ABSTRACT
As in the case of working class whites, insights embedded within student culture at Urban College are prevented from going further by contradictions within lived cultural form itself. While black student culture expresses certain insights into the conditions of existence of its members, these insights are only partial. It is important to point out that the collective faith in education is itself an oppositional tendency in the black community. Elements of culture represent simultaneous accommodation and resistance. The partiality of insights in student cultural form coupled with the fact that students fall back on their own culture, serves largely to reproduce the urban underclass. Student culture is limited by a well-founded sense of despair. In spite of optimistic expectations stemming from the struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, the median income of black families in 1978 remained at 57 per cent of that of white families.
