Our Schools Suck: Students Talk Back to a Segregated Nation on the Failures of Urban Education

1. Culture Trap: Talking about Young People of Color and Their Education

31 1 Culture Trap Talking about Young People of Color and Their Education Gaston Alonso Ideas never contain in themselves all the reasons for their influence and their historical role. Thought alone can never produce those reasons, for this influence derives not simply from what they are, but from what they do, or better still, from what they get done in society. —Maurice Godelier, The Mental and the Material (1986) During the spring of 2006, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson took to the pages of the New York Times to decry the conditions of low academic achievement, persistent poverty, and violence plaguing Black communities. “The tragedy unfolding in our inner cities is a timeslice of a deep historical process that runs far back through the cataracts and deluge of our racist past,” he wrote. “Most black Americans have by now miraculously escaped its consequences. The disconnected fifth languishing in the ghettos is the remains.” Patterson focused his comments on those young men still “languishing in the ghettos” who fail to graduate from high school or to go to college because, according to him, they are immersed in the culture of the “cool pose.” For them, he noted, this culture “was simply too gratifying to give up. . . . 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 32 Culture Trap entertainers were black.” Patterson argued that while young whites “know when it is time to turn off Fifty Cent and get out the SAT book,” Blacks do not know. “Sadly, their complete engagement in this part of the American cultural mainstream, which they created and which feeds their pride and self-respect,” he concluded, “is a major factor in their disconnection from the socioeconomic mainstream.”1 Patterson’s writing was occasioned by the Urban Institute’s publication of a series of reports documenting the high percentage of Black and Latino young men who are “disconnected” from mainstream society. According to the reports, only half of Black men sixteen to twenty-four years old not attending school participate in the labor force, and close to 30 percent of this group are either on parole or probation or in jail or prison at any one time. Further, 10 percent of Black and 9 percent of Latino young men are “disconnected” from both school and work for over a year, with the rates of the incarcerated cohorts rising to 17 and 12 percent respectively. Moreover , despite the economic boom of the 1990s, Black young men without a high school diploma experienced a marked decline in labor force participation during the decade. The reports proposed various governmentdriven solutions to address the structural forces behind these indexes of “disconnection.” These forces included the flight of manufacturing jobs from urban areas and the underfunding of government-sponsored employment training programs. As such, the reports shone a light on the structural forces that relegate many young men of color to the margins of our society and on the ways government intervention could lessen their marginalization.2 According to Patterson, however, these reports simply highlighted “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 failure, Patterson argued, was rooted in “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.” In addition to denouncing the way social scientists had become “allergic to cultural explanations,” he also criticized the “recent rash of scholars with tape-recorders ” busy collecting the “views and rationalizations” of Black young men. Whether running statistical regressions or conducting ethnographic fieldwork, Patterson argued, scholars need to recognize, once and for all, Culture Trap 33 “what has long been obvious to anyone who takes culture seriously: socioeconomic factors are of limited explanatory power.” Only then will they understand that the indexes of “disconnection” documented by the Urban Institute are primarily rooted in African Americans’ cultural values and norms rather than in structural forces and that effective strategies...