What factors shaped New York urban Black youth culture in the 1980s and 1990s?

“If I wasn’t in the rap game, 

I’d probably have a ki, knee deep in the crack game

Because the streets is a short stop

Either you’re slingin’ crack rock or you got a wicked jumpshot”

-The Notorious B.I.G. “Things Done Changed”

Christopher Wallace, known as The Notorious B.I.G., grew up in the inner-city Projects of Brooklyn, New York in the 1980s, and throughout his discography, he covers the oppressive themes of his life growing up. In the song “Things Done Changed,” Wallace elaborates on the conditions of urban housing in the early 90s including the rapid increase of gun violence and distribution of crack cocaine in his community. To survive, he explains that Black youth in the projects either have to support themselves by selling drugs or become famous through rapping or playing basketball. Since the odds of becoming famous are slim, many urban Black youths end up involved in drug dealing or gangs, both dangerous effects that are results of a tumultuous childhood. There were a series of economic, political, and social forces such as Reaganomics, the 1994 Crime Bill, and the creation of the inner-city Projects that shaped their generation and continue to shape current generations of at-risk urban Black youth in New York before the turn of the 21st century. Between the 1980s and 1990s, these forces shaped the lives of Black youth through the conditions of the Urban Housing Projects which led to deprivation and a lack of freedom, the inherently oppressive and racist School-to-Prison pipeline which incarcerated many young adults from marginalized communities, the increase in gang violence and drugs, and the messages internalized from rap music. 

From the New Deal through the end of World War II, Robert Moses instituted Urban Housing Projects in order to solve issues of urban decline. While organizing and beautifying New York City, he developed high-rise rentals, densely populated buildings outside of bustling city centers to place black families, effectively removing them from the centers of the city. Without much forethought for sustaining communities and growing wealth, the Projects lacked retail opportunities, resources, and required constant subsidies. On the other hand, at the same time, the National Housing Act of 1934 guaranteed mortgages to white families enabling them to buy homes in resourced suburban neighborhoods, effectively setting them up to grow generational wealth, while refusing them to black families, a policy known as ‘redlining’. Furthermore, the G.I. bill after World War II financially assisted white families in both education and housing but excluded black Americans and concretized the educational, opportunity, and wealth disparities for future generations. By the 1980s, almost 60% of Black Americans lived in these Housing Projects and Reaganomics instituted supply-side opportunities, severely reducing federal funding for urban development. Among other contributing factors, by 1984 Reaganomics helped to drive the unsettling statistic that 3 out of 4 black children were living in poverty. In addition, life in urban public housing as a result of subsidization, lack of independence and self-sufficiency, under-resourced school districts, lack of mobility, and benefits of opportunity was rife with trauma and high-risk environments for these same youth. As a result, both national and local initiatives served to create conditions that established and perpetuated poverty in Black communities and grew wealth and opportunities for White families, all that negatively impacted the lives of young Black children.

While slavery ended in 1865, the United States’ 13th amendment set up Black youth for an unnerving trend of criminalization, broken families, societal alienation, and untreated trauma. Directly after emancipation, chain gangs were instated to provide forced free labor through incarceration and throughout history, various forces continued to push African Americans into the prison system, particularly young men at a rate six times more likely than whites to be incarcerated for life by the early nineties. The culture of punishment for being Black manifested itself in various forms, one was the School-to-Prison Pipeline. This theory argues that punitive treatment in schools leads to greater incarceration rates with evidence that points to police officers stationed inside of schools ready to arrest children for unruly or defiant behavior. Effectively, children are sentenced to juvenile detention and given criminal records, which increases the likelihood they will enter the justice and prison system. The criminalization, as evidenced through the School-to-Prison Pipeline, punishes Black youth for the natural course of behavior that stems from conditions of poverty and trauma. Consequently, more detrimental conditions and events ensue, namely racial profiling, the separation of families, and the arrest of innocent Black youth in cases such as the Central Park Five. The separation of families due to the alarming amount of Black men in the Prison Industrial Complex supports our economy, but not the emotional well-being of young Black men. For example, across the country in the 1990s, the increase of the development of private prisons led to a development in the economies of rural communities.  It is shown that the lack of a fatherhood figure in the home and the trauma of incarceration increases the likelihood of social and emotional health issues, high-risk behaviors, and negative behaviors in school environments creating a cyclical effect. The issues of criminalization of Black youth also engender negative perceptions which contribute to racial profiling, producing more of a vicious cycle. The increasing rates of Black incarceration from the seventies through the late nineties promoted a culture of blame, criminalization, and bias, all reflected in the prominent New York City case of the Central Park Five. The case prosecuted by the city in the nineties was highly publicized and brought charges and ultimately indicted five teenage Black youth for brutally raping a White jogger in Central Park. The case became notorious after they were proven innocent years later and an award-winning limited series, “When They See Us” was released in 2019 that captured the racially charged culture and injustice prevailing in the justice system. Further, the lives of the Central Park Five highlight the intergenerational effects of family separation, demonstrating the far-reaching implications for loss of family members, grief, severe disruption, and financial despair.

