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Introductionor l a n d o pat t e r s on, Harvard Universityet h a n fo s s e , Harvard University

The past half century has witnessed remarkable changes in the condition of African Americans and, more generally, the state of race relations in America. These changes, however, have created a paradoxical situation. The civil rights movement and subsequent policies aimed at socioeco-nomic reform have resulted in the largest group of middle- class and elite blacks in the world, several of them leading some of the most powerful corporations in the nation and abroad; yet the bottom fifth of the black population is among the poorest in the nation and, as Hurricane Katrina exposed, often live in abysmal Third World conditions. Politically, blacks are a powerful presence and the most loyal members of one of the nations two leading parties; yet, race remains a central lever of American politics and sustains its most fundamental regional and ideological align-ments. Blacks have a disproportionate impact on the nations culture both popular and elite yet continue to struggle in the educational system and are severely underrepresented in its boom of scientific and high- end technology. And although legalized segregation has long been abolished and anti- exclusionary laws strictly enforced, the great majority of blacks still live in highly segregated, impoverished communities. It is a record of remarkable successes, mixed achievements, and major failures.

Nowhere is this paradox more acutely exhibited than in the condition of black American youth, especially male youth. They are trapped in a seemingly intractable socioeconomic crisis, yet are among the most vibrant creators of popular culture in the nation and the world. President Barack Obama (2014) has lamented that:Fifty years after Dr. [Martin Luther] King talked about his dream for Americas children, the stubborn fact is that the life chances for the average black or brown child in this country lags behind by almost every measure and is worse for boys and young men. Only between 52 and 61 percent (depending on method of calculation) of

2 Introduction

those entering high school graduate, compared with between 71 and 79 percent of white males. A third of all black men in their thirties now have a prison record, as do an astonishing two- thirds of all black men who have dropped out of high school. Violence has become endemic, with a murder rate of 34.4 per 100,000 among males aged fifteen to seventeen. Only 20 percent of black youth who are not in school are employed at any given time. Their lives are often impoverished, violent, and short, leading one group of social scientists to describe them as an endangered species (Gibbs 1988). A large number of social scientists have addressed the problem, but it is increasingly evident that the structural factors they emphasize, while certainly critical, can only explain the problem in par-tial, fragmentary ways. Further, these explanations confront the per-plexing, stubborn fact that, for all their socioeconomic problems, black youth are the producers of a powerful popular culture that permeates, and in areas dominates, the nations mainstream culture, including youth from other racial and ethnic groups.

What this paradox suggests is the need to explore the cultural life of black youth in order to deepen our understanding of their social plight as well as their extraordinary creativity. That is the primary objective of this volume. Doing so, however, requires some profound changes in the approaches of scholars who work on black youth, and poverty more gener-ally. For several decades, there was hostility, approaching derision, to any cultural study of the poor, including black youth. While it has become legitimate again to probe the cultural life of the disadvantaged, social scientists continue to tread warily, and one kind of cultural analysis remains suspect: attempts to explain social problems in cultural terms.

Explaining the origin and full extent of scholarly discomfort with the culture concept in so far as it relates to the black poor, and especially its youth population, would require its own volume, taking us deep into the sociology of knowledge, and cannot be attempted here (see Patterson 2014). This introduction examines only in barest outline the main periods through which this fraught academic process has developed. There was, first, a classic period, beginning in the late nineteenth century with the sociocultural studies of W. E. B. Du Bois (1899) and ending with two of the greatest ethnographies ever written on urban black culture, Ulf Hannerzs (1969) study of Washington, D.C., and Lee Rainwaters (1970) detailed examination of a St. Louis housing project. Between them were classics such as Hortense Powdermakers After Freedom (1939), Drake and Caytons Black Metropolis (1945), E. Franklin Fraziers The Negro

Introduction 3

Family in the United States (1948) and Negro Youth at the Crossways (1940), as well as Kenneth Clarks Dark Ghetto (1965). What we can gather from their analyses is that the authors of this classic era felt free to study black culture and its relation to social conditions as they saw fit, unburdened by any prevailing social science dogma concerning what was academically appropriate, either conceptually or terminologically.

