Since the civil rights movement in the 1960s revealed the brutality of racial violence to the American public, racial attacks have been perceived as particularly heinous crimes. They remind us of the not-too-distant past, when lynchings were an accepted method of social control of African Americans in many parts of the country. Media reports of racial violence pick at the scab on the American psyche, reopening the wounds of racial division to reveal a festering sore that has long been neglected. When news stories about attacks such as the 1989 racial murder of Yusuf Hawkins in the Bensonhurst area of...

New York City’s neighborhoods are an amazing collection of cultural enclaves established by waves of immigrants who settled in different parts of the city. Going from one neighborhood to another can feel like a journey from one country to another. Each neighborhood has its own unique atmosphere, forged from the combination of cultures brought from distant lands and diverse aspects of U.S. culture. From the goods and foods sold in the stores and restaurants to the languages spoken by their residents, New York City neighborhoods reflect both the rich history of their inhabitants and their fate and fortune as groups...

Adolescence is an unsettling time for most young people. It is the time when they begin to forge an identity, when they try to understand how they fit into the world around them. It is a time when young people try to figure out who they are and who they are not, and when peer groups become as important as families for many. The adolescent world is a world of acceptance and rejection. Identities are formed in relationship to membership in peer groups: jocks, burnouts, eggheads, nerds, greasers, homeboys, Crips, Bloods. All young people face these issues in their lives....

This is the scene on a normal day outside Christopher Columbus High School. Most days the groups only engage in posturing. But sometimes the scene is a prelude to intergroup confrontation and violence, which can range from an exchange of racial epithets to individual and group brawls. The confrontation may be sparked in response to an altercation between two students earlier in the day, or it may be a part of an ongoing conflict between different ethnic and racial groups in the school. Stories abound on both sides of one member of a group being attacked by a group of...

This incident was one of the more contemptible acts of racial violence in New York City’s recent past. A similar act occurred two days later when a Latino youth was attacked on the way to school; after being beaten, he too was sprayed with white paint. Both incidents occurred in the winter of 1992. They renewed racial tensions in a city where interethnic and interracial conflicts are periodically rekindled by high-profile racial incidents such as these.

Racial conflict and violence are an unfortunate but constant reality for many New York City young people. The Study of High School Students and...

The problem of ethnic and racial conflict is both complex and enduring. Conflict is fueled by oppositional identities, kindled by structural circumstance, and fed by hostility and hatred. It is the confluence of these factors that makes ethnic and racial conflict so difficult to explain and to prevent. The objective of this book has been to examine these factors in the specific context of the increase in ethnic and racial conflict among young people in New York City and, more generally, to analyze how these factorscombineto produce tension and conflict or tolerance and cooperation.

The factors that produce...