Living the Drama: Community, Conflict, and Culture among Inner-City Boys

334 Pages·2010·1.24 MB·English

by  David J. Harding

Liv ing the Drama
Community, Confl ict,
and Culture
among Inner-City Boys
DAVID J. HARDING
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
David J. Harding is assistant professor of sociology and
research assistant professor in the Population Studies
Center at the University of Michigan.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2010 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2010
Printed in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5
isbn-13: 978-0-226-31664-2 (cloth)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-31665-9 (paper)
isbn-10: 0-226-31664-5 (cloth)
isbn-10: 0-226-31665-3 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harding, David J., 1976–
Living the drama : community, confl ict, and culture
among inner-city boys / David J. Harding.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-226-31664-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-31665-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-226-31664-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-226-31665-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Boys—Massachusetts—
Boston—Social conditions—Case studies. 2. African American boys—
Massachusetts—Boston—Social conditions—Case studies. 3. Hispanic
American boys—Massachusetts—Boston—Social conditions—Case
studies. 4. City children—Massachusetts—Boston—Social conditions—
Case studies. 5. Urban youth—Massachusetts—Boston—Social con-
ditions—Case studies. 6. Urban poor—Massachusetts—Boston—Social
conditions—Case studies. 7. Sociology, Urban—Massachusetts—Boston—
Case studies. I. Title.
ht206.h273 2010
307.3'3640974461—dc22
2009022516
The paper used in this publication meets the
minimum requirements of the American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48–1992.
For all those who live the drama every day
Contents
Preface / ix
Acknowledgments / xiii
1 INTRODUCTION / 1
2 THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF VIOLENCE
IN POOR NEIGHBORHOODS / 27
3 NEIGHBORHOOD VIOLENCE , PEER RELATIONSHIPS,
AND INSTITUTIONAL DISTRUST / 68
4 NEIGHBORHOOD SOCIAL ATTACHMENT / 108
5 THE CULTURAL CONTEXT OF
DISADVANTAGED NEIGHBORHOODS / 132
6 CULTURAL HETEROGENEITY, ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS,
AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR / 162
7 CULTURAL HETEROGENEITY AND EDUCATION / 204
8 CONCLUSION / 239
Appendix: Fieldwork Methodology / 253
Notes / 271
References / 293
Index / 305
Preface
This book is about sixty black and Latino adolescent boys and the Boston
communities where they live, particularly how those communities affect
their experiences, their views, and the decisions they make about school-
ing, work, relationships, and childbearing. Two-thirds of the boys reside
in poor, inner-city neighborhoods in two areas of Boston, which I call Rox-
bury Crossing and Franklin. The remaining third live in the type of com-
munity that gets considerably less attention but is the implicit compari-
son we often have in mind when we wonder how poor communities might
be different—working-class black neighborhoods (in a section of Boston
known as Lower Mills). I compare the experiences of the boys in the poor
neighborhoods with those in the working-class neighborhoods. The goal is
to understand how their daily experiences and cultural perspectives differ
across neighborhood context and to thereby uncover some of the processes
by which neighborhoods affect adolescent boys. By focusing on the lives of
these sixty boys, I hope to begin to answer a much broader question: what
is it about poor neighborhoods that matters for the individual adolescents
who grow up in them?
The role of social context in individuals’ lives is an enduring socio-
logical question. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that sociologists
who study inequality and poverty have focused on poor neighborhoods
and their residents for at least a century, starting with W. E. B. Du Bois’s
Philadelphia Negro and the Chicago school studies of the early- to mid-
twentieth century by Park and Burgess, Shaw and McKay, and Drake and
Cayton. Many of the classic studies are investigations of the social and
cultural properties of disadvantaged or segregated urban communities,
from William Whyte’s Street Corner Society to Gerald Suttles’s Social Order of
the Slum, Herbert Gans’s Urban Villagers, Lee Rainwater’s Behind Ghetto Walls,
and Ulf Hannerz’s Soulside. Our contemporary favorites, like Elijah Ander-
son’s Streetwise, Sudhir Venkatesh’s American Project, and Mario Small’s Villa
Victoria, also delve deeply into these matters. For those who endeavor to
understand the conditions and consequences of urban poverty, neighbor