Cultivating a Morality of Care in African American Adolescents: A Culture-Based Model of Violence Prevention

Abstract

In this article, Janie Ward looks at the historical traditions of caring, interdependence, and valuing justice within the African American community. She posits that what has been lost to African American youth enmeshed in the violence of U.S. society is an awareness that aggression is a violation of the care and connectedness implicit in the notion of Black racial identity and community. Ward concludes that a solution to youth violence may lie in reconnecting African American teens to the communal values and traditions that have allowed Blacks to develop racial identity and racial solidarity in spite of their economic and social oppression in the United States.