The cultural matrix
Subtitle: understanding Black youth
By: edited by Orlando Patterson ; with Ethan Fosse
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 675
ISBN-13: 9780674728752
Subjects: Social conditions; Social life and customs; African American youth
Description: The Cultural Matrix seeks to unravel a uniquely American paradox: the socioeconomic crisis, segregation, and social isolation of disadvantaged black youth, on the one hand, and their extraordinary integration and prominence in popular culture on the other. Despite school dropout rates over 40 percent, a third spending time in prison, chronic unemployment, and endemic violence, black youth are among the most vibrant creators of popular culture in the world. They also espouse several deeply-held American values. To understand this conundrum, the authors bring culture back to the forefront of explanation, while avoiding the theoretical errors of earlier culture-of-poverty approaches and the causal timidity and special pleading of more recent ones. There is no single black youth culture, but a complex matrix of cultures{u2014}adapted mainstream, African-American vernacular, street culture, and hip-hop{u2014}that support and undermine, enrich and impoverish young lives. Hip-hop, for example, has had an enormous influence, not always to the advantage of its creators. However, its muscular message of primal honor and sensual indulgence is not motivated by a desire for separatism but by an insistence on sharing in the mainstream culture of consumption, power, and wealth. This interdisciplinary work draws on all the social sciences, as well as social philosophy and ethnomusicology, in a concerted effort to explain how culture, interacting with structural and environmental forces, influences the performance and control of violence, aesthetic productions, educational and work outcomes, familial, gender, and sexual relations, and the complex moral life of black youth.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 583-651) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction / Orlando Patterson, Ethan Fosse; title: The Nature and Dynamics of Cultural Processes / Orlando Patterson; title: The Social and Cultural Matrix of Black Youth / Orlando Patterson; title: The Values and Beliefs of Disconnected Black Youth / Ethan Fosse; title: Hip-Hop's Irrepressible Refashionability: Phases in the Cultural Production of Black Youth / Wayne Marshall; title: Continuity and Change in Neighborhood Culture: Toward a Structurally Embedded Theory of Social Altruism and Moral Cynicism / Robert J. Sampson; title: "I Do Me": Young Black Men and the Struggle to Resist the Street / Kathryn Edin, Robert Rosenblatt, Queenie Zhu; title: More than Just Black: Cultural Perils and Opportunities in Inner-City Neighborhoods / Van C. Tran; title: The Role of Religious and Social Organizations in the Lives of Disadvantaged Youth / Rajeev Dehejia, Thomas DeLeire, Erzo F.P. Luttmer, Josh Mitchell; title: Keeping Up the Front: How Disadvantaged Black Youths Avoid Street Violence in the Inner City / Joseph C. Krupnick and Christopher Winship; title: What About the Day After? Youth Culture in the Era of "Law and Order" / Sudhir Venkatesh; title: Culture, Inequality, and Gender Relations among Urban Black Youth / Jody Miller; title: Effects of Affluent Suburban Schooling: Learning Skilled Ways of Interacting with Educational Gatekeepers / Simone Ispa-Landa; title: "Try on the Outfit and Just See How It Works": The Psychocultural Responses of Disconnected Youth to Work / Orlando Patterson and Jacqueline Rivers; title: Stepping Up or Stepping Back: Highly Disadvantaged Parents' Responses to the Building Strong Families Program / Andrew Clarkwest, Alexandra A. Killewald, Robert G. Wood; title: Beyond BA Blinders: Cultural Impediments to College Success /  James E. Rosenbaum, Jennifer Stephan, Janet Rosenbaum, Amy E. Foran, Pam Schuetz; title: Liberalism, Self-Respect, and Troubling Cultural Patterns in Ghettos / Tommie Shelby; title: Conclusion: What Have We Learned? / Orlando Patterson and Ethan Fosse.