| Wow! I finally finished my masterpiece! But because I didn't finish putting all the footnote, reference, etc. together, it is really not completely done. There might also be grammatical mistakes because I didn't proofread yet. But I would really love to share with you guys this: the very first proof of the love between Sociology and I.  ----------------------------------------------------
In Achieving the American Dream: Young Black Men and their Culture
by Esther Hiotong Castillo As I was riding the train from West Philadelphia to Philadelphia downtown today, I saw a newspaper with a huge photo on the front page left behind on a passenger seat. Therefore, I picked it up and started reading the story. It featured the deadliest weekend in the city leaving eleven people murdered. In the story, the director of a local volunteer group said: “What we see is a lack of jobs. We hear people say ‘I wouldn’t be on this street corner right now if I had a job.’ The idle mind is a playground for the devil.” Turning the page, mayoral candidates were again making promises such as more after-school programs and affordable housing to overcome the city’s sky-scraping crime rate. After finished reading the newspaper, I carefully looked at the photo on the front page again: a picture showing a young black man mourning over the death of a homicide victim. Even though it was blurry, one could spot a crowd of black people in the background of the photo. Relying on structural factors such as, unemployment, poor schooling, and bad housing to explain crime in black neighborhoods has been popular among politicians and social scientists since mid-1960s. However, the question is: Does solving these structural issues help cease crime and drug problems among black youths? Or are there some other factors our society dares not to talk about? If so, what are they? In 2006, Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard University, published a commentary on New York Times, criticizing the “deep-seated dogma” of social scientists rejecting culture among groups as an explanation towards social problems. He argued that studies have not shown why unemployment would lead to crime and drug abuse for black youths in this country, whereas most people do not turn to crime in Latin America and India where unemployment is widespread. Patterson further suggested that socioeconomic factors are not enough to explain the situation because jobless black youths did not turn up to take the millions of new jobs provided by the Clinton administration in 1990s; instead, immigrants from Latin America and Caribbean came and seized those opportunities. If the society has done enough to help these young black men, then what is lacking? Patterson explained that it is the culture of these people leaving them in this “sorry state”: “hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, and hip-hop music.” According to Patterson, even when young black men realize the consequences of dropping out from high school and not attending college, they are still “failing” because their culture tells them it is simply “too gratifying to give up.” Yet, is what Patterson said all true? There is no doubt that culture should be addressed. However, it is unfair to say the culture of young black men is so “bad” that it makes them destined to “fail.” And to judge which culture is bad is even worse than unfair. Although Patterson was right that we should talk about culture, I disagree with the way he looks at culture. This paper will first consider why culture should not be rejected as explanation to crime and drug abuse among young black men. Then, I will examine how racial conflicts shape the culture among black people and what triggers this particular social group to find deviant ways to achieve the so-called “American Dream.” Why Should We Consider Culture? Many social scientists hesitate to talk about culture because it does not seem to be as concrete as other approaches to social science such as demography which allows them to provide statistics such as crime rate, birth rate, etc. Our society tends to believe that anything that fails to provide a universal understanding is not science. Consequently, the world provides this falsehood that social science is a field of science if and only if it can relate itself to something universal and constant, that is, numbers. Jean-François Lyotard, a French philosopher, called this phenomenon “the crisis of knowledge” under the progress of technology and the expansion of capitalism because it limits human knowledge to what is judged to be authorized knowledge. Also, it grounds the legitimacy of science involved in social, ethical, artistic, and humanistic practices. Therefore, it is necessary for us to escape from this model of thinking that hinders human knowledge from reaching its totality. After we understand that it is pointless to consciously avoid culture as a topic of study, now the question is: why should we focus on culture? The answer to this question is simple. It is because culture is important. It is powerful. Culture does not only shape our thinking, but culture also eventually generates actions that are caused by such thinking. Before I lead into the discussion of why culture can be a social force, I want to clarify what culture really is. A lot of people when considering culture, they think of artifacts. However, culture also comprises areas such as social norm, belief, and value system. For instance, the notion “time is money” is cultural. Some might argue that “time is money” is more of a logical deduction because one can earn money by working, and the more time one spends on working, the more money one makes. Nevertheless, the idea that men “should” make money is based on the ethic of our capitalistic culture. Max Weber, one of the founders of modern sociology, once pointed out that “from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it [this