Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com

Marketplace \| Services \| Contact Us \| Community \| Arts & Entertainment \| Local Guides

Sunday, May 20, 2001
Walk this way
Study shows boys unfairly stereotyped based on walking style
By Aimée Courtice
Caller-Times

Photo illustration by George Tuley/Caller-Times

Miller High School students Eddy Ruiz (from left), 17, Rickey Jones, 18, and Benny Ramirez, 18, say they walk in a stylized ‘stroll’ as a way to show their confidence. Some of their teachers admit that the walk can give the wrong impression about good students.

The first time Rickey Jones walked into Jane Wall's classroom at Miller High School, she thought she was in for a year with a serious troublemaker.
   Jones moved his towering 6-foot, 6-inch frame with a slow stroll, leaning slightly forward and bending one knee more than the other, his head cocked back.
   "I thought, 'Oh my gosh, what have I got here?'" Wall remembers.
   Jones' walking style may seem more like a dance step than a way to get from here to there, but in popular culture circles it's called "pimping," and plenty of teenage boys are walking that way.
   The walking style recently caught the attention of La Vonne Neal, an educator at Southwestern University in Georgetown. She conducted new research that suggests boys who adopt a certain style of walking are perhaps unfairly pegged as more aggressive and are more likely to be referred to special education classes.
   Making strides
   Jones, who is 18, said he adopted the walk at the end of middle school. The gait wasn't something that he practiced, he says. It just developed and now it's a habit. It wasn't intended to scare off teachers.
   "It was like a crowd thing," he said. "My walk was kind of geeky and I thought I better change it up. Your walk says a lot about you."
   It's a way to tell others you're confident about yourself, said his classmate Eddy Ruiz, without coming across as a show-off or a threat. Peers notice an assured stride, he said.

George Tuley/Caller-Times

Simon Guerrero, the technology advisor at Miller High School, said adopting a ‘cool walk’ is a way for teens to impress each other and feel like adults. ‘They’re doing it to look older for the kids who are their age,’ he said.

   "You can tell just by watching people walk through the halls," said Ruiz, 17. "The people who aren't really sure of themselves walk closer to the walls and other people walk through the middle with their heads up more."
   Wall admits that her first impression of Jones, who first set foot in her class two years ago, was influenced by the way he carried himself. But after a few days of interacting with him in class, she abandoned her initial judgement. Jones, who is now a senior, gets along just fine with Wall.
   "It didn't take long for me to see that he wasn't really that way," she said. "But I definitely thought I was going to have a hard time with him."
   Jones doesn't think people should assume he is a certain way just because of how he walks.
   "People look at me and think I am a gangster or something," he said. "It's not like that at all."
   Ruiz knows his strut may be taken the wrong way but he doesn't care if his walk is a turnoff, or an insult. It's part of who he is.
   "It just comes naturally," he said. "People who don't like it can just back off and give me 50 feet."
   Studying the stroll
   Neal's interest in the ways teachers interpret such non-verbal cues dates from her years as a middle school teacher in Round Rock. She said she observed the negative reaction from white teachers to this stylized "stroll" of some black students.
   Neal also noted that other studies showed black kids tended to evoke more negative attitudes from teachers. A Civil Rights Project study at Harvard University, for example, found that black public school students are three times as likely as white children to be labeled mentally retarded and referred to special education classes.
   Neal wondered: Is it the way they walk?
   To conduct the study, Neal recruited two 13-year-old males, one black and one white, and videotaped them walking from a locker to a classroom in a middle school. Each boy wore similar clothes, and was taped walking in two different styles, first in the "standard" stride, defined as "erect posture, leg and arm swing synchronized with posture and pace, a steady stride and a straight head," and in what Neal calls a "stroll," defined as a "deliberate swaggered or bent posture, head held slightly tilted to the side, one foot dragging, and an exaggerated knee bend."
   Neal and three colleagues then showed the tapes to 122 middle school teachers and 14 education students and asked them to rate the aggressiveness of the students, rate them as achievers and determine whether they'd be likely to need special education classes.
   The results: Teachers rated both black and white students using the "stroll" as lower in achievement, higher in aggression and more likely to need special education classes than the black or white student using the standard walk. They rated the white student doing the "stroll" as even lower in achievement than the black student doing the stroll.
   Initial impressions
   Olga Casey, an English teacher at Miller High School said it's hard not to jump to conclusions when a male student walks into class a certain way. His body language can give off a message of someone who is aggressive or indignant.
   But in her 15 years of teaching, Casey said she has learned some lessons.
   "Yes, I have been wrong," she said. "I see them come in my class and I think, 'Oooh trouble.'
   "A lot of times they surprise me because they have the walk and they dress the part but they behave just the opposite in class. They do their work and are well-behaved. I think most of them are just acting the part. The few ones that are really rough, usually don't go to class anyway. The ones in the classroom are just trying to give off an image."
   Casey also said misreading a student could require the teacher to make adjustments so that the student knows he is accepted, she said.
   "I find I am trying to win the student over," she said. "I try to send out a lot of 'I-like-you' messages."
   Creating an image
   Michael Blakey, a Howard University professor of anthropology, adds that the "stroll" has been adopted by adolescent males, both white and black.
   The results of Neal's study imply, Blakey said, "that walking styles have been stigmatized, like many other aspects of African-American identity."
   One Atlanta high-school student cautions that things may not be so simple. The subjects in Neal's study wore typical teen clothing - blue jeans, T-shirts and athletic jerseys - but in real life the stroll is only part of a style package, says Malik Barry-Buchanan, 17, a senior at North Atlanta High School.
   "The majority of people who are walking this way are also going to be dressed in a certain manner, speaking in a certain manner, and just give off a total image."
   Eddy Ruiz, who attends Miller High School, said the walk is only one part of the appearance picture that his peers judge.
   "We are more worried about the way we dress," he said. "You gotta match, and you gotta have your hair cut."
   The stance and posture that Neal studied have been referred to by psychologist William Majors as the "cool pose," notably in his popular psychology book of the same name. William Pollack, Harvard professor and director of The Center for Men and Young Men at McLean Hospital, says this pose speaks volumes about the dilemma of boys in public education. He points out that 70 percent of all special education students in the country are boys, and that negative reactions to students are driven by gender as well as culture.
   Boys, both black and white, adopt the "cool pose" as a mask of strength, to conform to a social stereotype of acceptable masculinity, he says.
   Simon Guerrero, the technology advisor at Miller High School, said projecting that image is a way for teens to impress each other and feel like adults.
   "They're doing it to look older for the kids who are their age," he said.
   But the girls are not impressed. An exaggerated walk is simply a turnoff sometimes, they said.
   "If I see a guy walking like that I'd say he thinks he's all that and he needs to get a life," said 17-year-old MaShaunda Bryant, who also attends Miller.
   While a guy may think his strut may exude confidence, some girls said it displays just the opposite.
   "It seems like it could be some kind of personality flaw," said Kim Mann, who attends Carroll High School. "If he puts on a show while he's walking, what else will he falsify?"




Cox News Service contributed to this report.

Contact Aimée Courtice at 886-3622 or courticea@caller.com.

| Talk about this story | Next Story | Home |

[ Printer-friendly version ]
[ Subscribe to newspaper ]

SEND THIS PAGE TO A FRIEND