The intergenerational trauma and lack of hope in children made them more inclined to join gangs in an attempt to form a sense of loyalty, family, and safety. Additionally, the Crime Bill of 1994 which created the racist distinction between crack and cocaine, caused fear and addiction leading to a higher use of drugs in teens. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, known as the Crime Bill was instated during the crack cocaine epidemic to lessen the crime rates. The 1994 Crime Bill reinforced the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 which created a difference in sentencing between powder cocaine and crack cocaine. In this Act, a person was sentenced to a five-year minimum sentence for five grams of crack cocaine, a cheaper alternative, but it took 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same sentence. Consequently, crack cocaine was more common in lower-income communities, because crack was a cheaper alternative. This act caused a rise in policing and racially motivated arrests which caused the rate of imprisonment to increase by 400 percent from 1970 to 1994. Therefore, this bill created a rise in indictments, prison sentences, and addiction rates in Black youth. The disruption caused by prison and substance abuse, a leading cause of childhood trauma, shaped a generation of youth prone to joining gangs, engaging in violence, dropping out of school, and using drugs. Again, producing a vicious cycle of at-risk behavior and unsafe conditions. The lack of secure attachment in families as a result of continued disruption and the need to protect oneself were underlying causes in the proliferation of gangs and violence. Gangs provided a support system, a brotherhood, a connection critical to human development, but positioned Black youth in high-risk, continually life-threatening realities. Disaffection and loss of hope were by-products of ongoing trauma, gang violence, and drug addiction.

 The issues of poverty, imprisonment, drugs, and violence can be seen in rap music produced in the projects; the music served as a unifier and a marker of cultural pride, while also simultaneously spreading themes of female objectification and normalizing violence as well as gang warfare. Rap music provided a source for Black youth to validate their struggles and recognize their strengths creating a common awareness and understanding of their issues going on at home or in society between their peers. In society, Black youth are oppressed by the racism and prejudice surrounding them on a daily basis: in their homes, their schools, and the people they walk past on the street. They use rap music as a means to shift the power from the oppressor to themselves, changing their disempowerment put on them by the factors around them to power. While these themes are empowering, there are many in rap music that are not. Typically, women are objectified and sexualized in this music, creating a sense of misogyny in rap music. The terms ‘b*tch’, ‘wh*re’, and ‘sl*t’ are commonly used by male rappers to portray women negatively. In the song “A B*tch Iz a B*tch” by rap group, NWA, the word ‘b*tch’ is used to characterize women as female dogs, ridiculing women as someone less than men or as purely sexual objects. Black men use dehumanizing portrayals of women as a way to assert their masculinity, to prove that they have the power in the relationship, which is a direct product of not having a sense of power in society. This can negatively impact the lives of Black men, because after listening to music about abusing women and objectifying women, those values are likely to be instilled in their belief and value system causing them to contribute to the 40% of Black women who experience domestic abuse in their lifetime. Additionally, the glorification and lionization of violence cause impressionable Black youth whose brains are still developing to be more inclined to think that violence, including those with guns, are acceptable forms of response to the treatment they received from those around them. A song that demonstrates these core values that were so prevalent in the lives of Black youth is “Hardknock” by Joey Bada$$. Joey recorded this song when he was only 17 while living in Brooklyn, NY, showing how much the gun violence affected his youth. He raps about how “teachers should teach us to get Smith & Wesson’s off the street” which is a clear example of how if Black youth grew up in the projects, they grew up with gun violence surrounding them, constantly impacting their lives and futures. 

In conclusion, the Black youth culture of New York’s inner-city in the eighties and nineties flared with violence, drug addiction, dealing, and criminal behavior, and was depicted and chronicled by rap lyrics. Taken alone, this generation of youth is easy to write off as depraved or violent. Lives, as the Notorious B.I.G pronounced, that would feed off of one another by dealing crack and hooking each other on drugs. Lives, that perhaps, should logically be funneled through the criminal justice system or written off. However, examined within the context of social, economic, and political forces, from pre-emancipation slave laws through the institutionalized chain gangs of the 13th Amendment, into New Deal and post-war housing policies that segregated, without resources or potential for growth, the picture appears much different. These policies that both established and perpetuated poverty and caused severe disruption through incarceration and drug addiction were definitively oppressive. While Black urban music flourished despite turmoil, trauma, and despair, a creative force pushing against oppression, the untreated and unrepaired conditions and plight of Black urban youth of the eighties and nineties poured into the twenty-first century, with tragic consequences. In 2020, a public murder, a glaring injustice on social media, blasted a light on decades of political forces as well as a culture of punishment for being Black.  

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