notion] appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational” (2006: ). In fact, many beliefs of modern American society such as the privatization of land and the desire for upward mobility are relatively new ideas that didn’t exist and were even considered as illogical before our time. As we are all living in this cultural world where what we think, what we say, what we act, and even what we dream to achieve is produced by culture, it is reasonable to conclude that culture is crucial enough to draw more concerns among social scientists who have long been underestimating its importance. Therefore, when considering crime and drug abuse among young black men, besides looking into structural factors, we should, as what Patterson has suggested, also consider the cultural factors that cause them committing such acts. What Type of Culture Does This Group of Black Youths Have? “Any interpretation of African culture must begin at once to dispense with the notion that, in all things, Europe is teacher and Africa is pupil…Western theorists have too often tended to generalize from a Eurocentric base” (Asante). When discussing culture, one should first abandon his or her own established belief system. To understand why this specific group of black youths are acting the way they are, we should start our investigation by putting ourselves into their place. Instead of questioning “why aren’t they succeeding?” We should ask what “success” means to them. Instead of asking “why aren’t they following the ‘right’ way to reach their goal?” We should try to find out what makes them not choosing to follow the mainstream, what mainstream culture means to them, and what is important to them. A lot of social scientists hold to the fallacy that black Americans are one single social group and assume that the social disadvantages they experience are mutual. However, under the increasing class division and differentiation, our society has generated diverse social groups among blacks. First, we have the black middle-class who constantly seeks assimilation and upward mobility in order to acquire more power and combat against the racism they face. Then, because of deindustrialization, we have the hopeless black industrial working-class who is finding ways to acquire new techniques to enter the service industry. Finally, there is a vast and emergent underclass that faces nihilism of alcoholism, drug addiction, homicide, and a rise in suicide (West). Patricia Hill Collins, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, called the seeing of race, class, and gender the “interlocking system of oppression” (xxx). What she meant is we cannot look at oppression one-dimensionally. In order to understand oppression, we need to look at a person’s race, class, gender, and age together. Therefore, to explain why young black men are involved in crime and drug addiction, we should focus on the particular group of under-class young black male rather than just looking at young black men as a whole. So, what is happening to them? One of the major consequences of drug abuse and homicide is imprisonment. Unfortunately, the affects of imprisonment do not only stay inside prisons. While people are used to the thinking of imprisonment as the spin-off of poverty among blacks, Bruce Western, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, made a bold remark identifying mass imprisonment of unskilled black men is the major cause of modern inequality. He explained that imprisonment not only reflects the division of race and class, but it also deepens this division and excludes young black men from the promised American life. Imprisonment not only deprives black women and their children of having husbands and fathers around, but it also takes away the opportunity for these black men to get a job that provides enough to support their families after release. In responding why young black men did not turn up to take the new jobs opened up during the 1990s economic expansion, according to Western, two out of three young black men dropouts were not working only by counting the penal population (2006). It seems that under-class young black men are experiencing something more than simply “hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, and hip-hop music.” Mass imprisonment of black underclass not only makes their lives more difficult, it also creates a sense of despair and culture of lawlessness among poor black neighborhoods. With some of them being prisoners, ex-cons or ex-felons, children and relatives of convicts also feel a collective impact that is unthinkable for other social groups. Yet, Patterson argued that “many victims of child abuse end up behaving in self-destructive ways; to point out the link between their behavior and the destructive acts is in no way to deny the causal role of their earlier victimization and the need to address it” (2006). Here is the problem: why are they acting like this in the very beginning? What creates this lawlessness? What Triggers Young Black Men to Commit Crime? Emile Durkheim, considered by many the father of sociology, once pointed out that life is nothing but restlessness if human wants are not limited by authority such as moral and ideas well-established in society. Society should establish a set of economic ideals assigned for every class of citizens and this confined them to certain limits. Therefore, “a certain way of living is considered the upper limit to which a workman may aspire in his efforts to improve his existence, and there is another limit below which he is not willingly permitted to fall unless he has seriously demeaned himself. Both differ for city and country workers, for the domestic servant and the day-laborer, for the business clerk and the official, etc” (2004: 77). If this scale is upset, society will enter an anomic state in which social norms, values and standards are unstable or even absent. He further suggested that trade and industry