{"id":68383,"date":"2015-12-07T10:20:29","date_gmt":"2015-12-07T15:20:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=68383"},"modified":"2015-12-22T12:23:36","modified_gmt":"2015-12-22T17:23:36","slug":"fatalism-and-death-the-lives-of-poor-urban-teenagers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/12\/07\/fatalism-and-death-the-lives-of-poor-urban-teenagers\/","title":{"rendered":"Fatalism, death, and the future: The lives of poor, urban teenagers"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently moved to a neighborhood that people routinely describe as “bad.” It’s my first time living in such a place. I’ve lived in working class neighborhoods, but never poor ones. I’ve been lucky.<\/p>\n

This neighborhood — one, to be clear, that I had the privilege to choose to live in — is\u00a0genuinely dangerous. There have been\u00a042 shootings<\/a> within one mile of my house\u00a0in the last year. Often in broad daylight. Once\u00a0the murderers fled down my street,\u00a0careening\u00a0by my front door in an SUV. One week there were six rapes by strangers — in the street and after home invasions —\u00a0in seven days. People are robbed, which makes sense to me\u00a0because people have to eat, but with a level of violence that I find confusing. An 11-year-old was recently arrested for pulling a gun on someone. A man was beaten until he was a quadriplegic. One day 16 people were shot in a park nearby after a parade.<\/p>\n

I’ve lived\u00a0here for a short time and —\u00a0being white, middle-aged, middle class, and\u00a0female\u00a0—\u00a0I am on the margins of the violence in my streets, and yet I have never been so constantly and\u00a0excruciatingly aware of my mortality. I feel less of a hold on life itself. It feels so much more fragile, like it could be taken away from me at any time. I am acutely aware that my\u00a0skin is but paper, my bones brittle, my skull just a shell ripe for bashing. I imagine a bullet sheering through me like I am nothing. That robustness that life used to have,\u00a0the feeling that it is resilient\u00a0and\u00a0that I can count on it to be there for me, that feeling is going away.<\/p>\n

So, when I saw\u00a0the results of a new study showing that only\u00a050% of African American teenagers\u00a0believe that they will reach 35 years of age, I\u00a0understood better than I have understood before. Just a tiny — a teeny, teeny, tiny — bit better.<\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I have heard this idea before. A friend\u00a0who grew up the child of Mexican immigrants in a sketchy urban neighborhood told me that he, as a teenager, didn’t believe he’d make it to 18. I nodded my head and thought “wow,”‘ but I did not understand even a little bit. He would be between the first and\u00a0second column from the right: 54% of 2nd generation Mexican immigrants expect that they may very well die before 35. I understand him now a tiny\u00a0— a teeny, teeny tiny — bit better.<\/p>\n

Sociologists Tara Warner and Raymond Swisher,\u00a0the authors of the\u00a0study<\/a>, make clear that the consequences of this\u00a0fatalism are far reaching. If a child does not believe that they might live to see another day, what motivation can there possibly be for investing in the future, for caring for one’s body, for avoiding harmful habits or dangerous activities? Why study? Why bother to see a doctor? Why not do drugs? Why avoid breaking the law?<\/p>\n

Why wouldn’t a person put their future at risk — indeed, their very life — if they do not believe in\u00a0that future, that life, at all?<\/p>\n

If we really want to improve the lives of the most vulnerable people in our country, we cannot allow them to live in neighborhoods where desperation is so high that people turn to violence. Dangerous environments breed fatalism, rationally so. And once our children have given up on their own futures, no teachers’ encouragement, no promise that things will get better if they are good, no “up by your bootstraps” rhetoric will make a difference. They think they’re going to be dead, literally.<\/p>\n

We need to boost these families with generous economic help, real opportunities, and investment in neighborhood infrastructure and schools. I think we don’t because the people with the power to do so\u00a0don’t understand — even a teeny, teeny tiny bit — what it feels like to grow up\u00a0thinking you’ll\u00a0never grow up.\u00a0Until they\u00a0do, and until we decide that this is a form of cruelty that we cannot tolerate,\u00a0I am sad to say that I feel pretty fatalistic about these children’s futures, too.<\/p>\n

Re-posted at Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently moved to a neighborhood that people routinely describe as “bad.” It’s my first time living in such a place. I’ve lived in working class neighborhoods, but never poor ones. I’ve been lucky. This neighborhood — one, to be clear, that I had the privilege to choose to live in — is\u00a0genuinely dangerous. There […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":68387,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[223,29,23642,233,8080,778,23697,23699,23702,675,285,37,133],"class_list":["post-68383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-childrenyouth","tag-class","tag-class-prejudicediscrimination","tag-death","tag-housingresidential-segregation","tag-intersectionality","tag-intersectionality-gender-x-nation","tag-intersectionality-race-x-class","tag-intersectionality-race-x-nationmigration","tag-psychology","tag-raceethnicity","tag-social-psychology","tag-violence"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/11\/2-11.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68383"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68521,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68383\/revisions\/68521"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}