Fugitive Cultures

Race, Violence, and Youth

Henry A. Giroux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415915786
• eBook ISBN: 9781135209735
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Fugitive Cultures examines how youth are being increasingly subjected to racial stereotyping and violence in various realms of popular culture, especially children's culture. But rather than dismissing popular culture, Henry Giroux addresses its political and pedagogical value as a site of critique and learning and calls for a reinvigorated critical relationship between cultural studies and those diverse cultural workers committed to expanding the possibilities and practices of democratic public life.

I

RACE,

VIOLENCE,

AND

CHILDREN’S CULTURE

1

WHITE PANIC

AND THE

RACIAL CODING

OF VIOLENCE

In our society, youth is present only when its presence is a problem, or is regarded as a problem. More precisely, the category “youth” gets mobilized in official documentary discourse, in concerned or outraged editorials and features, or in the supposedly disinterested tracts emanating from the social sciences at those times when young people make their presence felt by going “out of bounds”, by resisting through rituals, dressing strangely, striking bizarre attitudes, breaking rules, breaking bottles, windows, heads, issuing rhetorical challenges to the law.

—Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light

Youth have once again become the object of public analysis. Headlines proliferate like dispatches from a combat zone, frequently coupling youth and violence in the interests of promoting a new kind of commonsense relationship. For example, gangsta rap artist Snoop Doggy Dogg is featured on the front cover of Newsweek.¹ The message is that young black men are spreading violence like some kind of social disease to the mainstream public through their music. But according to Newsweek, the violence is not just in the music—it is also embodied in the lifestyles of the rappers who produce it. The potential victims in this case are a besieged white majority of male and female youth. Citing a wave of arrests among prominent rappers, the cover story reinforces the emergence of crime as a racially coded word for associating black youth with violence.²

The statistics on youth violence point to social and economic causes of crime that lie far beyond the reach of facile stereotypes about kids today. On a national level, United States society is witnessing the effects of a culture of violence in which

close to 12 U.S. children aged 19 and under die from gun fire each day. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, ‘‘Firearm homicide is the leading cause of death of African-American teenage boys and the second-leading cause of death of high school age children in the United States.”³

What is missing from news stories reported in Newsweek and other popular media is any critical commentary on the relationship between the spread of the culture of violence in this society and the representations of violence that saturate the mass media. In addition, there is little mention in such reports of the high numbers of infants and children killed every year through “poverty-related malnutrition and disease.” Nor is the United States public informed in the popular press about “the gruesome toll of the drunk driver who is typically white.”⁴ But the bad news doesn’t end with a one-sided commentary on violence in the United States.

The representations of white youth produced by dominant media within recent years have increasingly portrayed them as lazy, sinking into a self-indulgent haze, and oblivious to the middle-class ethic of working hard and getting ahead. Of course, the dominant media do not talk about the social conditions producing a new generation of youth steeped in despair, violence, crime, poverty, and apathy. For instance, to talk about black crime without mentioning that the unemployment rate for black youth exceeds forty percent in many urban cities, serves primarily to conceal a major cause of youth unrest. Or to talk about apathy among black and white youth without analyzing the junk culture, poverty, social disenfranchisement, drugs, lack of educational opportunity, and commodification that shape daily life removes responsibility from a social system that often sees youth as simply another market niche.

With the production of goods shifting to third world countries and corporate downsizing streamlining American businesses, the present economy offers most youth the promise of service sector jobs and dim prospects for the future. Against the scarcity of opportunity, youth face a world of infinite messages and images designed to sell products or peddle senseless violence. In light of radically altered social and economic conditions, educators need to fashion alternative analyses about how youth are being constructed pedagogically, economically, and culturally within the changing nature of a post-modern culture of violence. Such a project seems vital in light of the rapidity with which market values and a commercial public culture have replaced the ethical referents for developing democratic public spheres. For example, since the 1970s, millions of jobs have been lost to capital flight, and technological change has wiped out millions more. In the last twenty years alone, the U.S. economy lost more than five million jobs in the manufacturing sector.⁵ In the face of extremely limited prospects for economic growth over the next decade, schools will be faced with an identity crisis regarding the traditional assumption that school credentials provide the best route to economic security and class mobility for a large proportion of our nation’s youth. As Stanley Aronowitz and I have pointed out elsewhere:

The labor market is becoming increasingly bifurcated: organizational and technical changes are producing a limited number of jobs for highly educated and trained people—managers, scientific and technological experts, and researchers. On the other hand, we are witnessing the disappearance of many middle-level white collar subprofessions. . . .And in the face of sharpening competition, employers typically hire a growing number of low paid, part-time workers. . . . Even some professionals have become free-lance workers with few, if any, fringe benefits. These developments call into question the efficacy of mass schooling for providing the “well-trained” labor force that employers still claim they require.⁶

In light of these shattering shifts in economic and cultural life, it makes more sense for educators to reexamine the mission of the school and the changing conditions of youth rather than to blame youth for the economic slump, the culture of racially coded violence, or the hopelessness that seems endemic to dominant versions of the future.

