In 2009, in the city of Chicago where Cathy J. Cohen lives and teaches, at least 290 school children were shot. Most of the people on both ends of the guns were young African Americans. If the fundamental responsibility of a government is protect citizens' lives, then such violence puts the very legitimacy of the regime in question, to say nothing of the human tragedy that each gunshot represents.

An epidemic of violence also raises a contested and troubling question of responsibility, or (in more academic terms) of agency versus structure. From one perspective, firing a gun at another young person is a choice. The vast majority of young black Chicagoans would never do such a thing. If citizens see the perpetrators of gun violence as having agency, they are likely to blame them for their choice and respond with surveillance and punishment. They may also be tempted to direct moral disapproval at the group to which they mentally assign the perpetrator: in this case, young African Americans. Dropping out of high school, using illegal drugs, and having premarital sex can also be seen as condemnable individual choices requiring discipline, deterrence, and moral suasion.

Structural explanations, in contrast, look to large social and institutional factors—not only intentional policies but also examples of inaction or inertia. From this perspective, the huge and lightly regulated market for hand guns; the poor performance of urban public schools and police; the strikingly low ratio of adults to children in some poor urban neighborhoods;Footnote ¹ the vast prison system that provides economic benefits to companies, employees, and communities; the persistence of racial discrimination in labor markets; the lack of after-school opportunities and programs; the broad public glorification of violence; and even the disappearance of 650,000 manufacturing jobs in the Chicago metropolitan area since 1960—all would rank as background causes of teen violence.Footnote ²

Cohen does not deny young black people's agency but believes that structure at least shapes and constrains their choices and raises the price unreasonably high if individuals choose unwisely. As an example, African American adolescents are more likely to bear children than are white teenagers. A survey conducted by Cohen's organization, the Black Youth Project, finds that young blacks are more likely to condemn premarital sex and report using condoms at a higher rate than whites. But they are somewhat less likely to believe that having a child would hamper their prospects. Thus, their values are relatively conservative, but their perception of the social context increases the odds that they will have unprotected sex. As the author writes, “Many of the young blacks at the center of this book look around and see that having a baby doesn't hurt a friend's chances of fulfilling his or her goals, because the opportunity to fulfill those goals was eclipsed when they entered a subpar school in kindergarten” (p. 67).

Democracy Remixed is not an argument that structure determines the trajectories of young African Americans. Instead, Cohen writes about politics, and specifically about how influential adults view young African Americans and how young blacks participate in the discussion about themselves.

If one believes that at least part of the explanation for tragic outcomes among young African Americans is structural, then the prevailing public discourse is highly problematic. Large numbers of white Americans hold, and have always held, strongly negative views of young blacks. In addition, most Americans now believe that individuals are responsible for their own successes or failures.

Prominent African Americans reinforce these views. The comedian Bill Cosby, for example, says of young black men who are shot by the police: “These are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People are getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake, and then we run around and we are outraged, [saying] ‘The cops shouldn't have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with that pound cake in his hand?” (p. 30). That is a concise statement of the thesis that agency determines everything, combined with broad and negatively implied generalizations about black youth.

Cohen suggests several reasons for this kind of rhetoric: genuine anger at a young generation seen as squandering the opportunities achieved in the Civil Rights era, fear that middle-class African Americans will lose respectability in the eyes of whites if they are tied to poor young blacks, and perhaps some effort to curry favor with white audiences.

Barack Obama adopts subtler and more complex positions than Bill Cosby, but he sometimes chastises black fathers for “acting like boys instead of men” (p. 93), and he insists that despite “challenges and discrimination,” African American youth “must always believe that they can write their own destiny” (p. 220).

Addressing the nation's schoolchildren in 2009, the president said that an unjust social context was “no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That's no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That's no excuse for not trying” (p. 100). Although some critics attacked the president for giving a political speech to a captive audience of children, his defenders argued that as a successful black man, he could improve students' individual behavior by exhorting them morally. But if an African American Democratic president argues for agency over structure, hardly any room is left in the public debate for structural explanations.

Not only do famous and wealthy African Americans deny structure and purvey negative stereotypes about young African Americans as a category, but so do young blacks as well. Cohen assembles evidence from several surveys and numerous focus groups that young African Americans are highly critical of themselves as a group and quick to blame individuals for making bad choices. In one Black Youth Project survey, 80% of young African American respondents agreed that “too many young black people have the wrong morals about important things like sex and work.” Only one-third of whites and Latinos agreed with this statement about blacks (p. 52). In a focus group, a young African American woman observed that when bus stops are finally provided in black neighborhoods, they are quickly covered with graffiti: “The city is like why just keep throwing money to this [area] when they are just going to destroy it anyway. I think it has a lot to do with how a person raises their kids and who their friends are” (p. 81).

