Young people are joining together to demand a voice in the decisions that affect their lives. In the process, they are transforming policies and making institutions more accountable.
This article argues for a nuanced understanding of how Black youth respond, resist, and work to transform school and community conditions. It posits that community-based organizations in Black communities provide Black youth with critical social capital, which consists of intergenerational ties that cultivate expectations and opportunities for Black youth to engage in community change activities. Data for this study were collected from 3 years (October 2000—December 2003) of participant observation and interviews of 15 Black youth who were members of Leadership Excellence, a small community-based organization in Oakland, California. This study demonstrates how critical social capital is facilitated by challenging negative concepts about Black youth in public policy, cultivated by strengthening racial and cultural identity among Black youth, and sustained through ties with adult community members who help youth frame personal struggles as political issues.
The purpose of this article is to explore new forms of activism among African American youth in the post-civil rights America. Dramatic educational, economic, political and cultural transformations in urban America, coupled with decades of unmitigated violence, have shaped both the constraints and opportunities for activism among black youth and the communities in which they live. The central argument throughout this article is that intensified oppression in urban communities (job loss, unmitigated violence and substance abuse) has threatened the type of community spaces that foster revolutionary hope and radical imaginations for African American youth. Restoring hope requires a radical healing, which is a dramatic departure from radical identity politics of the 1960s and 1970s. Radical healing involves building the capacity of young people to create this type of communities in which they want to live. This article argues for an alternative framework to understand black political and civic life among youth.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.