Race In The Hood: Conflict & Violence Among Urban Youth
Howard Pinderhughes’ Race in the Hood: Conflict & Violence Among Urban Youth is a field study conducted by the author who chose to reside in three New York ethnic neighborhoods. His study is unique in that he not only chooses to focus on youth between the ages of 14-21, but he also persuaded them to fill out questionnaires and participate in focus groups. Pinderhughes chose his study based on increasing gang violence and racial violence in the late 1980s. His findings are no comfort to individuals that believe those responsible for violence and gang warfare are anomalies or aberrations of society. Instead, Pinderhughes’ contention is that these youths are affected by the attitudes and structural conditions in their environment – a virtual product of adult society that resemble many youths in many urban communities across America. These youths develop as their environment molds their development. As Pinderhughes (2000, 155) concludes:
The attitudes and actions of youths in southern Brooklyn, Easy Harlem, and Pelham Parkway demonstrate the importance of community-based ideas and attitudes in the construction of these young people’s individual identities and of their perceptions of other groups. It is through community interaction that their ethnic and racial attitudes became associated with their ethnic and racial identities. The youth form and construct their attitudes toward other ethnic and racial groups as a result of their exposure to community-based social systems and ideologies.
In other words, from his talks and research with ethnic youth from three different New York neighborhoods, Pinderhughes concludes that contemporary violence involves ordinary young people perpetrating racially motivated crimes mainly because of the social construction of their ethnic and racial attitudes and identities. In five chapters Pinderhughes gives us the social scenar...