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While researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and service providers ask increasingly for solutions to the enduring problems of youth violence, key issues have gone unaddressed. For example, questions remain about the disparity in the prevalence of violence for African American adolescents. It is unclear whether risk and protective factors for violent behavior differ for youth of color as compared to White youth, although several theories suggest that African American youth may be socialized differently to the use and outcomes of violence. To the extent that differences in violence and associated variables are understood, researchers and practitioners will be positioned to more fully meet the needs of particularly vulnerable and marginalized groups. The purpose of Chapter 3 is to distill key race differences in violence, as well as the many risk and protective factors found in the literature. Theories that position race in the etiology of violence are reviewed. The chapter examines race and ethnic differences in the prevalence of violence as well as group variation in risk and protective factors for violence.

This chapter investigates how Latinos' racial and ethnic identities yield either similar or dissimilar educational outcomes to African American youth. It analyzes interethnic differences between African Americans and Latinos in behaviors and attitudes about “acting white” and suggests that gender has the strongest influence. It discussed findings that Latinos are more likely than Latinas to share cultural styles, such as those of hip-hop culture, with African American youths.

This chapter daws on three published sociological works: Franklin E. Frazier’s, Negro Youth at the Crossways (1940), Charles S. Johnson’s, Growing Up in the Black Belt (1941), and Charles H. Parrish’s, Color Names and Color Notions (1946). These sociological views on color showed brown identity as an emergent social ideal and image of African America, and in varying degrees drew crucial connections of brownness to values associated with an ascendant middle-class status. These sociologists are presented as racial liberals who offered concrete and critical assessments of the rising idealization of brown complexions among African American youth coming of age between the Great Depression and World War II.

This chapter examines the link between chronic exposure to certain social and environmental stressors — sometimes referred to as urban stressors — and a range of poor outcomes, including, but not limited to, increased aggression, anxiety, low grade point average, delinquency, depression, and social withdrawal. Given the range of poor outcomes associated with chronic exposure to urban stressors, it appears that for some young African American males, such exposure may elicit maladaptive coping responses. Hence for many of these young men, the experience of living in an urban environment presents a set of unique challenges that can have a negative impact on their transition to adulthood. As such, urban stress and its related outcomes are important considerations in the study of ethnic minority children and adolescent development.

Young African Americans regularly experience racism, poverty, sexism, violence, and other affronts to their humanity. Though they are often highly active and vocal contributors to their churches, schools, and neighborhood communities, they are often silent about the possibility of God working to address the injustices in their lives. The disconnection between the issues young people face, their community involvement, and their conceptions of God point toward the pervasiveness of “fragmented” spirituality among African American youth. Spiritual fragmentation does not necessarily inhibit healthy development or functioning. However, the African American community and church are at risk if they fail to challenge the myth that the personal and the communal or the spiritual and political are in fact disconnected. But why are African American Christian adolescents experiencing spiritual fragmentation? Is spiritual fragmentation symptomatic of an irreparable chasm between the Black church and Black youth? Or are there other factors at play?

This chapter explores the international viability of African American youth television in the late nineties and early twenty-first century, when audiences across Europe and Latin America continued to fragment due to increased competition from commercial broadcasters and cable channels. Many channels turned to imported US sitcoms as a cheap way to lure viewers, including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. During this period, black youth culture became a lingua franca of revolt, sexuality, and coolness among adolescents around the world. The series' runaway popularity led global television merchants to revise their explanations about what kinds of African American television programs travel well. The chapter shows how the idea that youth-oriented shows with African American pop stars and hip-hop cultural references are globally appealing remains prevalent in industry lore.

Previous chapters have outlined the fragmented spirituality, beliefs, and practices of African American youth. This chapter assesses and affirms these as the building blocks of a more robust spirituality. Building on the work of Womanist theologians, this chapter articulates key theological concepts that are essential in helping African American youth resist and transcend the negative effects of spiritual fragmentation. Womanist public theology and reorientation of adolescent spirituality to communal ends does not necessarily reduce spirituality to political action. This chapter suggests approaches to participating in public theological reflection and action to help youth leverage their religious convictions and ideals to work for the common good.

