Rite of Passage

Back in middle school, umm there was this one chick named Teresa that for some reason everybody liked her so uhh like people would ask her out and she would reject them and all of a sudden there were five niggas that got rejected and shit… and then uhh so then like wow five niggas thas a fuckin’… rejected by Teresa there you go rejected by Teresa! The RBT! Then uhh so it became like a little club and everyone that was rejected by her hung out so uhh the rest of us wanted to be in the club so we asked her out, of course we got rejected so umm on to high school we still hung out even though we asked out the same chick, no beef. Like most society people evolve so it went from Rejected By Teresa to Really Big Tities and other stuff that could be initialed RBT. Like before we used to not hang out with David and KT but they knew Adrian and Victor threw baseball so we had a feel for them so… they were cool so they were let into out group… but then there was this other faggot named Joseph who tried to hang out with us… but that nigga just doesn’t know! You can’t just barge into peoples groups and shit! That’s what he tried to do and you just can’t do that do he would tag along… but we didn’t want him there so whenever we would have a kickback at Adrian’s we would call everyone except him.

It is clear that Daniel feels that one should not try to join a group of people without being invited and accepted by the members of the group.

This piece is an example of a rite of passage that people had to do in order to join the group. It started off by being rejected by a certain girl and then evolved to more of a social group. The letters RBT came from the fact that there are several gangs or ‘krews’ in the school that consisted of a bunch of little gangsters and they had letters associated with them. Although not everyone was a gang member, the influence was there and it influenced us into calling our group RBT, although we really weren’t gang affiliated. As a matter of fact, in high school when one of the guys in the group wrote the letters RBT on a desk jokingly, an actual gang crossed out the letters and wrote theirs over them, a sign of disrespect. When we found out about that, we quickly refrained from referring to ourselves as ‘RBT’ because we were not gang affiliated and did not want people to get the wrong impression. Subsequently we simply referred to ourselves as ‘The Fellas’ or ‘The Guys’, nothing special.

Also, this shows how if one tries to join up with a group without going through the proper rites of passage, there will not be acceptance. As seen with KT and David, they were already known by the people in the group and were liked, thus allowing them to have an easy transition into the group. On the other hand, Joseph was not really known by many of the people thus making it difficult to be accepted. Also the fact that he was disliked by a member did not help his chances much either. This shows the camaraderie that was within the group because they stuck together in their decision not to allow Joseph to be a part of the group.