ABSTRACT
The overall quality of life in the United States has been affected by the escalation of violence and other risk conditions. Although no segment of American society can escape this condition, the impact is most often felt in the inner cities or urban areas, where the majority of the residents are poor families and children of color. Here, the concentration of poverty and segregation gives rise to a social context of drug use, welfare dependency, teenage parenthood, and violence as the norm. In addition to a nonnurturing family life, most young people growing up in urban areas also experience poor-quality education and strong peer pressures not to succeed in school or to drop out and adopt an attitude of "getting over" (an expression suggesting that a person has not earned what they have). Such learned behavior is viewed as counterproductive to building and sustaining hopefulness (Ogbu and Fordham, 1986).