The previous chapter examined how adolescents’ growing maturity, including their college–going identities, can be motivated by a sense of agency and connectedness in the service of their own dreams and those of their families. This chapter considers the second question: what factors lead youth along academic pathways towards or away from college and college–based careers? This chapter examines these pathways and the experiences that shape their access to them. The chapter focuses on a longitudinal study of African American and Latino youth in university pre–college bridging programs, as well as related work with working–class European American youth, among other samples. Findings are aligned with social capital, alienation, and challenge models.

This chapter relates the work of young Black spoken word poets with Black liberationist, humanist, and Womanist religious scholars. It is easier for many Black youth to have “no expectation” that God should work in their lives than to wrestle with theodicy. This disconnection is reflected in youth performances of spoken word poetry, which invites their interpretations of overwhelming and absurd experiences of evil and suffering. The voices of young people in the heart of urban communities (like, but also beyond Chicago) reflect a desire for change within their communities and a condemnation of the role of political or religious leaders—or even God—in bringing that change to fruition. The young poets advance fierce correctives to many African American religious and scholarly attempts at making sense of evil and suffering in the presence of God. Nonetheless, Christian communities have a role to play in helping youth counter fragmented spirituality.

This chapter investigates the New Orleans Prison School—a public school in a prison—where African American male students were sent as punishment for nonviolent status offenses. Through the voices of local residents, including students and their families, teachers, local activists, and law enforcement officials, it explains what the push-pull factors of punitive schooling mean for their lives and their community. The chapter situates this examination in the historical context of urban school failure, youth criminalization, and mass correctionalization from the post-civil rights era of New Orleans forward. The work is theoretically framed by scholarship in the sociology of punishment, which articulates mass incarceration as a disappearing act playing out on the stage of the postindustrial and neoliberal state. The chapter ends by returning to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. While the city's schools were physically demolished by the tremendous floodwaters, the punitive ideologies of the city's criminal justice system remained intact. These ideologies resurged and were made manifest as the school system was rebuilt.

Globalism is associated with the movement of jobs and industry from one country to another, and from 1955 to the present, hundreds of thousands of industrial sector jobs were shifted from the United States to various countries across the globe. In theory, globalization works when new jobs become available to replace the old. This chapter describes what happened to inner-city black communities and their youth when promised replacement jobs never materialized. The absence of a mainstream economic presence in the ghetto has given rise to a thriving underground economy anchored by the drug trade. While the trade itself can be analyzed from a rational, business perspective, the violence and community chaos linked to the trade plays havoc with black child and youth development. The chapter reviews how clinical psychologists and psychiatrists have taken the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — once solely associated with psychological reactions to wars outside the United States — and applied it to the emotional states of inner-city black children and youth who have experienced, witnessed, or possess firsthand knowledge about the violence and chaos linked to the underground economy. In addition, the history of the social struggles of white ethnic groups in the United States is revisited, as a way of gaining insight into what worked to effectuate social mobility for white groups trapped in poverty at earlier points in U.S. history.

Analyses of recent trends in youth homicide show that juvenile murder rates were relatively stable from 1980 through 1987, followed by a significant increase through the early 1990s, and then an equally significant decrease through the first decade of the new millennium. Nearly all of the increase in youth homicide was due to increases in youth firearm deaths. Over the past two decades, the risk of homicidal death for 14- to 17-year-old African-American youths has been between six and ten times greater than for white youths. In 1997, the known juvenile homicide offending rates for racial groups (as classified in the U.S. arrest data) were approximately 30 (per million youth ages 10–17) for whites, 34 for American–Indians and Alaskan Natives, 44 for Asian and Pacific Islanders, and 194 for African Americans. These national rates describe the average differences in youth homicide offending for these racial subgroups.

