I just finished two books in anticipation of assigning one in my “Sociology of Men and Masculinities” course next semester: Victor Rios’ (2011) Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys and Adam Reich’s (2010) Hidden Truth: Young Men Navigating Lives In and Out of Juvenile Prison. Both deal broadly with masculinity, youth, race, class, inequality in urban spaces, and criminalization and incarceration. I talked about the books recently with a colleague who suggested that both offer a glimpse into what might have happened next in the lives of Ann Arnet Ferguson’s “bad boys.”
Ferguson’s book is so powerful because she manages to show how those who are there to help these young African-American boys in school (teachers, principals, school staff) often play an unintentional, but integral role in reproducing inequality. Rios and Reich illustrate the ways in which it is not only schools that play this role in young, lower-class, and often non-white boys’ lives. The spaces in which they work, play, live and learn are shaped by structures and discourses of “punishment” that constrain these boys’ likely futures, but simultaneously provide the seeds of enabling the critical thinking necessary to move beyond them. Both authors show, in different ways, how young boys navigate hostile social spaces that might claim to be designed to help them stay off the “wrong path,” but also seem to systematically make finding a “right path” all the more challenging.
Inequality by (Interior) Design 