Culture, Poverty, and Racial Inequality

O American Sociological Association 2016 DOI: 10.1177/0094306116641405 http://cs.sagepub.com REVIEW ESSAYS Culture, Poverty, and Racial Inequality: A New Agenda? D AVID J. H ARDING University of California at Berkeley dharding@berkeley.edu Few issues in the study of poverty and inequality in the United States have been as fraught, and as intellectually challenging, as the question of culture and racial inequal- ity. The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth, edited by Orlando Patterson with Ethan Fosse, is the latest intervention into this longstanding academic and public dis- cussion, and probably the boldest since William Julius Wilson’s introduction to The Truly Disadvantaged (1987). The Cultural Matrix (hereafter, TCM) represents an important step forward in integrating cultural concepts into the study of poverty, inequality, and race in a way that recognizes both the poten- tial for independent causal effects of culture and the closely intertwined dynamics of cul- ture and structure. This lengthy (almost 700 pages) and diverse volume can be read in multiple ways and will be of interest to a wide range of scholars of social stratification, race, cul- ture, urban studies, social policy, and social problems. One can see within TCM (at least) three distinct but interrelated agendas: (1) applying Patterson’s program of cultural sociology, rooted in the concepts of norms and values, to questions surrounding the well-being of contemporary black youth, (2) reinvigorating the role of culture in the study of the lives of black youth more gener- ally through a synthesis of cultural and structural factors, and (3) showcasing a series of state-of-the-art studies on the role of cul- ture in the daily lives of poor black youth and their communities. Norms, Values, and the Social Problems of Black Youth One way to read TCM is as an effort to apply Patterson’s program of cultural sociology The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth, edited by Orlando Patterson with Ethan Fosse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 688 pp. $45.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780674728752. (presented most comprehensively in a 2014 paper in the Annual Review of Sociology) to understanding the cultural views and social problems of contemporary black youth in the United States. Indeed, the chapters auth- ored or co-authored by the two editors could have been assembled into their own stand- alone book. A key part of this agenda is to revive the concepts of values and norms, which Patterson argues have inappropriate- ly fallen out of favor among most cultural sociologists and have been replaced by concepts like toolkits/repertoires, symbolic boundaries, and narratives that are rooted in what I would call a ‘‘culture and cogni- tion’’ approach. From this vantage point, the culture and cognition approach has too easily eschewed the ‘‘evaluative’’ aspects of culture, particularly norms and values. Although one might disagree with this characterization of the culture and cognition approach to understanding the intersection between culture and inequality, Patterson’s exhortation to take norms and values more seriously deserves careful consideration and further empirical attention. Drawing on recent work in social psychology and oth- er disciplines, Patterson explains and further develops conceptual distinctions that may well make norms and values more useful concepts for future scholarship, especially in comparison to the simple uses of those concepts derived from contemporary inter- pretations of Parsonian sociology. While a full discussion is beyond the scope of this Contemporary Sociology 45, 3 Downloaded from csx.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA BERKELEY LIB on April 13, 2016