Orlando Patterson wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times which caught my eye today since it is listed as the second most e-mailed NYT article in the last 24 hours. Some excerpts:
SEVERAL recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming
the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American
mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of
social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their
inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it.
The
main cause for this shortcoming is a deep-seated dogma that has
prevailed in social science and policy circles since the mid-1960's:
the rejection of any explanation that invokes a group's cultural
attributes — its distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions, and
the resulting behavior of its members — and the relentless preference
for relying on structural factors like low incomes, joblessness, poor
schools and bad housing.
Let me now skip down to some initial conclusions based on this "out-of-vogue" cultural analysis, which nevertheless produces promising and powerful explanatory power:
An anecdote helps explain why: Several years ago, one of my
students went back to her high school to find out why it was that
almost all the black girls graduated and went to college whereas nearly
all the black boys either failed to graduate or did not go on to
college. Distressingly, she found that all the black boys knew the
consequences of not graduating and going on to college ("We're not
stupid!" they told her indignantly).
SO why were they flunking
out? Their candid answer was that what sociologists call the "cool-pose
culture" of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up. For
these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street
after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party
drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the
superstar athletes and a great many of the nation's best entertainers
were black.
Not only was living this subculture immensely fulfilling, the boys
said, it also brought them a great deal of respect from white youths.
This also explains the otherwise puzzling finding by social
psychologists that young black men and women tend to have the highest
levels of self-esteem of all ethnic groups, and that their self-image
is independent of how badly they were doing in school.
I call this the Dionysian trap for young black men. The important
thing to note about the subculture that ensnares them is that it is not
disconnected from the mainstream culture. To the contrary, it has
powerful support from some of America's largest corporations. Hip-hop,
professional basketball and homeboy fashions are as American as cherry
pie. Young white Americans are very much into these things, but
selectively; they know when it is time to turn off Fifty Cent and get
out the SAT prep book.
For young black men, however, that
culture is all there is — or so they think. Sadly, their complete
engagement in this part of the American cultural mainstream, which they
created and which feeds their pride and self-respect, is a major factor
in their disconnection from the socioeconomic mainstream.
All very interesting, certainly. But there's a deeply sad and tragic element in this picture. . .