ABSTRACT

Very little has been written on issues of black masculinity in the British context. Although both Pryce (1967) and Cashmore (1979) remark on the significance of the male peer group in black youth culture, this remains very much an institution whose existence is assumed and significance unquestioned. Both place the peer group within the context of personal failure and frustration; a retreat to a collective identity-in each case, Rastafari-as a coping strategy in the face of racial rejection. For Pryce, the peer group is associated closely with the ‘hustler’ lifestyle, where older men act as role models for teenagers who are ‘unemployed, homeless and in conflict with their parents’. Drawing upon the ascribed pathology of the black family, Cashmore similarly claims that the peer group constitutes the primary source of socialization for black youth; an alternative to their parents who ‘provided only models of degradation and deprivation’. The black peer group thus constitutes a recoil from the forces of racism into a negative and hostile structure, which is oppositional in both form and intent. It also becomes inevitably associated with deviance and criminality.