ume.
During this time period he dated a white woman, Sophie, bought a zoot suit, a racist image which had become a status symbol for blacks, and had his hair straightened. He used cigarettes, liquor and reefers. He was not comfortable with the Roxbury blacks and found himself gravitating to Harlem where he stumbled into a life of hustling. He worked on the railroad where he learned that he could make a tremendous amount of money catering to the white man's need to feel obsessively important. In his effort to completely resist the white oppression, he drifted into criminality and ended up in prison.
Adams, Gullotta, and Montemayor recognize that one of the primary tasks of the adolescent years is identity formation. The individual's identity is an internalized, self-selected regulatory system that represents an organized and integrated self which is able to interact with the outer social world (Adams, Gullotta, & Montemayor, 1992, p. 1). Both Erikson and Blos make a distinction between an adolescent who forms a passive identity and one who forms an activ
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