Top Highlights

• The civil rights movement and subsequent policies aimed at socioeconomic reform have resulted in the largest group of middle-class and elite blacks in the world, several of them leading some of the most powerful corporations in the nation and abroad;
• yet, “race” remains a central lever of American politics and sustains its most fundamental regional and ideological alignments.
• And although legalized segregation has long been abolished and anti-exclusionary laws strictly enforced, the great majority of blacks still live in highly segregated, impoverished communities.
• A large number of social scientists have addressed the problem, but it is increasingly evident that the structural factors they emphasize, while certainly critical, can only explain the problem in partial, fragmentary ways. Further, these explanations confront the perplexing, stubborn fact that, for all their socioeconomic problems, black youth are...
• Explaining the origin and full extent of scholarly discomfort with the culture concept in so far as it relates to the black poor, and especially its youth population, would require its own volume, taking us deep into the sociology of knowledge, and cannot be attempted here (see Patterson 2014).