Living the Drama

Community, Conflict, and Culture among Inner-City Boys

David J. Harding

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780226316666
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

For the middle class and the affluent, local ties seem to matter less and less these days, but in the inner city, your life can be irrevocably shaped by what block you live on. Living the Drama takes a close look at three neighborhoods in Boston to analyze the many complex ways that the context of community shapes the daily lives and long-term prospects of inner-city boys.David J. Harding studied sixty adolescent boys growing up in two very poor areas and one working-class area. In the first two, violence and neighborhood identification are inextricably linked as rivalries divide the city into spaces safe, neutral, or dangerous. Consequently, Harding discovers, social relationships are determined by residential space. Older boys who can navigate the dangers of the streets serve as role models, and friendships between peers grow out of mutual protection. The impact of community goes beyond the realm of same-sex bonding, Harding reveals, affecting the boys' experiences in school and with the opposite sex. A unique glimpse into the world of urban adolescent boys, Living the Drama paints a detailed, insightful portrait of life in the inner city.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

In a Boston Globe photo, a police officer strong-arms a young black man, bleary-eyed in the early morning light, through the open doors of a paddy wagon. The boy is dressed in an oversized white T-shirt and baggy shorts, his head is bowed, and his arms are handcuffed behind him. In the background, white police officers dressed in windbreakers and bulletproof vests mill about outside Roxbury’s newly renovated Orchard Gardens public housing development.¹ The accompanying headline declares, “Raid hits ‘24-hour’ drug ring; 15 in Roxbury arrested,” and heralds a multiagency effort to crack down on gang violence in Boston’s inner city. Police sources say the fifteen young men and five others arrested a few days earlier are the remnants of the once fearsome and highly organized Orchard Park Trailblazers,² who “terrorized Boston in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.” Terrified by the violence, the article reports, some Orchard Gardens residents are trying to leave the neighborhood.³

“Daniel,” a seventeen-year-old African American Roxbury resident, normally gregarious, soberly regards the photo and accompanying story. An unemployed high school dropout and the son of a poor single mother, Daniel has never been involved in drug dealing. Nevertheless, he is troubled by the newspaper account, especially the image of the young man. As he passes the newspaper back to me across the kitchen table in his mother’s third-floor apartment, he notes:

It’s kinda sad because you don’t know if he has a family or not. [They are] just taking him off because he had drugs or something . . . I’m not the police or anything, or I’m not none of the people that was there. So I don’t know what happened. But it looks pretty awful though . . . He could have been a good guy. Like he could have gave the drug money to kids. You don’t know what he did with the money. You don’t know if they’re investing it back in the community, or did they try to go get a house somewhere to try to get out of the drug game.

Only a few weeks later another story of violence hits the pages of the Boston Globe. White teenagers, dressed in their Sunday best, hold up their hockey sticks to form an arch as the casket of a young white man is carried out of a suburban church in Somerville. The headline proclaims, “Teen died as he lived—helping others; Sullivan fatally stabbed aiding friend in fight.” Ryan Sullivan, a sixteen-year-old from an inner-ring suburb, was stabbed as he and a nineteen-year-old friend, recently released from prison, fought with two men.⁴ Apparently Ryan had sacrificed himself to save his friend.

The sharp contrast between these two newspaper accounts is telling. In comparison to young men from working-class communities, inner-city black men are often viewed and portrayed as little more than social categories: drug dealers, gangsters, rappers, or athletes. Although young men like Daniel are in fact a diverse lot, the popular media often promulgates more monolithic images—and these are often accepted at face value by a public that misunderstands or fears poor black men. Young men like Daniel feel the effects of these monolithic images in their day-to-day lives. When an older person crosses the street to avoid them or a teacher assumes they are great athletes but not great scholars, they know they have been pigeon-holed. Sadly, academics often fare no better than the public at large in understanding the lives of inner-city minority males. Even the literature on teenage childbearing focuses almost exclusively on the decision making of young women (for exceptions, see Anderson 1990, 1999).⁵

This book puts the focus back on adolescents like Daniel—black and Latino boys growing up in inner-city communities beset by poverty and violence. I examine the role of neighborhoods in their lives because these community contexts matter, shaping the social resources available to them and the cultural landscapes they inhabit during the risk-filled years of adolescence. What features of disadvantaged neighborhoods have important consequences for adolescent boys, and which boys are most susceptible to these influences? How do the social and cultural characteristics of disadvantaged neighborhoods influence outcomes such as teenage pregnancy and education? What are the social processes in disadvantaged neighborhoods that create neighborhood effects? These are the key questions I address.

