Based on analysis of interviews conducted during 2008-2009 in Oakland, California, this paper examines how narratives of inner-city youth reinforce and destabilize mainstream conceptions of ‘ghetto.’ The paper demonstrates that inner-city youth discourses regarding ‘ghetto’ spaces, subjects and schools often exemplify a consciousness informed by both counter-hegemonic insights and internalized psychological trauma. In other words, the interviewed youth reconstitute the term ‘ghetto’ to signify structural and cultural processes of dislocation occurring in their neighborhood through narratives characterized by contradiction. This finding is significant because it questions how to analyze non-white narratives and offers ‘dislocated consciousness’ as an interpretive lens grounded in the contradictions of subaltern consciousness theorized by W.E.B. Dubois, Frantz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci. By developing the concept of ‘dislocation’ to illuminate how such youth negotiate, resist and internalize the material and ideological structures that condition their existence, this study contributes to the existing literature on race and class consciousness of urban youth. The paper concludes by exploring how strategies urban youth utilize to come to terms with their lives can provide new understandings of urban communities and schooling.
Derrick Bell's interest convergence thesis is a seminal framework to analyze social change within critical race theory. While interest convergence's influence has grown, two foundational questions have been raised: do interest groups act rationally; does interest convergence also offer a change prescription or only an explanation of prior events. By revisiting Bell's early influences, via the concept of hegemony, the article intervenes in these two formative debates by offering a reimagined analytic framing that I term "hegemonic interest convergence." The article then applies this concept to analyze how broader political economic shifts shaped the struggles within which the 1968 Bilingual Education Act arose. I demonstrate that support for bilingual education stemmed from a seeming interest convergence among policymakers and Latino activists based on economic, rather than cultural, concerns regarding poor urbanizing Latino communities. In doing so, policymakers promoted the bill as a concession to redirect focus from other Latino demands for economic uplift and a tool to promote ideas of cultural deficit that reimagined job automation and outsourcing into linguistic and racial "handicaps." These findings are significant in illuminating how hegemonic interest convergence functions, thereby providing a novel historiographical analysis of the Bilingual Education Act as well as suggesting a possible strategy for future change.The 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education verdict of the United States Supreme Court to desegregate public schools has produced more scholarly publications than any other event in modern American educational history. Among the seminal studies, Derrick Bell's (1980) analysis of the decision via the thesis of interest convergence has become one of the leading frameworks within Brown historiography and, in doing so, bore the new interdisciplinary subfield of critical race theory. At its core, the interest convergence thesis offers an answer to the puzzle that civil rights leaders and scholars began questioning in the 1970s: why did the Brown case succeed during a conservative period best known for anti-communist McCarthyism, while 1970s civil rights gains stalled after an unprecedented decade of legal successes and broader social change? According
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