The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth

by Orlando Patterson (Editor), Ethan Fosse (With), Andrew Clarkwest (Contributor)

The Cultural Matrix" seeks to unravel a uniquely American paradox: the socioeconomic crisis, segregation, and social isolation of disadvantaged black youth, on the one hand, and their extraordinary integration and prominence in popular culture on the other. Despite school dropout rates over 40 percent, a third spending time in prison, chronic unemployment, and endemic violence, black youth are among the most vibrant creators of popular culture in the world. They also espouse several deeply-held American values. To understand this conundrum, the authors bring culture back to the forefront of explanation, while avoiding the theoretical errors of earlier culture-of-poverty approaches and the causal timidity and special pleading of more recent ones.

There is no single black youth culture, but a complex matrix of cultures adapted mainstream, African-American vernacular, street culture, and hip-hop that support and undermine, enrich and impoverish young lives. Hip-hop, for example, has had an enormous influence, not always to the advantage of its creators. However, its muscular message of primal honor and sensual indulgence is not motivated by a desire for separatism but by an insistence on sharing in the mainstream culture of consumption, power, and wealth.

This interdisciplinary work draws on all the social sciences, as well as social philosophy and ethnomusicology, in a concerted effort to explain how culture, interacting with structural and environmental forces, influences the performance and control of violence, aesthetic productions, educational and work outcomes, familial, gender, and sexual relations, and the complex moral life of black youth."

Genres: Sociology, Race, African American, Social Science, Nonfiction

688 pages, Hardcover

First published February 9, 2015

About the author

Orlando Patterson is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University; the author of Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and Slavery and Social Death; and the editor of The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth, for which he was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. His work has been honored by the American Sociological Association and the American Political Science Association, among others, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as Special Advisor for Social Policy and Development to Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley and was awarded the Order of Distinction by the Government of Jamaica.

Reviews

[Ahmed · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite boring and uninformative. A collection of articles by a bunch of Harvard scholars. The writing is objective, cold and uninteresting. The book doesn’t address hot issues like the culture of the ghetto, the cycle of poverty and crime and the psychologically scarred black youth and most important of all the epidemic of drug use and hip hop music culture. Instead, it sticks to political correctness and general euphemisms. It lacks courage and daring as the subject requires and finally falls short of its purpose.

[Mike Horne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good collection of essays. Culture is important. There is not one black culture, or even one black ghetto culture. But there is a disconnect black male culture that values "face"--the ability to defeat ones opponents, does not value education, and does not value women or stable relationships. 80% of these young men had only a mother who probably stopped disciplining by middle adolescents. Though these young men make up less than 25% of the young men in the "getto" they are responsible for most of the violence.

[Toby Mustill · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredibly in-depth look at African American youth in the United States. This book is a collection of articles from extremely knowledgeable scholars. The articles provide intertwining (although completely separate) accounts off all the factors effecting life as an African American youth. Although this book does an excellent job in the description, it falls short of providing in-depth recommendations for the issues presented. A very long but important book for anyone interested in the topic!

[Markes Gonzalez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Academic read. Not quite the sociological study I thought it would be. Still, an informative read.