At the same time, Cohen finds that young African Americans are trenchant critics of their social context, perceptive about inequalities in school funding and food quality, aware of racial discrimination, and skeptical that the government and other institutions are concerned with their interests. In focus groups conducted by my organization, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), we have found exactly the same combination. Young, urban, low-income African Americans offer passionate and detailed critiques both of young blacks (often including themselves) and of powerful institutions. Like Cohen's nephew Terry, with whom she begins her book, they cite both structure and agency as causes of their own challenges.

Given the objectively unjust social context, we might view young black people's choices and behaviors as simply dependent variables and reserve all of our critical scrutiny for powerful institutions. Citizens and policymakers should demand that schools, police, employers, courts, and welfare agencies treat young African Americans better.

In my view, however, three essential reasons compel continued attention to agency. First, powerful institutions will not serve young black people well unless they receive effective pressure from young African Americans and their families and communities. Political agency is a necessary condition of social reform.

Second, even if the leaders of major institutions actually want to serve young black people better, they will not make wise and effective choices unless they hear the voices of young African Americans, who are the best experts on their own circumstances and needs. I am convinced, for example, that many of the leading educational reform initiatives of the past two decades (such as testing and accountability, the closing of poor-performing schools, and charter schools and vouchers) are genuinely well intentioned but ill-conceived because they do not fit the actual needs of poor children. Listening to those children would help.

Finally, political agency is part of a good life. All citizens should be able to help shape their own communities. Even if government could raise the health and economic welfare of young black people without engaging them politically, that would still be unsatisfactory because they would not be political agents.

Although Cohen makes this case in somewhat different terms, it is clearly her position as well. That is why a chaired professor at the University of Chicago fills an Oxford University Press book with quotations and survey results that capture and take seriously the subtle views of black teenagers and young adults. The author also incorporates her own experience as an African American woman who has emerged as a leader and mentor to many young black people. For example, she writes (p. 49): “The truth is, when Cosby talks about a black woman with eight children from eight different men, I find myself struggling with my own panic and respectability impulse, not only because the topic raises issues of community shame but also because I know what the lived consequences of such images and narratives have been for black people in this society and in our own communities.” Interjecting that first-person voice into a scholarly book packed with data and theoretical concepts is itself a political act.

The Black Youth Project, more broadly, is a national platform for debate and cultural expression. Far from being a structuralist who would treat discussion and opinion as epiphenomena, Cohen believes in the power of ideas and conversations. “I am interested,” she writes, “in the ability of young people to use the limited agency and constrained rationality available to them, to work their way through moral dilemmas, and to make decisions that contextually and politically make sense” (p. 98).

Note that we have now moved beyond the dichotomy of personal agency and impersonal structure that begins the book. A third factor is collective political agency: talking and working together to reform society. Cohen is concerned that young black people are not as politically active and effective as they need to be, but she finds that many still hold a “vision of black politics that is focused on community action, not following ordained leaders” (p. 229). Her ultimate goal is to strengthen that vision.

In short, the political agency of young African Americans is both an essential means to social reform and an intrinsic good. The Black Youth Project is itself an intervention to strengthen young people's political skills and voice, and Cohen makes other suggestions, including the argument in Chapter 5 that youth should be encouraged to participate in a more searching and realistic moral discussion of sexuality. But her policy prescriptions in the short final chapter are mostly about policies that would improve the objective economic circumstances of black Americans, such as increasing financial support for higher education and reducing incarceration. Just two paragraphs, the last two of the book, are devoted to policies that would encourage young black people's civic and political engagement.

There is, in fact, a great deal more to be said about enhancing young black people's political agency. Programs that have that explicit goal are far too small and marginal, but they provide a base of experience and data. Not only has YouthBuild USA, for example, been providing construction skills and educational credentials to high school dropouts since the 1970s, but it also has a long record of enlisting participants to govern their own worksites and to debate and influence policy. On entering YouthBuild, the participants estimate their own life expectancies at 40, on average, whereas upon completing the program, they have raised the estimate to 72—evidence that they have gained a sense of opportunity, optimism, and purpose by working together in a context explicitly intended to enhance their voice and agency.Footnote ³ More generally, research suggests that when teenagers are encouraged to address significant public problems, many of them rise remarkably well to the challenge.Footnote ⁴ Richard F. Catalano and colleagues have identified 24 programs that include elements of service or youth contribution to society, that have been rigorously evaluated, and that “showed significant improvements in problem behaviors, including drug and alcohol use, school misbehavior, aggressive behavior, violence, truancy, high-risk sexual behavior, and smoking.”Footnote ⁵

Unfortunately, enhancing the civic engagement of black youth and other marginalized youth is not a priority, even when policymakers are genuinely concerned about the welfare of African American children. State standards, funding streams, and school accountability measures are largely silent about political agency, which is why programs like YouthBuild and the Black Youth Project remain anomalous. Democracy Remixed makes a strong case for engaging young people in discussion and civic action; readers should begin to think about the programs and policy reforms that would achieve that goal.