Black Social Capital

This book examines the extent to which British-born Black African youth have access to opportunities and support during their pre-school, primary school and secondary school years.

Deindustrialization, white flight, and inner city poverty have spelled trouble for Baltimore schools. Marion Orr now examines why school reform has been difficult to achieve there, revealing the struggles of civic leaders and the limitations placed on Baltimore's African-American community as each has tried to rescue a failing school system. Examining the interplay between government and society, Orr presents the first systematic analysis of social capital both within the African-American community ("black social capital") and outside it where social capital crosses racial lines. Orr shows that while black social capital may have created solidarity against white domination in Baltimore, it hampered African-American leaders' capacity to enlist the cooperation from white corporate elites and suburban residents needed for school reform. Orr examines social capital at the neighborhood level, in elite-level interactions, and in intergovernmental relations to argue that black social capital doesn't necessarily translate into the kind of intergroup coalition needed to bring about school reform. He also includes an extensive historical survey of the black community, showing how distrust engendered by past black experiences has hampered the formation of significant intergroup social capital. The book features case studies of school reform activity, including the first analysis of the politics surrounding Baltimore's decision to hire a private, for-profit firm to operate nine of its public schools. These cases illuminate the paradoxical aspects of black social capital in citywide school reform while offering critical perspectives on current debates about privatization, site-based management, and other reform alternatives. Orr's book challenges those who argue that social capital alone can solve fundamentally political problems by purely social means and questions the efficacy of either privatization or black community power to reform urban schools. Black Social Capital offers a cogent conceptual synthesis of social capital theory and urban regime theory that demonstrates the importance of government, politics, and leadership in converting social capital into a resource that can be mobilized for effective social change.

The Transformation of Plantation Politics explores the effects of black political exclusion, the sharecropping system, and white resistance on the Mississippi Delta's current economic and political situation. Sharon D. Wright Austin's extensive interviews with residents of the region shed light on the transformations and legacies of the Delta's political and economic institutions. While African Americans now hold most of the major political offices in the region and are no longer formally excluded from political participation, educational opportunities, or lucrative jobs, Wright Austin shows that white wealth and black poverty continue to be the norm partly because of the deeply entrenched legacies of the Delta's history. Contributing to a greater theoretical understanding of black political efforts, this book demonstrates a need for a strong level of black social capital, intergroup capital, financial capital, political capital, and a human capital of educated and skilled workers.

This book examines the extent to which British-born Black African youth have access to opportunities and support during their pre-school, primary school and secondary school years. Through the voice of British-born Black African youth, this book explores why and how some racial-ethnic and linguistic minority students fail academically while students from other linguistic minorities excel despite coming from similar socio-economic backgrounds. Drawing on interpretive-qualitative research analysis, the author demonstrates the racial dimension of social capital in education that challenges the traditional social capital theory, which recodes structural notions of racial inequality as primarily cultural, social, and human capital processes and interactions. In contrast to the focus on achievement gaps, the concept of opportunity gaps shows how and why language policies have shaped the educational experiences and outcomes of linguistic minority students. This book will be of interest to policy makers, practitioners and scholars of Multicultural Education, Black and African Diaspora Studies and Educational Sociology.

This volume presents a kaleidoscopic view of the norms and forms of contemporary city life, focusing especially on the processes of social capital (de)formation in the urban milieu. It brings together studies from highly diverse urban settings, such as squatter re-settlement projects in Kathmandu, urban funeral societies in Africa, an HIV/AIDS community in Los Angeles, the poor of Harare, pensioners in Shanghai, Maori gangs in Auckland, and a Roma boxing club in Prague, among others. Contributors draw on contemporary theory and research in social capital, political economy, urban planning and policy, social movements, civil society and democracy to explore how social norms, networks, connections and ties are created, deployed - and often frayed - under conditions of social complexity, inequality, cultural pluralism, and the ethno-racial diversity and division characteristic of urban contexts throughout the world. In this way, the volume engages in a genuinely globalized - and globalizing - discussion of contemporary urban social life and stands as a unique and timely interdisciplinary contribution to the ever-expanding literature devoted to social capital.

Why do some people get ahead in the workplace, while others, equally qualified, fall behind? Rochelle Parks-Yancy uses the experience of African American workers across the US to reveal how the forces of inequality and social capital shape long-term occupational success.

This collection tackles the theme of isolation and the breakdown of mediating social institutions. It is, in part, a response to Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone as well as an attempt to create a broader idea of civil society.

Ginwright examines the role of community based organizations (CBOs) in the lives and development of black urban youth. The author argues that these organizations have the potential to provide a powerful influence in "how young people choose to participate in schooling and civic life." Ginwright bases his observations on a five-year study of a CBO he created in Oakland, California. The book shows readers that the lives of poor, black, urban youth are not quite as determined by locale and income as more deterministic readings have argued, and that there is real hope for positive change in these urban communities.