This chapter provides an overview of the main themes covered in the present volume. Public housing is a federal program started by the US Housing Act of 1937, which provided public financing for low-cost public housing. Initially, public housing was developed to meet the housing needs of white middle-class families affected by the Great Depression; however, it quickly transitioned into housing for poor racial minorities. Shortly after its inception, public housing captured national attention due to the constellation of social problems that coalesced in many public housing developments across the country. In an attempt to rectify what was deemed a failed housing policy, the United States launched the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere VI (HOPE VI) program to transform (i.e. demolish and rebuild) distressed public housing developments in many large US cities. This book seeks to contribute to knowledge on African American youth living in public housing developments that were not targeted by HOPE VI. The remainder of the chapter discusses public housing residents and locations; changes in urban public housing; why and how public housing developments are neighborhoods in their own right; research on youth public housing; and limitations on public housing.

Fragmented spirituality among African American adolescents has been fostered and shaped in US society and African American churches, amid sometimes inadequate theology and pedagogy. However, the text concludes with the assertions that young African Americans are both in need of a vision of abundant life and capable of integrating spirituality. These young people have not given up on churches or on the importance of spirituality in their lives. However, many still do not know or believe that churches exist that value their voices and their lived realities. Therefore, churches and concerned adults must respond by working with youth to live life abundantly.

Most studies have focused on the pathologies and deficits exhibited by African American youth while ignoring the signs of resiliency evident in this population. A section of the Integrated Model on Adolescent Development in Public Housing Neighborhoods posits that promotive aspects of public housing neighborhoods contribute to increased self-efficacy and less favorable attitudes toward deviance. This chapter tests this section of the model by exploring variations in latent classes of adolescents based on their self-efficacy and attitudes toward deviance; assessing how adolescents differ on their depressive symptoms, anxiety sensitivity, delinquent behavior, and exposure to deviant peers based on their class membership; and examining how inhibiting and promotive aspects of public housing neighborhoods predict membership in each latent class. Findings show that adolescents' attitudes and efficacy determine their behavior, mental health symptoms, and peer affiliations. For instance, youths with conventional attitudes and more efficacious beliefs used less alcohol and marijuana than other youth; they engaged in less delinquent behavior and were affiliated with less youth involved in antisocial behavior, compared with youth with more favorable attitudes toward deviance and low efficacious beliefs. Higher self-efficacy also appears to be a moderating effect against depressive symptoms.

This chapter describes how probation officers explain and assess the future risk of offending. Probation officers use qualitatively different kinds of attributions and explanations and rely on explanations about the immediate causes of the present offense. The analysis in the chapter presents three striking results. First, in the assessments of low-risk youths, there is no evidence that the internal/external dichotomy of attributions explains racial differences in the officers' perceptions of the offenders. Probation officers were not more likely to draw on internal attributions for African-American youths, or external attributions for white youths. Second, explanations mirroring the internal/external distinction between African-American and white youths were much more likely to be seen in the assessments of moderate-risk youths. Finally, the characterizations that probation officers used in high-risk assessments are not easily categorized into a theoretical framework of internal and external attributions.

This chapter examines the role of labor markets in the problems of inner-city schooling. Given the long history of racial discrimination, African-American youth might reasonably have been skeptical about the economic value of education. Stanley Lieberson and others have identified the 1930s as a time when racial disadvantage in the labor market may have increased. Direct evidence regarding perceptions of the labor market is very limited. The chapter tracks the labor market experiences of black and immigrant workers over time. Perceptions of the labor market are likely to have been grounded in the experiences of family, friends, and neighbors. Thus, the chapter gains some indirect insight into how black and immigrant youth saw the economic value of schooling by observing the labor market opportunities and employment patterns of black and immigrant Chicagoans over time. It begins with a discussion of opportunity and discrimination in white-collar employment.