Young people, ‘race’ and ethnicity

Before going on to briefly review substantive aspects of black and minority ethnic young people’s transitions, this chapter first considers some of the theoretical and conceptual problems that have important implications for how we might understand minority transitions. Racial or ethnic categories cannot be abstracted from their social context or the cross-cutting influences that constitute ‘race’ and ethnicity at any given point in time. In other words, it cannot be presumed from the outset that race or ethnicity will be the overriding or main factors determining black and minority experiences. Other spatial, demographic, social class and gender factors may be as important or override the significance of race and ethnicity according to social situation and context. It may seem churlish to appear to cast doubt on the distinctiveness or primacy of racial exclusion and ethnic identity in the lives of some young people given plentiful evidence of discrimination across different dimensions of youth transitions. Suffice to say there is little doubt that within Britain and America the disproportionate presence of young AfricanCaribbean and African-American men in the youth and criminal justice system is both striking and even greater than in the past. Black young people in particular suffer disproportionately in respect of school failure, exclusion from school, being in the care system and joblessness (House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee 2007; Walker et al. 2007). These disadvantages, however, are suffered by other groups too and as MacLeod’s (1995) study of working-class white and black boys in the USA shows, class rather than race may be the overriding factor in determining transition outcomes. Young people’s experiences are often shared across similar class groups despite different

ethnic identity, while there is considerable class and other forms of polarization both

within and between heterogeneous racial and ethnic groups. Therefore intergenerational experiences by young people in their transitions to adulthood are influenced by class as well as ethnic relations. As Furlong and Cartmel (2007: 8) suggest, ‘The analysis of the impact of “race” on the life experiences of young people is complex because many of the disadvantages faced by members of ethnic minorities are a consequence of their position within the class structure, rather than being a feature of racial exclusion.’ A further complication is that racial and ethnic group identity is subjectively experienced differently and perhaps less strongly than in the past among some individuals and groups while strengthening in others, for example, among some young British Muslims (Lewis 2007). Change in how racial and ethnic identity may be felt does not of course alter the continued efficacy of objective racial and ethnic stratification as an aspect of the reproduction of social divisions and social exclusion for some groups. Some brief illustrations of these difficulties can be mentioned here so as to begin to

think afresh about the problematic of young people, race and ethnicity. Young black men are typically said to be disproportionately involved in offending inferred from their presence in the criminal justice system and that this involvement has deleterious effects on transitions within this group. The couplet Black youth has long been employed in racist discourse to signify criminality so that terms like ‘crime’ and ‘riot’ become racially loaded (Keith 1993: 234). Yet in Britain self-report studies suggest that whites disproportionately offend compared to other ethnic groups and obviously commit the vast bulk of crimes. After all, 85 per cent of offences involving children and young people were committed by those who classify their ethnicity as white, and 92 per cent of black young people and children are not subject to disposals in the youth justice system (House of Commons Home Affairs Committee 2007).1 Similarly, white working-class boys living in disadvantaged areas are the lowest performing group of pupils in schools after the small population of Traveller children (Curtis 2008). And of course, school failure is a strong predictor of ‘failed’ transitions, delinquency, crime and anti-social behaviour. A further set of problems emerge when it is acknowledged that customary ethnic and

racial categories in a myriad of western societal contexts hardly capture the increasingly complex ethnic and demographic make-up of societies experiencing recent large-scale immigration. In the case of Britain, customary categories such as ‘Black’, Asian’, ‘White’, ‘Other’, and more recently, ‘Mixed’, hardly do justice to either the diversity within these categories or the influx of new migrants and their children. Similarly, customary descriptions of a white majority and ethnic minorities in some urban areas seem increasingly outmoded in new complexions of inter-and intra-ethnic group relations in western societies. Of course it may still be the case that the particular status of black and minority young people, as the children of earlier or recent migrants, continues to carry particular resonance in terms of intergenerational and area experiences of advantage and disadvantage. A third and final set of conceptual problems insinuate themselves into discussion of

young people, race and ethnicity. As implied above, ethnicity, like class and gender, is relational, productive and active in social relationships rather than a mere fixed or passive descriptor or category. Understanding ethnicity requires consideration of ‘white’ ethnicity too as whiteness conjures up other ethnicities while at the same time is often rendered invisible, ‘normal’, ‘neutral’. Ethnicity – white and minority – is an identity and a lifestyle, and a set of perspectives on social relationships, marked by varying degrees of self awareness. Acquired in the course of collective and individual history, ethnicity is about becoming, being and staying a particular identity and its distinctiveness is realized

in specific social and spatial locations. Certain locations are sought out, others are avoided, becoming one thing and not being something else. The relational and interdependent aspects of race and ethnicity arise from it defining others as also belonging to a different race or ethnicity and thus implicitly or explicitly defining itself as belonging to a race or ethnicity. Changes in the situation, power or status of each group influence the position of the other. In these ways ethnicity is dynamic and changing, accruing advantage and disadvantage in ways that favour some groups while marginalizing others (Webster 2008).