Dangerous or Endangered?: Race and the Politics of Youth in Urban America

Introduction: Who’s Responsible for Kids?

| 1 Introduction: Who’s Responsible for Kids? In June 1999, recently elected Mayor Jerry Brown visited a Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council (NCPC) meeting in an elementary school auditorium at the eastern edge of Oakland, California’s sprawling flatlands. Speaking to approximately fifty, mostly African American, middle-class homeowners, Mayor Brown detailed his plans for revitalizing the city, “When I talk to people everywhere in Oakland, they are concerned about crime and schools.” Crime rates were declining, but “not fast enough.” He knew that Oakland’s citizens disagreed on how to respond; some at the meeting took “an overtly hard line on crime” while others focused on economic development , improving schools, or building after-school programs. When Mayor Brown opened the meeting for questions, an African American woman in her midthirties asked if the city had a plan to reduce juvenile crime. Mayor Brown mentioned new funding to open recreation centers longer, and then added, “Facilities are full. Even to be arrested and held, youth have to pass a test. So it is hard to discipline youth.” The woman explained that she was thinking more in terms of prevention, remarking, “Locking them up doesn’t work.” Mayor Brown agreed: “That’s our paradox. We’ve got to do something, but building facilities doesn’t work. So what do we do?” Talk about Oakland’s present and future almost invariably turned into a discussion about youth, who seemed to simultaneously embody both the city’s crises and its hopes for change. After briefly responding to an unrelated question, Mayor Brown returned to this topic: “I don’t believe that I’ve answered this woman’s question,” he said. Prevention is an environment where young people are respected as well as disciplined. It is very hard for the state and the city to take the lead on prevention. First you need the family, then relatives, and then maybe the neighborhood. If we have to go to institutions, it’s not going to work 2 | Introduction: Who’s Responsible for Kids? so well. First of all, those institutions are not well funded. The rich don’t want to pay for funding those kinds of programs. And there is no lobby to prevent crime, only to build prisons and lock people up. Schools are important, as are after-school programs, but schools can never be entirely responsible. Basically you are on your own. . . . These things are broken down for a number of reasons. One is that we live in a whole culture that requires there to be a bottom 5 to 10 percent that fails. We are in a system that generates failure as the flip side of success. All we can do is work block by block. There is no pie in the sky, no magic bullet. If there was, I would have discovered it as governor. I don’t want to propose that the city government can solve all that. Mayor Jerry Brown and the African American community activists at this meeting struggled with a basic problem: many of the structures that supported kids coming of age were crumbling, and the future of too many of Oakland’s children seemed in doubt. This meeting highlighted significant debates over how the city should respond. What had caused things to “break down”? Were young people’s problems caused by broken families or by racial exclusions and a dearth of economic opportunities? Were Oakland’s children endangered or had they become dangerous themselves? Could the city and state help? Or were Oakland residents left on their own, forced to solve the urgent crises facing children by working “block by block”? This book explores the politics of youth in Oakland at the turn of the twenty-first century, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Oakland residents who struggled to shape the city’s responses to dangerous and endangered youth. It investigates how these debates over the nature and needs of young people have fundamentally reshaped politics in the contemporary United States. Youth is a concept that is “good to think with.” A liminal category betwixt and between childhood and adulthood, “youth” offers a way for adults to think about social change, about the past and the future.1 Oakland residents narrated complex historical changes by comparing their memories of childhood to childhood today. But young people also served as powerful symbols of the city’s and the nation’s future. The presence of wealthy, overprotected children living mere blocks from desperately poor kids seemed to challenge both the...