Cathy Cohen tries to do several important things in Democracy Remixed. The first is to provide new data from original surveys, interviews, and focus groups on black youth attitudes and self-reported behaviors on select social issues (especially sex and rap music), as well as politics, broadly conceived. Out of this, she constructs a complex picture of often quite nuanced and contradictory views and behaviors, not cardboard stereotypes, which might sustain a remixing that includes black youth as full members of the polity. This is a significant accomplishment.

Cohen's second aim is to explore the rhetorical divide that has emerged between some black spokespersons, such as Bill Cosby, and black youth, specifically on the question of personal responsibility and moral failing. Is the older generation of Civil Rights leaders, who fought many tough battles in order to break down barriers, simply overreacting, thereby helping to generate a moral panic, when they echo some of the concerns of Cosby and others with misogynist gangsta lyrics and low-hanging pants? In their understandable desire to protect past gains, defend their own earned respectability, and see young people benefit further from these advancements, have these older leaders and their counterparts among ordinary parents and neighborhood leaders simply fallen under the hegemony of neoliberalism? Cohen's core question here is vitally important: Why is it so difficult to generate and sustain a public narrative of the structural impediments facing black youth and to combine it with the language of personal agency and responsibility, without the latter displacing the former?

The author's third aim is to utilize the survey findings on moral questions, as well as specific measures of political alienation and engagement, to inform politics and policy for black youth empowerment. Here, I think, she succeeds least well, though this is not the centerpiece of her project.

I found some of the data on sex and rap in the early chapters quite interesting, and some surprising, though I am no expert on comparable data sets. For instance, the most religious among black youth are only 4% more likely than others to say that having a baby before marriage would be an embarrassment to themselves and/or their families, and only 6% of black youth from neighborhoods with the highest socioeconomic status are less likely than those from the poorest neighborhoods to believe that such embarrassment results (p. 66). These are relatively minor differences, surprising to me. But much bigger differences, in the range of 15 to 20 points, are manifested between black and white youth on these and related questions. Cohen admits here and in various other statements running throughout the book not only that some readers will be “appalled” (p. 67) at some of these statistics but that she, too, finds herself feeling this way at times.

Cohen, however, weakens her approach in a number of ways. First, since one of the major issues is intergenerational perceptions—with the goal of greater mutual understanding, complex public narrative, and effective action—I wonder why her research team did not choose to interview at least some from the older generation (parents, coaches, ministers, teachers, school counselors, local shopkeepers), or at the minimum to hold a few focus groups with them, parallel to the three she held with youth. Or she and her team could even have interviewed some mixed groups of younger and older people. The qualitative component of the methodology, which draws primarily, yet not systematically, upon high-visibility media statements and controversies among the older generation, is thus very skewed, and hardly designed to discover those many subtle and nuanced ways that everyday members of the older generation might try to combine insight on structural obstacles with the wisdom of personal decision making. Cohen rightly regrets the lack of public “discursive space” (p. 91) for honest conversations among black youth and older generations, so necessary for generating and sustaining a public narrative of structural impediments and personal choices, but she does not open up such space through her own research methodology.

The promise of Cohen's important challenge seems to be cut short by several analytical choices made. One is her use of the concept of moral panic. While she cites the basic literature on moral panics, she does not attempt to directly enrich the concept, to provide comparisons to other panics, or to develop other measures to make a convincing case that the heightened attention to personal responsibility among black youth does, in fact, demonstrate that a moral panic is under way. Perhaps it is. But quotes from Cosby, the controversy on gangsta rap, and Barack Obama's language in a Father's Day speech, do not constitute systematic testing of whether we are witnessing a moral panic. Even if one stayed at the level of mass media, communications scholars would insist on a more rigorous research design of the use of the language of structural impediment and moral agency in, say, CNN's coverage of race.

The analytic choice of moral panic is reinforced by several other choices. Most disappointing for such an otherwise sophisticated empirical study is the repeated use of the thoroughly blunt term neoliberalism throughout the study, almost as the deus ex machina explanation for all structural barriers and all shifts towards the language of choice and responsibility. Another analytic choice is to use the general terminology of the regulation and policing of behavior. The author sees this as wrong when done by the state, a largely undifferentiated entity. Such policing is then compounded in its destructiveness when performed secondarily by “indigenous moral entrepreneurs” (p. 43). This analytic assumption certainly is one familiar in Foucauldian circles, but remains profoundly misleading when applied to community life generally, and especially in communities seeking to self-regulate behavior and to become empowered and self-governing. Think only of the black communities along the northern bank of the Ohio River that were so active in the Underground Railroad, who needed to cooperate with white abolitionists and sympathetic Quakers, yet also had to live among conservative whites who might regularly mob their neighborhoods and help return runaway slaves, whom free black communities often encouraged to settle and integrate fully into local churches and institutions. Respectability, trust, and internal policing were vital to the constitution of resilient and free black communities.Footnote ¹

While Cohen acknowledges that self-policing has always been practiced in black communities, she finds today's version of “secondary marginalization” by “indigenous organizations, institutions, and leaders” much worse. What she sees as different today is “the access some black elites have to the dominant media, where construction of black pathology by black elites is able to reach a broader public” (pp. 27–8). However, as she does not do a systematic study of media coverage, she also does not provide systematic evidence for this claim about indigenous community organizations, or even indicate what might count as evidence. Is the behavior of black churches different, more harmful, and marginalizing? Do local youth organizations compound the marginalization of black youth? Consider the national network of YouthBuild programs that develops partnerships with business to teach job skills, personal behavior, and responsibility required for successful employment, and also leadership skills as part of a broad social justice mission—and just spend of few minutes with Dorothy Stoneman, YouthBuild's founder, to get a sense of how profound the network's social justice mission is. Is YouthBuild merely making further concessions to hegemonic values (p. 40), or simply capitulating to neoliberalism? I think that such labels do an injustice to the richness and promise of such efforts.

