I will admit to slight trepidation upon encountering Jennifer Tilton's book. Why, I wondered, does the title pose an either/or question? What alternative frameworks are there for understanding contemporary urban youth and why does she not acknowledge the various other options? After all, the crux of her analysis involves examining the ways in which young people generally, and young people of color especially, are constrained by narrowing opportunities and contained within the prescriptive discourses and representations of the state and other more localized groups. With the title's limited scope has Tilton unwittingly reproduced the very discursive repression that she studies?

Focussed on the sociopolitical contexts in Oakland, California, Tilton cites two crucial moments that frame the book's account of the city's racial dynamics: the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966 and the killing of an unarmed twenty-two-year-old black man, Oscar Grant, by a white local transit authority officer on 1 January 2009. As she explains, the city's history has long been marked by racial conflict, and complicated by intersecting forces at the global–local nexus and the often dire impact of more recent neoliberal policies and initiatives. In the contemporary era, young people of color exist within a maelstrom of social influences and they are increasingly pummeled literally and figuratively by severe economics, harsh media representation, an unforgiving criminal-justice system, and suspicion and surveillance by a host of civic entities. These are obviously not the conditions under which youth excels and Tilton embarks on a serious study of “how Oakland activists constructed racial, class, and generational identities within different political networks” (20).

A number of key individuals are introduced throughout the book, especially in the introduction to each chapter, where Tilton offers well-crafted narratives that simultaneously define the chapters’ main themes while providing a sense of character that humanizes the various issues under analysis. This emerges as a significant stylistic element since many of the initiatives described in the book are driven by small community-based collectives and, at times, inspired by the verve and urgency embodied in men and women who seek improvements to their city and demand better opportunities for their children and those around them. Tilton is explicit about her engagements with her research cohort, suggesting that she spent long hours in intimate settings where conversations unfolded easily, as well as attending meetings and other public events where the discourse was evidently more heated. It is apparent throughout the text that Tilton's own admitted activist background provided important insights on the actions of her research subjects while bestowing a degree of authenticity that facilitated her entrée among the various stakeholder groups. Moreover, her experience evidently provides her with a shrewd critical and analytical perspective; this makes her a truly remarkable guide to the reader who accompanies her on her forays into kitchens and meeting halls, school cafeterias and street-corner conversations.

Much of the book centers on Oakland schools as a crisis point, with education as a front line for the struggles and competing interests of neighbors, parents, students, administrators, and politicians. Tilton is at her best in this environment, teasing out the issues and conveying the details in a reasoned and lucid narrative. For instance, she pays considerable attention to the natural topography of Oakland – the flatlands and the hills – delineating the ways social meanings and values (imbued with race and class distinctions) have been mapped onto these spaces, reproducing educational disparities within a “geography of inequality” (148). With impressive analytical acuity, she extends these symbolic environments into a discussion of a constructed “moral geography that turned racial and class divides into cultural and moral conflicts” (139).

While her conceptualization of the convergence of youth and race in Oakland is fascinating and important, however, there is much about the project that is unique to Oakland itself. With her detailed assessments of the distinct urban arrayal of resources and personnel in relation to the geographic contours of the city's landscape, Tilton may have fallen short of fulfilling the book's subtitle, producing a tome that is really about Oakland and its particular status rather than a meditation on a national urban condition. Certainly many of the problems that Oakland faces are generalizable to the wider national stage, as are the community-based strategies to right the many social wrongs that Tilton identifies in the book, but the wider sets of common issues are not always articulated clearly, leaving one to ponder how Oakland's best practices might be replicated elsewhere.

It is appropriate that Tilton also addresses hip-hop culture in the book's final chapter since it constitutes a core facet of youth identity in the USA, comprising a lingua franca of sorts through which young people of all races and ethnic backgrounds interact and engage with the world around them. In this regard, Oakland's hip-hop scene is nationally renowned even as it is tightly wound into the local urban fabric of the Bay Area. Tilton explains the ways in which hip-hop's cultural practices (most frequently rap music, aerosol art, and b-boying) are mobilized in political activist and youth advocacy contexts, reflecting tendencies that were also evident in the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of the Black Power movement and other overlapping black cultural enterprises. Here, Tilton reveals how traditional forms of street-based youth advocacy have been transformed in and through hip-hop as different generational members bring their own sets of experiences with social inequality and oppression to bear on the current crises. The adult/parent organizers of the past are lost in this new youth milieu and Tilton illuminates the exciting, progressive and ultimately hopeful scenario of young people uniting across their racial differences in ad hoc collectives, mobilizing for social change.

Tilton's work sits well alongside several recent books that are similarly focussed on contemporary youth and race politics; Cathy Cohen's Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (2010) is an apt accompaniment, validating many of Tilton's examples while extending some of her localized findings into a wider national setting. Upon reflection, I am convinced by Tilton's bracing overview of youth in crisis and communities in transition, realizing in the end that between the poles of danger and endangerment, many of the young people at the core of her study also thrive. This book, as an example of engaged critical scholarship, is clearly intended as a tool to ensure that the numbers of thriving youth will only rise.