Rethinking the conditions of youth is also imperative in order to reverse the mean-spirited discourse of the 1980s and 1990s, a discourse that has turned its back on the victims of United States society and has resorted to both blaming and punishing them for their social and economic problems. For example, in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, which subscribe to “Learnfare” programs, a single mother is penalized with a lower food allowance if her kids are absent from school. In other states, welfare payments are reduced if single mothers do not marry. Mickey Kaus, an editor at the New Republic, argues that welfare mothers should be forced to work at menial jobs, and if they refuse, Kaus suggests that the state remove their children from them. Illiterate women, Kaus argues, could work raking leaves.⁷ We are now witnessing the indifference and callousness in this kind of language as it spills over into national discussions about youth and their future. Instead of confronting the economic and social conditions that cripple the nation’s youth, leaving many without food, shelter, access to decent education, and safe environments, conservatives such as former Secretary of Education William Bennett seek repressive institutional reforms. Conservatives argue for imposing national standards on public schools, creating voucher systems that benefit middle-class parents, and doing away with the concept of the “public” altogether. However, there is more at work here than simply ignorance of the issues and neglect that results from the convenience of not knowing.

It is perhaps in the dominant discourse on families and cultural values that one gets a glimpse of the pedagogy at work in the culture of mean-spiritedness. Bennett, for instance, in his new, best-selling book, The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories, finds hope in “Old Mr. Rabbit’s Thanksgiving Dinner,” in which the rabbit instructs us that there is more joy in being helpful than being helped. The discourse of moral uplift may provide soothing and inspirational help for children whose parents send them to private schools, establish trust-fund annuities for their future, and connect them to the world of political patronage. But it says almost nothing about the culture of compressed and concentrated human suffering that many children have to deal with daily in this country—a culture of suffering made evident by the fact that over seventy percent of all welfare recipients are children. In what follows, I want to draw from a number of insights provided by the field of cultural studies to chart out a different cartography that might be helpful for educators to address the changing conditions of youth.

FRAMING YOUTH

The instability and transitoriness characteristic of a diverse generation of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds is inextricably rooted in a larger set of postmodern cultural conditions. These conditions are informed by the following: a general loss of faith in the narratives of work and emancipation; the recognition that the indeterminacy of the future warrants confronting and living in the immediacy of experience; an acknowledgment that homelessness as a condition of randomness has replaced the security, if not misrepresentation, of home as a source of comfort and security; an experience of time and space as compressed and fragmented within a world of images that increasingly undermine the dialectic of authenticity and universalism. For many youth, plurality and contingency—whether generated by the mass media or through the dislocations spurned by the economic system, the rise of new social movements, or the crisis of representation and authority—have resulted in a world with few secure psychological, economic, or intellectual markers. This is a world in which one wanders within and between multiple borders and spaces marked by excess, otherness, and difference. This is a world in which old certainties are ruptured and meaning becomes more contingent, less indebted to the dictates of reverence and established truth. While the circumstances of youth vary across and within terrains marked by gender, racial and class differences, the modernist world of certainty and order that has traditionally policed, contained, and insulated such difference has given way. In its place is a shared postmodern space in which cultural representations merge into new hybridized forms of cultural performance, identity, and political agency. As the information highway and MTV condense time and space into what Paul Virilio calls “speed space,” new desires, modes of association, and forms of resistance inscribe themselves into diverse spheres of popular culture.⁸ Music, rap, fashion, style, talk, politics, and cultural resistance are no longer confined to their original class and racial locations. Middle-class white kids take up the language of gangsta rap spawned in neighborhood turfs far removed from their own lives. Black youth in urban centers have created a hip hop style fashioned amid a combination of sneakers, baseball caps, and oversized clothing that integrates forms of resistance, a style later appropriated by suburban kids whose desires and identities resonate with the energy and vibrancy of rap, hip hop culture, and the new urban funk. Music displaces older forms of textuality and references a terrain of cultural production that marks the body as a site of pleasure, resistance, domination, and danger.⁹ Within this postmodern youth culture, identities merge and shift rather than becoming more uniform and static. No longer associated with any one place or location, youth increasingly inhabit shifting cultural and social spheres marked by a plurality of languages, ideologies, and cultures. Youth can no longer be seen as either bearers of counter-hegemonic cultures or as drop outs, sheepishly slacking off into an aimless and dreary accommodation to the status quo.

Communities have been refigured as space and time mutate into multiple and overlapping cyberspace networks. Bohemian and middle-class youth now talk to each other over electronic bulletin boards in coffee houses. Cafes and other public salons, once the refuge of beatniks, hippies, and other cultural radicals, have given way to members of the hacker culture. Middle-class youth reorder their imaginations according to virtual reality technologies. They produce forms of exchange through electronic texts and icons that have the potential to wage war on traditional meaning, but they also run the risk of reducing critical understanding to the endless play of random access spectacles.