My own qualitative and action research on youth civic engagement with local groups and national networks, while not motivated by exactly the same questions as Cohen is, would lead me to believe that there is much more discursive space and organizing opportunity among indigenous organizations and institutions than she would currently see—although we would agree that moral chastisement without genuine opportunities for shared power and leadership will not get black youth very far. One example strikes me as particularly relevant to the issues of moral responsibility, gangsta imagery, and sexuality.

In Hampton, Virginia—widely recognized nationally (Innovations in American Government Award) and internationally (Mohn Prize finalist) as having one of the most robust city/nonprofit partnerships for high-impact youth engagement—the public high schools faced the familiar issue of sexual harassment and violence, and, more broadly, of verbal and physical bullying. The issue was hardly confined to black youth, to be sure, though they constitute the majority of the school-age population in this moderate-income city, roughly half-white and half-black in population overall. The youth nonprofit Alternatives, Inc., in full collaboration with the school system and with funding from the state, built upon its youth leadership and relational organizing practices to develop a curriculum component for all ninth-grade health classes. The RELATE Project (Relationship Education Leading Adolescents Toward Empowerment) is based on peer leadership and coteaching by teams of sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Black girls have been especially vigorous in such peer leadership because, as one put it to me, “I really wanted my younger brother and his friends to get what was happening, to change the way they act.”Footnote ² Their approach is not just to teach the week-long module in teams of two, but also to help establish and nurture lasting networks of support among students, as well as between students and teachers, throughout the school year. Their goal is to change the culture and to enlist support through other networks, such as the school band and the football team.

Is this a version of secondary or even tertiary marginalization, or is it an empowered way to mobilize networks and institutions to change noxious moral and sexual behavior that impedes many youth, and especially girls, but also lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth, from becoming full citizens in the public square? I strongly suspect that Cohen would agree that it is the latter, especially if she met the black (and white) teen leaders in Hampton, who have some of the most amazing civic skills I have ever witnessed. But her theoretical apparatus and rhetorical strategies continue to point to unjustified policing and self-policing of behavior.

Cohen's epilogue, “‘A Change is Gonna Come’: Politics and Policy,” is especially disappointing. She claims to attempt to “start the conversation about what specific policies might constitute part of a political agenda to empower black youth in the United States” (p. 235). She offers six proposals (on postsecondary education, high school graduation, violence, employment, incarceration, and civic and political engagement), four only one paragraph long, and most based on a quick and thin Internet gloss. The problem, of course, is that complex policy discussion has been under way for a long time in each of these areas, and a paragraph or two or, at most, three can neither claim to start nor contribute significantly to such discussion. The epilogue is perhaps justified as a way to simply indicate hopefully that there are policy tools available. My fear is that some will read it as ignoring much complex policy analysis and somehow laying claim to authorship of the beginning of a new discussion.

President Obama faces a good deal of criticism or skepticism in this book as a third-wave black leader willing to suggest that personal responsibility on an everyday basis is part of what needs to be done. So let me end on a personal-is-political note that reveals my own biases. Cohen notes that Obama thinks that passing saggy pants laws are a “waste of time,” but, he continues, “having said that, brothers should pull up their pants” (p. 142) as a sign of respect for their mothers, grandmothers, and other people in general. I have said this very same thing to my own African American 20-year-old son and his male friends (of all races), some of whom practically live (and often sleep) in my home. Indeed, some of them also regularly play or record gansta rap while one or another parent is cooking or working in an adjoining room. Violent and misogynist lyrics are not much fun to negotiate in the tight spaces of a home. As the complex and nuanced youth that Cohen portrays in her research, some of these young men actually have changed their behavior. My own son, after appropriating my belt for weeks while he took a new job and got a new girlfriend, thus leaving me as the sagging-pants, gray-haired white deviant male on my walks in the neighborhood, finally asked me to buy him a new belt of his own (I had offered many times). While I would not create a moral panic over this, let me state outright that I fully agree with President Obama: “brothers should pull up their pants.” I have yet to meet a black parent who would not say the same thing.

I am still not sure, however, whether Cohen believes that black male youth can be empowered in public life unless they begin to pull up their pants, literally and metaphorically. She seems to imply that only after they have become full members of the polity, through equal education and other programs, can “we as a community and as a nation … legitimately ask things of young black Americans” (p. 233). I say, let us encourage brothers to pull up their pants now, or at least after a reasonable period of mutually educative and playful nagging, so that they can have greater standing and effectiveness in becoming part of the solution to their own unjustified marginalization and to the broader problems of injustice that continue to plague our society. Perhaps save one old pair to send around for defiant memory's sake.