The second period, which we might call a period of disjunctions, began in the mid- sixties, ironically the period that witnessed some of the best cultural studies on the urban poor, and it was sparked by reaction to the work of two authors, Daniel Patrick Moynihans policy report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965) and Oscar Lewiss badly theorized summary of his otherwise remarkable ethnographic works (1961, 1966). The reaction to the Moynihan analysis was by far the most virulent, inaccurate, and often grossly unfair. As the sociologist William Julius Wilson (1989) and others have pointed out (Rainwater and Yancey 1967), Moynihans report simply summarized what was the consensus sociological position on the troubled black lower- class family at the time, including the views of leading African American sociologists. He identi-fied the economic and social consequences of single female- headed house-holds, but further pointed out that this was the result of the racial and socio economic oppression of black Americans. Critics, as William Julius Wilson (1989) has observed, egregiously neglected the corollary to his argument and pilloried him for pathologizing the black poor with language that was, in fact, common in sociological circles at the time. Kenneth Clarks work (1965), for example, published the same year as Moynihans report, wrote at length on The Negro Matriarchy and the Distorted Masculine Image and The Causes of Pathology. The greatest irony of all is that Moynihan was easily one of the most liberal councilors to advise a presi-dent and was deeply committed to the single most liberal policy agenda to aid black Americans in the history of the American government, Lyndon B. Johnsons Great Society program. History has been kind to Moynihan: a recent conference at Harvard by leading social scientists, all with impec-cably liberal credentials, concluded that Moynihan was correct in his anal-ysis and prediction. Looking backward, the criticisms of Moynihan were largely motivated by the racial pride of a newly resurgent black nation-alism, (Draper 1971; Patterson 1977, ch. 6; 1997, 6481), the fear of an emerging black middle class that undue attention to the sociocultural problems of the urban poor would redound unfavorably on them or diminish support for liberal social policies, and the mistaken belief that

4 Introduction

any reference to cultural practices was tantamount to blaming the victim, with the implication that the poor had to change their ways if there was to be any meaningful improvement in their condition.

History, however, has not been as kind to Lewis. A collection of papers published in the late 1960s (Valentine 1968) already fully laid out the major criticisms of the theory. The simple truth of the matter is that there is no such thing as the culture of poverty. Poor people all over America and the world adapt to their socioeconomic, physical, and political envi-ronments in a wide variety of ways. Indeed, even in a small island such as Jamaica, the poor of the shantytowns of Kingston have very different values, norms, and beliefs from the rural poor of the countryside; the latter are among the harshest critics of the former and are quite terrified of them. Apart from flaws in his theoretical statement, Lewis was also a victim of changing academic trends. His seminal works appeared at the height of the reaction against the Parsonian paradigm in sociology (Gouldner 1970; Habermas 1981), which portrayed culture as a highly integrated system of values and norms that regulated society and, by virtue of being internalized by deep processes of socialization, set the goals that were thought to guide human behavior. These justifiable criticisms of the Parsonian framework, combined with the ideological and policy criticisms launched at Moynihan, led many to adopt an exclusionary rule: all cul-tural studies, especially those on the poor, became suspect.

What followed was a third, revisionist period in the study of black America (Williams and Stockton 1973), which lasted from the end of the Lyndon Johnson era to the early 1980s. Not only did culture become a Typhoid Mary in academic social science but the very study of blacks was largely shunned by white scholars. Partially filling the void were studies, mainly by black scholars, which denied or downplayed problems in black families, and black lower- class life generally, claiming instead that the lives of black Americans were simply different and constituted a record of remark- able survival and resilience against white oppression, the best examples of this being Billingsleys (1968) Black Families in White America and Ladners (1972) Tomorrows Tomorrow. A collection of essays edited by Ladner (1973) entitled The Death of White Sociology laid out the revisionist posi-tion. White scholars took the title and contents seriously, and nearly all stayed away. The few who dared study the subject carefully toed the line. For instance, in her study All Our Kin, Carol Stack focused on the adap-tive strategies, resourcefulness and resilience of urban families under con-ditions of perpetual poverty and the stability of their kin networks

Introduction 5

(Stack 1974, 22). Scanzoni (1971) likewise took no chances: his study of black Americans focused squarely on stable, working- and middle- class households headed by couples married for at least five years. Predictably, given his self- censored sample, he found stable unions headed by nur-turing, loving couples with childhood outcomes that varied strictly in terms of fathers economic situations.