has converted anomie, that is, normlesness, from an occasional situation to a chronic state when nations in the world avow to have one single and chief goal, that is, industrial prosperity (2004). Today, industrial prosperity has changed to become economic prosperity among wealthy nations such as the United States, while throwing all the unwanted labor-intensive jobs to the Third World countries to maximize profits. The United States, boasting its exceptionalism out loud, provides Americans an exclusive promise that have never existed or heard of before: the American Dream. This collective and almost sacred ideology shared by most people in the country promotes that one can “get there” if one works hard enough with courage and determination. So, what does it have to do with under-class young black men? The irony is that the fact that they also share this American Dream becomes the main cause for them to commit crime, to refuse to follow the social norms, and to involve themselves in anomie. Why is that? Under the notion of the American Dream, the cultural goal is money; the method to reach the goal is through hard work. However, how much money is enough? Robert Merton, an American sociologist, described the American Dream has “no final stopping point.” Before one can understand why under-class young black men tend to commit crime, it is important to realize that they also feel the pressure to reach this common cultural goal, just like everyone else in the United States. So, what is going on here? Merton suggested sometimes society may put different emphasis on goals and institutional procedures. And the value of how to achieve the goals may be undermined by the stress on goals. Merton further illustrated that in sports competition, “winning the game” sometimes becomes far more important than “winning under the rules of the game.” He described this type of individual adaptation to obtain shared goals with rejected means innovation. I believe that over time under-class young black men have become innovators by aligning their cultural goals with the white mainstream; however, because society fails to put an emphasis on “the rules of the games,” they tend to find deviant ways to achieve the goals. When Patterson compared under-class young black men with immigrants, it is clear that he was not aware that immigrants may have different cultural goals from what is shared by people who grew up in the United States. Furthermore, they may be conscious about the upper limit assigned to them as a group. Therefore, they can achieve satisfaction more easily than black underclass. On the other hand, society does not expect that much from immigrants. Hence, getting a job very often only means to them a method of survival than a measure of success. If society really wants to cease crime and drug abuse among black youths, it is time to stop questioning why they are not working hard enough. Racism, classism, sexism and other types of oppression do exist in our society, everyone knows it, but why no one dares to talk about them out loud? Clearly, our society has been trying too hard to preserve the collective notion of the American Dream: everyone will “succeed” only if they work hard enough. Talking or even thinking about social oppression becomes something more than inappropriate; it is haunting because oppression contradicts the American Dream. To wake up from or totally abolish this dream that everyone holds appears to be unaffordable. With all these social problems that seems to have no remedy happening among black underclass, it is really time for us to stop blaming unemployment, low income, poor schooling, and bad housing. It is also time for us to stop exchanging whispers about how black underclass is not living up to expectation given by our society. Emphasizing the “success” achieved by other black groups and compare them with other racial minority will only make the situation worse because their cultural goals are therefore put farther and farther away from them to a point that it is impossible for them to achieve those goals in a society that is full of discrimination and oppression. So, what is to be done now? If it is too harsh of a request to ask everybody to wake up from the American Dream and admit that this dream is really nothing but an illusion that will never come true, then at least it is time for the government, politicians, social scientists, educators, the media, and general public to put a greater emphasis on the rules in society. It is also time to stop focusing on educating the public “how to become successful,” but “how to survive under social norms in a society of inequality” seems to be a more applicable topic. “One sort of heredity will always exist, that of natural talent. Intelligence, taste, scientific, artistic, literary or industrial ability, courage and manual dexterity are gifts received by each of us at birth, as the heir to wealth receives his capital or as the nobleman formerly received his title and function” (Durkheim 2004: 78) It is apparent that the concept of equal opportunities is a delusion. We have to admit that some people are of lesser advantages that they owe to the chance of birth. However, do we have to be equal in every way in order to be happy? Happiness is the ability to enjoy achieved results and finds in them the attachment to life in time of difficulty. A person who has always fixed himself or herself in the endless pursuit of the hopes on future is blinded by the happiness he or she had so far missed (Durkheim 2004). If under-class young black men can find attachment to their life from what they already obtained, it becomes unlikely they will be persuaded to find act in deviant ways. In the moment, it is time for us to take a minute to pause and ponder – is the ability to dream really more important than the ability to cherish what we already have? And what should our society choose to emphasize: result or process? |
