Dangerous or Endangered? by Jennifer Tilton

Author:Jennifer Tilton [Tilton, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Ethnic Studies, Sociology, Urban, Children's Studies
ISBN: 9780814783122
Google: W2wTCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2010-10-03T05:23:52+00:00

Conclusion

The Skyline Task Force enacted fundamental debates about the meaning of race, class, and generation in the post–civil rights era. White neighbors’ calls for color-blindness, while often well intentioned, were premature and only exacerbated pervasive inequalities in California. Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, we remain far from attaining racial equality in educational opportunities or outcomes. If we cannot talk about race, we cannot see or address the persistent ways schools reproduce racial inequalities.81 We will return again and again to trying to fix individual young people or youth culture instead of addressing racial inequalities that have significant structural causes. As anthropologist Mica Pollock argues, kids in multiracial California do not belong to simple racial groups, but “when it comes to inequality,” too often “we do.”82

Americans engage in deep debates over why these racial inequalities remain. These disagreements often boil down to three central questions: Are racial inequities explained by culture (values) or structure (economic or spatial exclusions)? Are they the legacy of past racism or does racism still work to create inequality in the present? Do individuals control their own destiny or do outside forces impinge upon us and shape our life paths? These debates often obscure more than they elucidate, in part because they misunderstand culture, structure, and individual choice. Culture is not a stable set of beliefs or values, separate from the material world. Culture is always contested, changing, emergent—reshaped by our daily engagements with the world around us, even as our ideas and actions shape that world. Individual choices matter, but our choices are fundamentally shaped by the contexts (ideological and material) in which we grow up, live, and raise children.

White neighbors in the hills were face-to-face with the city’s obvious failures to support and educate all of its children. These kinds of exclusions of young people exist in deep tension with idealized relationships between generations. Youth remain still on the border of childhood, with its attendant moral responsibilities for adult nurturance. We have a significant commitment to ideals of equal opportunity, particularly that children can become whatever they want through effort and education. Adults either must engage with the needs of youth or work hard to bolster ideologies of equal opportunity that justify existing inequalities.

Roger Sanjek argues that quality-of-life concerns focused on children can enable neighbors to recognize that people of all races “share a common fate at the hands of city planners, realtors [and] politicians” and want effective policing, good schools, and recreation facilities.83 Sanjek argues that the terrain of local politics is particularly important for creating a multiracial public sphere. In Queens, he found that the definition of “our people” and the boundaries of community changed as black residents, and later Korean and Latin American immigrants, began to participate in community politics. We saw a similar phenomenon in the Laurel district, where defining public school students as “our kids” led to an inclusive civic politics.84 But in the Oakland Hills, most upper-middle-class neighbors didn’t share a “common fate” with the working class or lower middle class.

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