What is astonishing about the revisionist period is the discrepancy between the social science consensus and the reality of urban black life, for it was during the seventies and early eighties that major problems among the urban poor escalated greatly: family life disintegrated beyond anything Moynihan could have imagined (by the early 1980s, over a half of all births were to single mothers, compared with the 25 percent that had deeply troubled Moynihan), drug addiction soared with the cata-strophic crack epidemic, and criminal victimization, including homicide, reached unprecedented levels in contemporary American history.

Inevitably, white and black social scientists were compelled to take the problems seriously, demarcating the fourth period in regard to the role of culture, which we call the structuralist turn. The response, both on the left and right, as well as those of neither political persuasion, was bad news for the study of culture. Leading the liberal resurgence were the path- breaking works of William Julius Wilson, who laid out a strongly struc-turalist position, especially in a paper written with one of his students, Loc Wacquant, who was later himself an important player in the study of black life. Wacquant and Wilson wrote: Our central argument is that the interrelated set of phenomena captured by the term underclass is pri-marily social- structural and that the inner city is experiencing a crisis because the dramatic growth in joblessness and economic exclusion asso-ciated with the ongoing spatial and industrial restructuring of American capitalism has triggered a process of hyperghettoization (1989). To be fair, this overstated the structuralism of both authors, especially Wilson, who was always alert to the interactive role of culture in the understanding of lower- class black life, even if this was sometimes hidden in an overall structuralist tone.1 For example, implicit in his 1978 book, The Declining Significance of Race, was the cultural argument that the withdrawal of middle- class roles and lifestyles from the ghetto had deleterious conse-quences for those left behind, an argument that elicited a good deal of carping from the hardline structuralists. With the publication of the The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), Wilson found himself in complex academic combat with both ends of the ideological spectrum, for by now the right

6 Introduction

had entered the fray with analyses and commentaries on the black poor and, sadly for the fortunes of the cultural approach to poverty, had embraced a cultural position that would certainly have appalled Oscar Lewis, even though it was often expressed in his name. Mercifully, poor Lewis was by now long dead, having prematurely passed away in 1970 at the age of fifty-six. Noting that the number of people in poverty stopped declining just as the expenditure on welfare was at its highest, Charles Murray (1984) blamed the welfare policies of the 1960s and 1970s for the growing social crisis among the urban poor. These policies, Murray argued, created a culture of dependency that incentivized the poor to remain idle and bear more children. Wilson responded by criticizing Murrays work as a rehash of the culture of poverty thesis, but at the same time faulted liberals for their failure to address straightforwardly the rise of social pathologies in the ghetto (Wilson 1987, 12). While insisting that social isolation and structural constraints were the major factors accounting for the problems facing poor black Americans, he nonetheless acknowledged that culture played some role though as a response to social structural constraints and opportunities (Wilson 1987, 61). Wilsons position, in which culture might be considered in the analysis as long as it is viewed as a dependent variable, remains the standard assump-tion when studying the lives of the poor. Interestingly, Wilson has recently given a more central place for culture in his most recent statement on the subject. In More Than Just Race (2009), he concedes that culture can operate as an intermediary variable in explaining the problems of black Americans. While agreeing with Orlando Patterson (2001, 2006) that cultural explanations should be part of any attempt to fully account for such behavior and outcomes, he insists that in the final analysis struc-ture trumps culture (Wilson 2009, 21). We respond to Wilsons newly nuanced position on this issue in Chapter 2.

