists must dominate nature and bring the order of God’s will to all things residing in a state of nature.
Of course, this includes all plants and animals which live outside God’s grace and must be subjugated to the will of Man working on behalf of God and Heaven. It also includes all humans who are too closely aligned with Nature. Such peoples are considered to be living in a state of nature from which they must be saved, so that they can know the goodness of God and his will.
Colonial hierarchies were built on this framework with European men at the top as having greatest access to God’s word. Below them were women who by virtue of their perceived state of nature rooted in their bodies as inherently and immutably sexual. Women’s capacity to overcome their nature was considered weak in comparison to men, who were seen as more intellectual and less connected to their bodies. Below women were all non-Christian peoples which comprised almost the entirety of colonized peoples. Anyone perceived as Pagan or Heathen was considered to be living in a state of nature and as such could be treated in the same way as other aspects of nature such plants and animals. That is to say, pagans or heathens were absolutely subject to the will of Christian colonizers. However, in addition to living in a state of nature, they were also incapable of goodness because they did not have access to God’s grace. Because of this, they were often considered evil and fallen peoples without morality or ethics. Ironically, this allowed Christian colonists to commit horrendous atrocities against them without any acknowledgement of their common humanity.
As I write this, it occurs to me that perhaps these terms may seem more appropriate for an essay on religion or spirituality than one on how we in CYC work with young people. And indeed, as I struggled to make a connection with the ideas of grace and evil for this column, I had a hard time fitting them into a framework of CYC practice or even CYC theory. That was until I remembered my involuntary shudder at the term “bad” kids. Perhaps it is the latent humanist in me that sees all people, including young people, as inherently valuable. That at core, people have a great deal of worth and are capable of wonderful acts. The fact that my colleagues and students see some of the young people we work with as “bad kids” is at extreme odds with these beliefs. So, I began to wonder, how is it that we get to the place of differentiating kids into good and bad?
And it is not just CYC workers who see the world this way. Teachers, religious leaders, politicians, and parents also often seem to divide young people into those worth saving and those who are a lost cause. As I reflect on this, I wonder if the notion of “bad kids” is perhaps deeply connected to the practices of colonization and hence grace and evil. Certainly, the idea that young people are always on the verge of falling into the state of nature as Tennyson would have it, violent and “red in tooth and claw” is a reasonably common idea in popular culture. The book and movie, The Lord of the Flies is an excellent example. The colonial definition of a hierarchy of civilization vs primitive peoples living in the state of nature certainly seems to have resonance in the definition of “bad kids.” In this hierarchy, it is adults who are the civilizing force that can subjugate the “natural” tendency of young people to fall into living like animals. Grace in this definition is the gift given to young people of adults and adulthood that can save them from the fallen world of chaos and violence that is their natural fallen state.
In many respects, I have spent much of my work arguing against the adult domination of young people. I have never seen adults as having kind of moral or ethical superiority over young people. In fact, it often seems to be the opposite with the horrendous violence of adults far outstripping the acts of young people. That said, I have also tried to focus on the idea that all of us, and in particular the young people with whom we engage in our work are good and worthy of unconditional care regardless of any acts they may have committed.
However, living in a world seemingly saturated with acts of cruelty, hatred, and violence, the notion of evil is hard to avoid. However, when I find myself confounded by the apparent contradiction of my beliefs in the face of some horrendous act of violence, I am referred to the work of Sr Helen Prejean, a nun who spent her career ministering to inmates on Death Row. For many of us, such inmates are the incarnation of evil. Certainly, the violence and brutality of their actions would seem to justify that view. And, in fact, Prejean was often asked how she could devote here life’s work and ministry to working with these very bad men. Why not devote her life to supporting those more deserving of her efforts. Her answer, has stuck with me for many years. She responded to these questions by saying, that these men are so much more than the worst thing they have ever done.
So much more than the worst thing we have ever done—the phrase echoes for me with a powerful resonance as an antidote to the concept of evil as all encompassing. In a way, it could be read as an invocation of grace for those of us whose actions would seem to exclude the possibility of salvation-spiritual or social. But it is possible that it there is another reading. One in which we don’t delineate the world into evil and good. After all, maybe we are not so different from each other.
Many years ago, I also worked in a prison. I was in charge of a drug treatment unit that was held within the walls in its own cell block. The men who came to the unit had a variety of motivations, some of which had to do with getting and staying sober. The politics of prison life can be extremely complicated and the refuge of a self-contained unit safe from the violence and predation of the general prison population was attractive to some. That said, on the whole the men all shared horrendous histories of violence that they had inflicted on others when high. You wouldn’t know it from getting to know them though. On the unit, they were affable, pleasant, and pretty much willing to give sobriety a go. It was only when reading their files that their history emerged of murder, torture, rape, and other forms of predatory abuse. As part of the work, we would talk about this past and mostly there was a sense of deep remorse. And so, I began to wonder, what would cause someone to fall into such a life and why hadn’t I? I certainly had my own history (which why I got hired) but on the whole it didn’t have nearly the level of violence.
As I reflected on why not me over a fairly long period of time, I came to a pretty unsurprising simple explanation. My life had been composed of different elements than theirs. In my life, being deeply involved with drugs did not necessarily lead to violence and prison. There were people to cushion those kinds of consequences and circumstances in which conflict were not always solved with brutality. The men I worked with had very different lives. Lives in which most of the other men they knew were involved with violence and in which prison was a likely outcome of living in the communities and families they came from. In short, it wasn’t a question of character or will (I wasn’t a better person). I was just more privileged. I wasn’t inherently a good guy and they weren’t inherently bad guys, it was more a question of how a life lived offered more of one pathway than another.
Perhaps this is why I recoil when someone calls a kid “bad.” Because I know they are not bad. There is far more to them than that. They are simply living in way that suggests they need us to discipline them and shape them into who we think they should be. They need to be saved from themselves. For me, this is terribly faulty thinking. Kids are neither good or bad, they are in fact full of highly complex sets of possibilities and capacities. They don’t need to saved from their evil, they simply need to afforded more opportunities to be more of who they are. For me this is grace, the gift of options, the gift of life as limitless.
