'Doing what I do': African American teenagers, gender, and sexuality in an inner city

This ethnographic study examines the strategies that a nonprofit organization (Kidworks) used to create opportunities for working-class black kids. The mission of Kidworks was to help kids achieve their potential and become productive adults through youth development. Staff at Kidworks viewed their black clientele as at risk for failing and getting into trouble. They attributed the problem to street culture, and they prescribed middle-class culture as the solution. I examine how Kidworks went about meeting its mission and the consequences, using data from 21 months of participant observation, 40 interviews, and artifacts.; Kidworks' programming was designed to transmit middle-class cultural capital---middleclass presentations of self, self-determination, and rationality---to kids and to give them practice using it. Kidworks' attempts to transmit middle-class cultural capital were assimilationist and existed alongside a marketing strategy designed to build Kidworks' credibility among wealthy white donors. Despite the ideological colorblindness that dominated the organization, Kidworks itself was stratified along gender and race lines. The black direct-care staff, in response, defined themselves and blackness around dedication to the kids rather than money and status. They appropriated the superficially race-neutral mission as a way to mediate the effects of racism on the kids and themselves. They themselves code switched rather than assimilated.; In practice, it was black direct-care workers who were charged with culturally developing youth. How the staff established their own credibility, taught kids to interact with authority figures, and disciplined them often undercut their attempts to transmit middle-class cultural capital. I argue that gender also shaped how well they promoted middle-class cultural capital. They taught girls to be good girls who controlled their sexuality and took responsibility for emotions, while they taught the boys to become real men through breadwinning. These lessons reinforced both working-class and middle-class cultural capital among the girls but mostly working-class cultural capital among the boys. I conclude that cultural training was necessary but insufficient for individual kids to access opportunities at Kidworks. It also came at the cost of reinforcing the perception of black culture as dysfunctional.