|
Article Excerpt
OVER THE PAST DECADE, URBAN COMMUNITIES HAVE EXPERIENCED UNPRECEDENTED social, economic, and political transformation. Global capitalism has contributed to the exodus of jobs, higher levels of inequality, and the marginalization of the urban poor. Urban youth have been particularly affected by this transformation and the concomitant social and economic conditions. The failure of so many urban school districts to prepare young people academically, the absence of early-childhood education, and the removal of after-school opportunities have combined with a growing fear of crime to shape a national consciousness that is complacent to the injustices that negatively affect urban communities and the youth who live in them.
Although policymakers express concern about the future of young people, few have actually taken steps to address the economic, political, and social conditions that shape young people's lives. This is particularly true in working-class communities of color, where punitive public policies exacerbate rather than ameliorate community problems. The failure of current policy to address important quality-of-life issues for youth of color remains a substantial barrier to their full civic participation, educational achievement, and healthy adulthood (Hart and Atkins, 2002). Researchers who study urban youth issues, and who have a grounded knowledge of the conditions they negotiate, generally have been unable to exert effective influence over relevant public policy; thus, the various ways in which young people of color respond to coercive policies, ineffective institutional practices, and bleak economic conditions in their communities have gone unnoticed.
In this article, we discuss five vital points that will contribute to the advancement of theory and policymaking for youth in urban communities. First, we argue that the current wave of policy directed at youth renders them second-class citizens who are prevented from full democratic participation. Second, we offer a critique of existing conceptual frameworks for youth development, which we call the problem-driven and the possibility-driven approaches. The problem-driven approach treats urban youth as threats to civil society, while the possibility-driven perspective views young people as passive consumers of civic life. Both frameworks obscure more than they explain youth's experiences in society. Third, we contend that urban youth behaviors should be conceptualized within the political economy of urban communities. The contemporary urban context consists of political, economic, and social conditions--urban decay, economic deprivation, health care deficiencies, racism, police harassment, and educational demise--that severely limit the full civic participation of urban youth. Urban youth's actions cannot be understood in isolation from these factors. Fourth, we discuss how an understanding of the political economy and of specific forms of social capital in community settings can illuminate an alternative, social justice framework that emphasizes young people's potential to play a vital role in social and community problem solving. Fifth, we explore critical factors in urban youth's social activism by reviewing examples of young people's collective capacity to change coercive and debilitating public policy. These examples highlight how young people succeed in building social capital in their communities in ways that resist and transform oppressive policies and institutional practices in their schools and communities.
This five-point discussion offers a comprehensive analysis of the social and economic conditions that impede young people's healthy development and outlines the major patterns of institutional failure to address these conditions. Furthermore, our proposed framework for social justice youth policy supports community-based social capital for young people and their collective ability to effect social change in their schools and communities. We conclude by reemphasizing that policy directed at youth must shift from the current focus on control and containment to proactive methods to increase their participation in democracy. The way a society treats its young people is a vital indicator of its quality of life. If U.S. society continues to treat youth--particularly young people of color--as potential criminals and undermines their contributions to social justice, then democracy, freedom, and fairness will only be wishful ideals in times of increasing disparity and despair.
Youth as Second Class Citizens: Barriers to Full Democratic Participation
In many ways, urban youth from working-poor communities are seen as second-class citizens in the United States. As was once the case in the South, where Jim Crow laws limited democratic participation for African Americans, youth today are subjected to hostile laws and unfair policies, but have no rights or power to change them. We share Alexis de Tocqueville's (1969) early-19th-century concern about democratic participation in the United States--namely, how can we reconcile entrenched social inequality with the promise of democracy and to whom do we grant full participation? Few institutions exist to insure young people's rights to full democratic participation, the lack of which grants adults full authority to develop policies that sometimes are detrimental to the well-being of young people. For example, during the past seven years, 43 states have instituted legislation that facilitates the transfer of children to adult court. The result of these laws was the dismantling of a long-standing belief on the part of juvenile courts that special protections were necessary to protect children and youth from the effects of the adult justice system, and to ensure rehabilitation (Poe-Yamagata and Jones, 2000; Polakow, 2000; and Polakow-Suransky, 2000).
These harsher sentencing policies have had a disproportionate impact on urban youth of color. Between 1985 and 1990, the number of African American and Latino state prisoners under the age of 18 increased by almost 10%, while the incarceration rate for white youth declined by 11% (Males and Macallair, 2000). Similarly, some juvenile justice and educational decision-makers share the assumption that public policy should ultimately control and contain youth to preserve general public safety (Polakow-Suransky, 2000). Despite the fact that youth crime has steadily declined since 1990, growing public fear of urban youth has contributed to harsher youth-related public policy (Hancock, 2000; Males, 1996; Males and Macallair, 2000; Poe-Yamagata and Jones, 2000). For example, Noguera (1995) examined how urban schools implemented coercive disciplinary policies as a strategy to reduce violence. He argued that measures commonly practiced to increase safety in schools, such as surveillance cameras, metal detectors, and, in some cases, security guards and police officers, actually perpetuate violence by creating schools that closely resemble prisons. He suggested that coercive practices and policies fail to create safe environments because they breed mistrust and resistance among students and teachers and ultimately disrupt learning and healthy development.
The emergence of coercive youth and educational policies around the country, which unfairly target children and youth as the source of social problems, has prompted social science researchers and public policy advocates to rethink their basic assumptions about how to support youth development, create educational opportunities, and encourage youth civic participation. Although empirical evidence indicates that young people present possibilities for civic progress (Gold, Simon, and Brown,...
|