While sociologists have been concerned with urban residents and their neighborhoods since the birth of the discipline (e.g., Du Bois 1899; Park and Burgess 1925; Shaw 1929), scholarship on the effect of neighborhood context on individuals was reignited by William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged (1987). With this work, Wilson directly linked urban sociology to socioeconomic stratification, residential mobility, and race. In theoretical terms, neighborhoods became an important context in which the social processes driving stratification and racial inequality played out, and neighborhood context became a causal force in the lives of youth and adults. In brief, Wilson argued that the decline of manufacturing employment and the movement of middle-class blacks out of the central city led to a concentration of poverty and social isolation among inner-city minorities left behind. These changes exacerbated social problems in these communities, including single-parent families, male joblessness, crime, and the underground economy, and weakened support structures and institutions—all of which negatively affected the life chances of individuals living in poor urban communities.⁶

This new focus on urban neighborhoods and spatial segregation set off a sustained effort to understand the effects of neighborhood context on fertility, health, education, labor market, and delinquency outcomes, particularly for children and adolescents. Although some disagreement remains about how and why concentrated poverty increased between 1970 and 1990, most scholars agree that it has had detrimental consequences for the residents of affected neighborhoods (see Harding 2003 for a review of and evidence on this issue). Yet social scientists have only begun to uncover the mechanisms that translate neighborhood characteristics into long-term outcomes for individual residents. The task at hand is to understand how structural conditions, such as concentrated poverty, joblessness, and residential instability, lead to social processes that are harmful or helpful to young men like Daniel.

This book argues that two features of poor neighborhoods are critical mechanisms underlying neighborhood effects on adolescent boys: neighborhood violence and cultural heterogeneity. These characteristics both distinguish poor neighborhoods from other neighborhoods and have pronounced effects on the decision making and behavior of adolescent boys. Omnipresent in the daily lives of boys growing up in poor neighborhoods, violence plays a powerful role in structuring social relations, identity and hierarchy, use of space, perceptions, and cultural frameworks. While much social science research has focused on neighborhood differences in rates of violence and other crimes, scholars have paid less attention to the social and cultural implications of living in an environment where the threat of violent victimization is significant.

The ways in which violence is socially organized (as opposed to just its frequency) is critical to understanding the effect of violence in other domains. In Boston’s poor neighborhoods, much of the violence experienced and perpetrated by youth is organized by cross-neighborhood rivalries. These rivalries, which both fuel and are fueled by neighborhood identities, mean that even those youth who do not participate in violence are subject to victimization through revenge and recrimination. Local neighborhoods, very small in geographic size, become safe spaces for residents—and those venturing into other neighborhoods or neutral territories risk confrontation. The result is that the neighborhood becomes an important social space, particularly with regard to participation in organizations and same-sex friendships.

The strategies that adolescent boys use to adapt to these realities have implications for the structure and strength of peer networks. For protection and status, younger adolescents seek out the older adolescents and young men who sit atop neighborhood status hierarchies that prize the ability to navigate dangerous streets. The result is greater cross-age social interaction in poor neighborhoods, facilitating cross-cohort socialization. In addition, boys form strong bonds of mutual protection with friends, heightening the importance and strength of same-sex friendships. These cross-age interactions and strong peer ties provide conduits for local socialization, imparting alternative scripts (ways of achieving goals) and frames (interpretive lenses) in domains such as romantic relationships and schooling.

Neighborhood violence and crime also have direct cultural consequences. In such an environment, those who perpetrate or are the victims of violence and crime become negative role models. Comparisons to such individuals serve to level expectations among both parents and youth and focus attention on keeping boys physically safe, away from dangerous peers, and off the streets, often at the expense of attention to other domains such as school or teenage pregnancy. Youth who live in violent or crime-prone neighborhoods also have greater contact with the criminal justice system, particularly police, even if they themselves are not involved in violence or crime. These contacts, often their first sustained interaction with a major social institution, are overwhelmingly negative, leaving youth feeling disrespected and mistreated. Coupled with the failure of police and other institutions to safeguard their neighborhoods, these negative personal contacts lead youth to develop a broader institutional distrust that can spill over into their interactions with other institutions, such as schools.

For many years, the study of culture was the “third rail” of scholarship on urban poverty. To propose an explanation that invoked culture seemed to blame the poor themselves for their predicament. Yet in the last two decades, cultural concepts have inched back into debates about poverty and inequality. Today the canonical account of the cultural context of poor neighborhoods, social isolation theory, holds that socially isolated neighborhoods where residents are overwhelmingly socially disadvantaged and opportunities are few develop a separate subculture that leads to nonmainstream attitudes and behaviors that reinforce social isolation. Cut off from the rest of society and faced with bleak educational and economic prospects, individuals in such neighborhoods are thought to develop “ghetto-specific” or “oppositional” cultural norms and values that, for example, reject schooling and work and valorize early childbearing.

