Introdution

      A feared and seemingly ineradicable stereotype, the urban teen—pregnant, drug-addicted, violent, fatherless, welfare dependent, poor, black, and uneducated—is alive and well in the public’s mind. The opposite side of this cliché is the somewhat rare though equally reductive urban teen who has risen up against the greatest of odds to become a highly successful entertainer, athlete, doctor, or lawyer. These contrasting images reside in our imagination, our daily newspapers, weekly magazines, popular books, and professional journals, and are accepted as the totality of urban teenage experience. This book, however, is about neither of these stark images. It is neither about adolescents who kill for cash, smoke crack, roam the streets, and wreak havoc on the world, nor about those who have overcome tremendous adversity to reach great heights of success. Instead, this book is about the urban poor and urban working-class adolescents¹ we rarely hear about—those who live under oppressive conditions yet do not necessarily provide titillating stories for fiction writers or journalists. These teenagers do, however, offer us critical insights into what it means to be an adolescent in the 1990s. This book is about the 95 to 98 percent of urban teens who are neither murderers nor superheroes, and are not typically featured on the evening news.

      Among the adolescents described in this book, some do eventually drop out of school or become teenage parents, while others are honor students or stars on the high school basketball team. All of them, however, are persevering, striving, trying to make the best of their difficult circumstances. They are not necessarily invulnerable or particularly remarkable—they are ordinary and courageous teenagers growing up in urban areas of America, and they have a lot to tell us.

      This book is about the everyday courage of girls like Eva, an African American girl, who says in her sophomore year in high school:

      I’m not like normal people. If you see a pencil—if you put this pencil on the table, you’ll see a pencil and accept it. I’ll go around and say, “Yeah, I see a pencil, but why is the pencil there and who put it there.” Most people would just see a pencil: “So what? A pencil,” like that. That’s how I go about solving problems, too. You know, that’s it.

      This book is about the stories that urban teens tell about themselves and about their relationships, beliefs, values, experiences, and lives. It is about the mundane as well as the exciting. It is about adopting Eva’s curiosity about the world and investigating what it is like to be a poor or working-class teenager growing up in urban America in the 1990s.

      This book is also about Sonia, a Puerto Rican girl, who reflects as follows in her junior year of high school:

      I feel I always have an image to put up because I think a lot of people have talked so bad about Spanish people. You know, that they get pregnant too soon, they’re all on welfare … and that’s where I come in. It’s like I don’t want people to think that about me. ’Cause, you know, I am gonna make it far and I’m not gonna let anything stop me. ’Cause if I do, then I’d get, “Oh look, what we all talked about was true.” I’m gonna go to college. I’m gonna have a career set for myself and then I’ll think about making a family.

      It is about the oppression that ethnic minority youth face on a daily basis, the stereotypes that pervade their lives, and their motivation and persistence to overcome such obstacles.

      But haven’t we heard enough about urban teens? From Jonathan Kozol’s acclaimed Amazing Grace to Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here, there has been an outpouring of journalistic accounts of the lives of urban children and adolescents.² Michael Massing noted this phenomenon recently in the New Yorker.

      The inner city, a subject long neglected by journalists, is suddenly in vogue. So many writers, photographers, and documentary film makers are heading out to housing projects and street corners that it’s a wonder they don’t trip over one another. Their output from the last year alone would fill a small depository.³

      These reports “from the front” have documented the trials of growing up poor in desolate, devastated, urban neighborhoods, and of being an ethnic minority in a racist, classist, and uncaring society. Such accounts powerfully reveal the traumas experienced by urban youth. However, by focusing on the harrowing and the shocking, they commonly ignore or downplay the regularity of these teens’ daily lives. These accounts are not concerned with how urban poor or working-class adolescents understand their worlds over time: how they perceive themselves, their relationships with parents and peers, their futures, their school, and the larger society, and how these perceptions change or stay the same as they go through adolescence. The research upon which this book is based addresses these gaps in our knowledge of urban teenagers. I sought to learn about adolescence by listening to urban youth speak about their lives.

      As a developmental psychologist counseling and conducting research with urban teenagers in the Boston and New York City public schools over the past eleven years, I have listened to hundreds of adolescents from poor or working-class families speak about their worlds. As I listened, it became clear that their perspectives cannot be neatly summarized in the ways offered by either journalists or academics. Adjectives or categories like “hopeless,” “optimistic,” “present oriented,” “violent,” or “impulsive” simply do not suffice. As Eva suggests, the lives of urban teens are intricate, subtle, and rich, filled with contradictions, ambiguities, and continuities. Their stories, like all of our stories, are messy and out of control, and, at the same time, carefully gauged, in control, passionate, and provocative. There are no definitive boundaries within which their perspectives or stories neatly fit. I also began to understand, while listening to these teens, that they do not spend every waking minute confronting violence, drugs, teenage pregnancy, welfare, gangs, and single-headed households. Their lives are as complex and multilayered as their views. Their biggest concern on a given day may be, as it is perhaps for their suburban counterparts, whether they will go to the prom, or whether their math test will be difficult. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I began to understand that, in contrast to what many developmental psychologists have suggested, the stories of urban adolescents are as important to our theories of adolescence as are the stories from their mostly white, middle-class, suburban peers. There are few studies, however, that elicit from urban teens their personal worldviews, and rarely have researchers examined their perspectives over time. This book presents findings from a three-year longitudinal research study of twenty-four urban adolescents from low-income families. During this period, I systematically investigated how they perceived their worlds over time—in their own words and on their own terms.

      More than a decade after Carol Gilligan noted in In a Different Voice that girls and women had been excluded from studies of human development,⁴ social scientists are now beginning to take note that urban poor and working-class and ethnic-minority adolescents have also been excluded from developmental studies. Almost 40 percent of all adolescents are from poor or working-class families,⁵ one-fifth live below the poverty line,⁶ and the majority of these poor or working-class youth live in urban areas. It is clear from these numbers that the worldview of this population will have a significant impact on our collective future. Yet as a recent article in the American Psychologist noted: “Neither research nor theory in the adolescent field has had much to say about young people growing up in poverty.”⁷ And the editors of a comprehensive book on adolescent development remarked: “Perhaps the most striking observation across all the chapters in this volume is the