Pinderhughes Race In The Hood

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

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d around them, their sense of themselves and how they fit into that world, and their sense of the meaning of their ethnicity or race and of ethnic and racial difference". In this chapter we see Pinderhughes' use of sociological theory such as that of Durkheim's argument that youths who feel they are denied the means of access to the mainstream lifestyle held up to them as success, look for support from similar-thinking youths. Durkheim's anomie theory argues that when norms break down in society, there is a state of confusion and normlessness that results. We have seen how many of the ethnic youths in Pinderhughes' work feel that opportunities such as education and work are limited for them. Marger (2000, 110) explains such order theorists who were influenced by Durkheim as viewing society as a "relatively balanced system made up of differently functioning but interrelated parts. Society is held together and social order maintained through a consensus of values among its groups and through the imperatives of functional interdependence". It is exactly this "consensus of values" we see the youth from the three different neighborhoods studied by Pinderhughes lacking. Assimilation does not occur so these groups reinforce and cr

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