I will argue that this description of the cultural context of poor neighborhoods is empirically inaccurate. Instead, adolescents in poor neighborhoods experience a cultural environment in which both mainstream and alternative cultural models are present and socially supported. A focus on cultural values is unhelpful, as the urban poor value education and marriage just about as much as other Americans. Instead, the context of poor neighborhoods is better described as culturally heterogeneous, with a mix of competing and conflicting cultural frames and scripts. Indeed, poor neighborhoods are especially heterogeneous in that they encompass a wide array of lifestyles and behaviors, and—as social organization theory suggests—because residents of poor neighborhoods have less capacity to regulate public behavior. Yet local and nonlocal institutions such as churches, schools, and the media transmit mainstream cultural messages that are taken to heart in even the poorest neighborhoods. I posit that individuals in poor neighborhoods experience the negative effects of cultural heterogeneity through three processes: model shifting, dilution, and simultaneity. Model shifting occurs when adolescents switch among competing cultural models because alternative models are readily available and socially supported. Dilution occurs when information about the detailed workings of any particular cultural model is diluted by the presence of many models, leaving an adolescent without the information necessary to construct effective pathways to achieve his goals. Simultaneity occurs when multiple competing models are mixed unsuccessfully, resulting in ineffective strategies for accomplishing the desired ends.

I first apply the concept of cultural heterogeneity to adolescent boys’ romantic and sexual behaviors. In poor neighborhoods, adolescent boys have available to them an array of frames and scripts regarding girls, relationships, and responsible fatherhood. The multiplicity of frames regarding girls and relationships, from the good girl who is focused on school and career to the “stunt” who will toss a man aside once she has had her way with him, contributes to gender distrust and establishes the standards by which boys judge the strength of their own relationships and their risks of contracting a sexually transmitted disease. In this cultural context, condom use becomes fraught with meanings relating to love and trust, influencing decisions boys make about their contraceptive use. Multiple frames regarding responsible fatherhood, from the “player” who sleeps with as many girls as possible to the responsible family man who asserts his masculinity by supporting a family and “raising his kids up right,” dilute messages about what is actually involved in being a father and allow boys to switch between fatherhood frames depending on the situation.

The concept of cultural heterogeneity also helps us understand boys’ educational decision making. Adolescent boys in poor neighborhoods face an array of frames and scripts regarding school and the relationship between education and career trajectories. Multiple frames make it difficult for boys to construct effective pathways for educational and career success. Boys may jump from one pathway to another, or may find that each path is obscured or diluted by competing models for future success. This heterogeneity puts boys at a significant disadvantage as they navigate educational institutions.

Though neighborhood violence and cultural heterogeneity may seem at first blush to be disconnected, they are linked as mechanisms underlying neighborhood effects. Given strong support for conventional or mainstream cultural models among residents of poor neighborhoods, we face an important question for a theory of cultural heterogeneity: What is the source of alternative, local, or “ghetto-specific” cultural models? The consequences of neighborhood violence can help us understand this question. Cross-age interactions on the street provide conduits for the transfer of alternative cultural models across cohorts, and strong friendship ties among neighborhood youth further transmit these ideas among adolescents of the same age. Because the older adolescents and young men who are available in this capacity often are not engaged in mainstream pursuits such as work, school, and long-term relationships, they represent and may espouse cultural models at odds with mainstream or middle-class models, or with other cultural models in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Especially for younger adolescents, these older adolescents introduce young people to behavioral models that the wider society views as age inappropriate. Institutional distrust and the leveling of expectations further reinforce alternative cultural models.

Though this book emphasizes the importance of both violence and cultural context for understanding the experiences and decisions of adolescent boys in inner-city neighborhoods, I am not arguing that boys in poor neighborhoods are embedded in a “culture of violence.” Though media accounts of inner-city neighborhoods often portray them as places where guns are the tool of first resort for dealing with conflict and where any sign of disrespect is met with swift violent retribution, the story is more complicated than the acceptability of violence or a short-term time horizon. As chapters 2 and 3 discuss, violence in poor communities is highly socially organized, and only a tiny fraction of young men who live in poor neighborhoods engage in deadly violence.

Scope of the Problem: Neighborhood Poverty in the United States

Between 1970 and 1990, the number of high-poverty census tracts—those in which 40 percent or more of families had incomes below the poverty line—doubled, and the number of individuals living in them increased from 4.1 million to about 8 million. African Americans were particularly hard hit by these trends, with the number living in high-poverty neighborhoods increasing by 75 percent, from 2.4 million to 4.2 million.⁷ By 1990 about one-third of poor African Americans lived in high-poverty neighborhoods. In addition, growth in Latino populations resulted in a 171 percent increase in the number of Latinos living in high-poverty neighborhoods during this period, from 729,000 to 2.0 million (Jargowsky 1997). In 1990 about one in five poor Latinos lived in a high-poverty neighborhood.⁸

As the economy boomed in the 1990s and unemployment declined, the total number of residents living in high-poverty neighborhoods fell significantly in both central city and rural areas.⁹ However, this overall decline in concentrated poverty, documented at the height...