This study will compare and contrast minority working-class youth subcultures described by Michael Brake in Comparative Youth Culture and Martin Sanchez Jankowski in Islands in the Street, and the white youth subculture described by Donna Gaines in Teenage Wasteland. The study will consider the structural conditions these youth groups are facing, their cultural responses to these conditions, the nature of the groups with respect to their hegemony, and the reasons why, in Gaines' view, white youth kill themselves while black youth kill each other.
The different youth subcultures in the three books face prevailing social, economic, cultural, political, and racial structures which, if they are not designed to disempower and alienate youth, nevertheless have that effect. The basic reason that youth form gangs, or "subcultures," is that they do not feel a part of the "culture" at large. Whether they join together to kill or kill themselves, to steal or do drugs or vandalize, they are responding in opposition to structural conditions which do not value them as productive members of society. As Brake explains, for "American society," it is "essential" to "control" "working-class youth" and "vagrant unemployed youth" (Brake, 1993, 57). Inevitably, if such youth are viewed negatively by the controlling structures of society, any behavior they exhibit which is out of the norm---even if it is not illegal---is viewed as a problem or potential problem: "Urban working-class culture, partly due to its ethnic mix, developed distinct forms of youth culture which were responded to as indicators of delinquency and immorality" (Brake, 1993, 57).
Gaines argues that the "white boys and girls" in the "nonaffluent suburbs of New York and New Jersey" her book studies are victims of controlling structures based on socioeconomics:
We must . . . recognize that strategies now used by us to regulate young people are rooted in class struggle as well a...