Middle-Class White Suburban Punks

There's an article in The Grand Rapids Press about some arrests today, involving a recent rash of public vandalism in several inner-city neighborhoods. You can probably picture the situation: former middle-class homes now somewhat run-down, maybe vacant... closed businesses... most of the white folks moved out a few decades ago... lots of low-income tenant and homeowners... and now the scourge of "tagging": graffiti signatures and symbols in spray paint, repeated on any blank vertical surface. There goes the neighborhood, right?

Except that it's not homies or gangbangers doing the tagging. The teenagers they arrested were white kids from the 'burbs.

They had Dutch last names (this area was settled by puritans from the Netherlands), and they were students at East Grand Rapids High School, Grand Rapids Christian High School, and Byron Center High School, so it's a pretty safe bet they're white. EGR is the traditional upper-class suburb of the area; not quite the top of the economic pyramid anymore, but still the home of moneyed powerbrokers, and the high school a powerhouse in prep-school sports like tennis, lacrosse, and golf. GR Christian is your typical Calvinist parochial school, where the Bible is considered a textbook; it's still located in the city but its students are largely white suburbanites who can afford the substantial tuition. Byron Center is the until-recently-rural suburb where a highly talented and well-liked music teacher was run out of town for having a private commitment ceremony with his male lover, died from the stress of suing to get his job back, and the school board then refused to pay up on his severance settlement on the grounds that he was dead.

Which is a long way of explaining what kind of morality these schools and these parents are teaching their children. EGR lauds hereditary capitalism and preaches against liberal social programs. GR Christian rails against evolution and other secular science. Byron Center is hysterically anti-homosexual.

But apparently none of these schools is teaching the fundamentals of respect for other people.

Furthermore, these kids seem to be getting the message - gosh, I can't imagine where - that the neighborhoods to vandalise are the ones where the residents are less white and less affluent (and middle-class white families are often all-male or all-female). They're not picking on each other, or even the middle-class Dutch or Polish neighborhoods in the city. They're coordinating these nighttime assaults on the 'hood. I can assure you they're not coming here because they're less likely to get caught; it's pretty well patrolled, certainly better than the sprawling 'burbs where GR Christian students tend to hail from, and the subdividing farmlands of Byron.

For decades, white middle-class people have been fleeing cities for the suburbs, pointing to crime rates and quality-of-life issues such as graffiti as reasons why they just aren't safe here and don't want to live here. Well evidently it isn't just the fault of the poorer brown people who've stayed; Whitey's kids are coming back to make sure the place runs down.

I just wish these kids would stick to vandalising their own neighborhoods, and keep the malaise of graffiti out of our law-abiding communities here in the city.