For years I’ve been meaning to read Why Black People Tend To Shout to get the answer to this questions, because like Vinyl Turnip I’ve noticed the same thing. Especially in the malls where I work. The past week allowed me to see the contrast between two very different malls…one in downtown Cleveland, and one in Sandusky. The Sandusky mall is predominantly white, while the Cleveland mall is predominantly black. Downtown, it is standard procedure for the black teens to shout to each other from floor to floor, and to continue a conversation while one person stays on the ground floor and another rides the escalator. The girls are always trying to create drama, and if a crowd of girls develops, there will always be one who will start shouting or speaking loudly enough for a crowd of boys halfway down the mall to hear. In the Sandusky mall, the place would be teeming with teens, and I could still hear the music playing. No one was shouting, not even the black kids, and never did any crowd form. I was in a kiosk, so I was right out in the middle of things, and had plenty of time to observe…in fact I was taking notes. One time in the two days I was there, a group of kids got loud and starting calling each other out (“I know you didn’t just say that to me, bitch.”) but it was one of the three black girls doing all the drama, not the seven goth white kids they were with. I also observed a lot more hand-holding between couples in Sandusky, even the old people, but that is a generalization for another thread…can’t remember the last time I saw anyone downtown holding hands.
So maybe the better question would be "why do black teens in malls tend to be louder and more dramatic than the white teens, and why do some black girls feel they have to have the attention of every person in the mall?’ Not every black teen, and there was one white girl at Sandusky in the crowd of goth kids who also was making sure every guy in the place could hear her voice and look at her. But in general, when there is a ruckus outside our downtown Cleveland store, it is never ever the white kids. We had a tour group of 40 white suburban kids in the mall today…never heard a peep out of them (though they did try shoplifting at several stores.) and didn’t even know they were in the mall until another store owner came over to warn us of their thieving ways. But when the same size school group of black band kids came through the mall a few weeks back, you could hear the noise level rise as they got out of the Rapid station downstairs, and continue to increase as they rode up the escalators, and then decrease as they headed out onto Public Square to go to the Convention Center…if you ever wanted to hear the definition of groundswell, that was it. And the teachers were just as loud, and made no attempt to have the kids keep the noise down, unlike the white teachers with the group today, who only had to remind a couple boys not to run through the mall.
Now we don’t get crowds of Korean kids, or Italian kids, and everyone can be noisy at family gatherings or at sporting events. But my limited observations (if 40 hours a week is limited) of teenagers in malls makes me conclude that it is more likely the black kids (and especially the subset of black girls) than the white kids who are making the noise.
Unless it’s St. Patrick’s Day. Then the noise level never drops all day, and it’s almost all drunken white kids.
