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

Conclusion: Hope and Fear

| 229 Conclusion: Hope and Fear Young people are growing up today in contradictory times: increasing inequality alongside expanding dreams, deep poverty beside lavish wealth, racially unequal childhoods in an era that promises equal opportunity . At a special police-youth dialogue organized by performance artist Suzanne Lacy, two young people asked questions of Oakland’s black police chief that captured their experiences of this contradictory moment. An African American young woman challenged, “Y’all like to beat us down. How can we respect your authority?” In a more plaintive tone, a fifteen-year-old black young man on probation asked, “How come we can’t get together? We all supposed to be rich.” The police chief had no real answer to these questions about respect, state power, and crushed structures of opportunity. But how do we answer these young people as a nation? Maybe working-class and poor kids have to lower their expectations and realize we probably can’t all be rich. Maybe black parents across class lines have to teach their kids the skills they need to avoid getting “beat down” when the police stop them on the street. Maybe we should send poor kids to anger management classes so they can learn to control the raw sense of injustice they feel as they compare the nation’s promises to the vast inequalities they see around them. But as a nation, can we accept these as our answers? Do we really want to be the kind of nation that abandons its commitment to create real equal opportunities for all our children? We began this book with Jerry Brown at a community meeting embracing a central precept of neoliberal urban governance—that Oakland’s communities and families were responsible on their own for trying to solve the deep problems facing young people. We have also seen the formidable efforts of parents and community activists working to construct safe and nurturing environments for the city’s children. But Oakland’s activists often faced unacceptable political choices. Community activists in Oakland’s flatlands, overwhelmed by the social costs of our nation’s drug wars, sometimes turned to 230 | Conclusion: Hope and Fear the police as their only choice. As they struggled to save kids in their neighborhood , they embraced a vision of the state as disciplinary father. Parents from Oakland’s lower hills with kids in the public schools often had to rely on their own volunteer labor to try to reconstruct safe and nurturing landscapes for all of Oakland’s children. They tried to equalize childhood, but their volunteer labor was rarely enough to address the vast inequalities built into children’s lives and landscapes. Even wealthy black parents in the hills needed to defend their children from the images of black youth crime that distorted public responses to kids in Oakland and in national public policy debates. Across the city, neighborhood activists often felt they had no choice but to clear young people off the streets as they competed for the private investment necessary for urban redevelopment. Youth activists struggled to reconstruct our ideas of youth in the face of their persistent exclusion from full citizenship and public spaces. Over the last fifteen years, Oakland city government, pushed by its citizens , who refused to abandon a generation of poor children, has worked in fits and starts to reconstruct structures and cultures of care for kids. Youth activists and adult advocates pushed the city to create a children’s trust fund that expanded after-school programs and nonprofit services for children and youth. Advocates used this growing nonprofit sector, characteristic of neoliberal governance, to create a lobby to prevent crime and invest in youth. Public -private partnerships created these new possibilities but also constrained citizens’ ability to demand state action and narrowed understandings of children ’s needs. They succeeded in expanding after-school programs to keep kids off the street and in creating new programs to prevent youth crime and violence, but did little to address the deeper problems of child poverty and retreating state supports for poor families. Neoliberal public policies exacerbated the crises of low-income families and left poorly funded nonprofits to pick up the pieces. Children and youth do not live in a private realm outside of politics. They serve as powerful symbols and actors in on-going struggles over how to reconstruct the state. Debates about children help redraw the boundaries of public and private responsibility and forge changing ideas about the proper role of government...