io and the youth perspectives that he finds contributory to contemporary violence and racially motivated crimes. In chapter one he discusses the cultural structural conditions that create neighborhoods where “youths who perpetrate racial violence receive sanction and support for their activities from their peer groups, families, and neighborhoods” (Pinderhughes, 2000, 23). The attitudes we form about these perpetrators distances us from them, thereby making their behavior seem aberrant and fanatical. In reality, it is our own culture and attitudes that contribute to such actions of relatively ordinary young people.
In chapter two the author introduces us to the children from three neighborhoods – the mostly Italian American youth of the Avenue T Boys in Bensonhurst, the African American youth of Schomberg Plaza, and the mainly Albanian youth of Christopher Columbus High School in Pelham Parkway. Questionnaires and personal disclosure makes our experience of these youths resemble case studies. Further, Pinderhughes uses sociological theories such as the social construction of reality in an attempt to get at the root of the formation of racial and ethnic attitudes and identities in these urban youths. We see how many of these individuals who have experienced prejudice and racial discrimination have internalized attitudes and perceptions of identity that serve to limit their development and fill them with animosity, resentment, and anger toward all members of the ethnicities that they perceive as “against them”. As one black youth named Terrell argues: “When you work for white people, they are always watching you waiting for you to mess up or steal something. They expect that you are going to fail or that you’re going to steal somethin’” (Pinderhughes, 2000, 65).
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