Of course, calling attention to the often contradictory nature of popular culture is not meant to endorse a Frankfurt School dismissal of popular culture in the postmodern age.¹⁰ On the contrary, I believe that the new electronic technologies, with their proliferation of narratives and open-ended forms of interaction, have altered the pedagogical context for the production of identities as well as how people “take in information and entertainment.”¹¹ Produced from the centers of power, media culture has spawned in the name of profit and entertainment a new level of instrumental and commodified culture. On the other hand, popular culture offers resistance to the notion that useful culture can only be produced within dominant regimes of power. Black inner city youth, for example, have reinvented such old technologies as the mixing board and the drum machine to articulate rap as a unique form of musical expression.¹² At the same time, the distinction between mass and popular culture is not meant to suggest that popular culture is strictly a terrain of resistance. Popular culture does not escape commodification, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression, but it is marked by fault lines that reject the high/low culture divide while simultaneously attempting to affirm a multitude of histories, experiences, cultural forms, and pleasures. Within the conditions of postmodern culture, values no longer emerge unproblematically from the modernist pedagogy of foundationalism and universal truths, or from traditional narratives based on fixed identities with their requisite structure of closure. For many youths, meaning is in rout, media has become a substitute for experience, and what constitutes understanding is grounded in a decentered and diasporic world of difference, displacement, and negotiation.

The intersection among cultural studies and pedagogy can be made more clear through an analysis of how the pedagogy of Hollywood has attempted to portray in some recent films the plight of young people within the conditions of a postmodern American culture. I will focus on five films: River’s Edge (1986), My Own Private Idaho (1991), Slacker (1991), Juice (1992), and Kids (1995).These films both frame the ways in which youth can be taken up by diverse audiences and argue for particular pedagogical readings over others. They point to some of the economic and social conditions at work in the formation of different racial and economic strata of youth, but they often do so within a narrative that combines a politics of despair with a fairly sophisticated depiction of the alleged sensibilities and moods of a generation of youth growing up amid the fracturing and menacing conditions of a postmodern culture. The challenge for progressive educators is to formulate the ways in which a critical pedagogy might be employed to appropriate the more radical aspects of children’s culture. Its radical notions will be useful in addressing the new and different social, political, and economic contexts that inform and shape the twenty-something generation. At the same time, progressive educators must consider how the interface of cultural studies and critical pedagogy might be analyzed to create the conditions for social agency and institutionalized change among diverse sectors of youth.

WHITE YOUTH AND THE POLITICS OF DESPAIR

For many youth, showing up for adulthood at the fin de siècle means pulling back on hope and trying to put off the future, rather than taking up the modernist challenge of trying to shape it.¹³ Popular cultural criticism has captured much of the alienation among youth and has made clear that “What used to be the pessimism of a radical fringe is now the shared assumption of a generation.”¹⁴ Cultural studies has helped to temper this broad generalization about youth in order to investigate the more complex representations at work in the construction of a new generation of youth, representations that cannot be abstracted from the specificities of race, class, or gender. And yet, cultural studies theorists have also pointed to the increasing resistance of a twenty-something generation of youth who seem neither motivated by nostalgia for some lost conservative vision of America nor at home in the New World Order paved with the promises of the expanding electronic information highway.¹⁵

While “youth” as a social construction has always been mediated, in part, as a social problem, many cultural critics believe that postmodern youth are uniquely “alien,” “strange,” and disconnected from the real world. For instance, in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), the main character, Mike, who hustles his sexual wares for money, is a dreamer lost in fractured memories of a mother who deserted him as a child. Caught between flashbacks of Mom shown in 8mm color and the video world of motley street hustlers and their clients, Mike moves through his life by falling asleep in times of stress only to awaken in different geographic locations. What holds Mike’s psychic and geographic travels together is the metaphor of sleep, the dream of escape, and the ultimate realization that even memories cannot fuel hope for the future. Mike becomes a metaphor for an entire generation of lower middle-class youth forced to sell themselves in a society governed by the market, a generation that aspires to nothing, works at degrading McJobs, and lives in a world in which chance and randomness rather than struggle, community, and solidarity drive their fate.

A more disturbing picture of white, working-class youth can be found in the cult classic, River’s Edge (1986).Teen-age anomie and drugged apathy are given painful expression in the depiction of a group of working-class youth who are casually told by their friend John that he has strangled his girlfriend, another of the group’s members, and left her nude body on the riverbank. The group members at different times visit the site to view the dead body of the girl. Seemingly unable to grasp the significance of the event, the youths initially hold off from informing anyone of John’s murderous act and with varying degrees of concern and self-interest try to protect the teen-age sociopath from being caught by the police. Framed in conservative terms, the youths in River’s Edge drift through a world of broken families, blaring rock music, schooling marked by dead time, and a general indifference towards the future. In River’s Edge, history as social memory is reassembled through vignettes of 1960s types portrayed as either burned-out bikers or a...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• I RACE, VIOLENCE, AND CHILDREN’S CULTURE
• II PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS AND POPULIST PERSUASIONS
• III THE WAY THINGS OUGHT NOT TO BE: RACE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
• NOTES
• INDEX