We are now in the fifth, and current, phase of the treatment of culture in the study of African American problems and, more generally, the problem of poverty. It is what Mabel Berezin (1994) once called a fissured terrain. First, it should be noted that culture has returned to center stage in the social sciences, including sociology, and was officially acknowledged in the founding of the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association in 1988. Enthusiasts have published thick volumes announcing the cul-tural turn in the discipline (Bonnell, Hunt, and White 1999). Accompanying this turn has been an even more vibrant development in cultural studies in the humanities, which bear a somewhat prickly relationship to cultural

Introduction 7

sociology. As far as the study of poverty, and black poverty in particular, is concerned, however, current developments in sociology are best described as a cultural half- turn. On the one hand, scholars such as Elijah Anderson (1979; 1992; 1999; 2008), Douglas Massey and Mary Denton (1993), Sandra Smith (2006), Martin Sanchez- Jankowski (2008), Alford Young (2004), Prudence Carter (2005), Annette Lareau (2003), Sudhir Venkatesh (2002; 2009), and others have forged ahead, probing complex, difficult issues on how culture can have an independent, semiautonomous effect on human behavior, including the lives of the poor. On the other hand, other scholars, most notably Lamont and Small (2008; see also Small 2004; Lamont, Small, and Harding 2010; Harding 2010), have sought to navi-gate between the Scylla of a crude culturalism and the Charybdis of a barren structuralism and have embodied what we call the cultural half- turn. Typically these analyses have replaced the language of norms, values, attitudes, and ideologies with those of scripts, toolkits, boundaries, narra-tives, repertoires, and frames. While the adoption of concepts from cogni-tive psychology and the humanities are potentially useful in expanding our approach to understanding how culture works, the cultural half- turn is limited in several respects.

First, the cultural half- turn focuses mainly, and often exclusively, on the pragmatics of culture, largely ignoring or downplaying the evaluative, normative, and informational components of culture. Even with symbolic boundaries, where an evaluative dimension could be incorporated, most research has been toward how an individual categorizes or differentiates others, or as they prefer to say, how people conduct boundary work, a concept borrowed largely from the Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth, who developed it as an effective means of downplaying the role of culture in the conception and analysis of ethnic groups (Barth 1969). Second, scholars in the half- turn tradition have ignored how cultural con-structs are persistent through time and across populations, both dia-chronically and synchronically (Patterson 2004, ch. 2). Persistence has been confused with coherence and simplicity, but norms, attitudes, values, and ideologies, as social psychologists have long demonstrated, are any-thing but coherent or simple. Unfortunately, as social scientists in the tradition of the half- turn have ignored cultural persistence, they have dis-carded related processes of diffusion and transmission. Third, as a correc-tive, the cultural half- turn has downplayed the shared aspect of culture. This neglect of the collective is also reflected in the disparagement of subcultures, or of what we will call cultural configurations, the fact that

8 Introduction

cultural constructs cluster in meaningful, systematic ways (see Patterson, Chapter 1 in this volume), all such attempts being disparaged with the academic smear of being Parsonian or culture of poverty. Fourth, and crucially, the half- turn culturalists have tended to view culture as some-thing to be interpreted but not a force that explains behavior. This is particularly surprising since structural accounts increasingly include cul-ture as a mediator between structure and behavior (except for orthodox Marxists and neoclassical economists, and even the latter has now begun to shift significantly). Even for the most die- hard structuralists, social class, for instance, impacts behavior through cultural mechanisms and thus has a role for explanation.

Finally, despite criticizing, and sometimes condemning, previous studies on the cultural lives of the poor for conflating culture with behavior, those embracing the cultural half- turn frequently do so, a common danger of extreme pragmatism. This conflation of culture and behavior is not a mere academic distinction: by combining culture with behavior, culture cannot logically explain behavior, since it is behavior. How culture works and influences becomes what people do or how they rationalize what they are doing (called meaning- making). The result can be frustrating for the progress of social science research as well as for determining policy implications of these analyses, since culture becomes an epistemological ouroboros of both explanandum and explanans.

By neglecting the persistent, collective, evaluative, explanatory, and ideational, culture is at worst treated as a hall of mirrors, a postmodern epistemological jungle in which no one (including, or rather especially, the social scientist) can conclude anything substantive from their non-privileged, inherently relational epistemological position. All that can be said is that reality is complex and everybody is right. As an academic exercise, this may very well prove self- fulfilling. However, as a way for understanding and explaining the paradox of black youth, and for uncov-ering the solutions to the problems they face, it demands more. The social problems they face are too great and too important not to take culture seriously.2

Chapter Overviews

We now turn to an overview of the chapters in this volume. The work is organized into five parts. Part one, Overview, provides both a theoretical and substantive framework for the works that follow. In Chapter 1, The