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Stereotypes of economically marginalized black and brown youth focus on drugs, gangs, violence, and teen pregnancy. Common wisdom posits that targeting these “risk behaviors” is key to breaking the cycle of poverty. Ranita Ray uncovers the pernicious consequences of centering risk behaviors as key to targeting poverty. Ray spent three years among sixteen black and Latina/o youth from one economically marginalized neighborhood in a northeastern U.S. city, and she shares both harrowing and heartwarming accounts of their transition to adulthood as they try to obtain upward social mobility. The young people Ray came to know were invested in education, worked legal jobs, and denounced risk behaviors. She weaves tales of their family lives with the joys and heartbreaks of romance, intersecting it with their everyday battles with hunger, untreated illness, and the threat of eviction. We witness the young people take long bus rides to college and struggle to access computers and the Internet to complete homework. We see them exhausted from working multiple jobs as they try to balance work with school. The riveting accounts of the daily lives of youth that Ray presents do not fit into flashy headlines of drugs, gangs, and violence. Instead, she compellingly demonstrates how the disproportionate emphasis on risk behaviors reinforces class, race, and gender hierarchies, diverts important resources that could be focused on supporting the basic necessities and educational and occupational goals of marginalized youth, and ignores how educational inequalities function to channel ambitious and hardworking black and brown youth into the low-wage service class.

What is it like to become an adult in twenty-first-century America? This book takes us to four very different places—New York City; San Diego; rural Iowa; and Saint Paul, Minnesota—to explore the dramatic shifts in coming-of-age experiences across the country. Drawing from in-depth interviews with people in their twenties and early thirties, it probes experiences and decisions surrounding education, work, marriage, parenthood, and housing. The first study to systematically explore this phenomenon from a qualitative perspective, the book offers a clear view of how traditional patterns and expectations are changing, of the range of forces that are shaping these changes, and of how young people themselves view their lives.