The Cultural Matrix seeks to unravel a uniquely American paradox:
the socioeconomic crisis, segregation, and social isolation of
disadvantaged black youth, on the one hand, and their extraordinary
integration and prominence in popular culture on the other. Despite
school dropout rates over 40 percent, a third spending time in
prison, chronic unemployment, and endemic violence, black youth are
among the most vibrant creators of popular culture in the world.
They also espouse several deeply-held American values. To
understand this conundrum, the authors bring culture back to the
forefront of explanation, while avoiding the theoretical errors of
earlier culture-of-poverty approaches and the causal timidity and
special pleading of more recent ones. There is no single black
youth culture, but a complex matrix of cultures-adapted mainstream,
African-American vernacular, street culture, and hip-hop-that
support and undermine, enrich and impoverish young lives. Hip-hop,
for example, has had an enormous influence, not always to the
advantage of its creators. However, its muscular message of primal
honor and sensual indulgence is not motivated by a desire for
separatism but by an insistence on sharing in the mainstream
culture of consumption, power, and wealth. This interdisciplinary
work draws on all the social sciences, as well as social philosophy
and ethnomusicology, in a concerted effort to explain how culture,
interacting with structural and environmental forces, influences
the performance and control of violence, aesthetic productions,
educational and work outcomes, familial, gender, and sexual
relations, and the complex moral life of black youth.
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