Rational Grounds

Before embarking on further discussion on the subject I should note that I have about nil background on the actual concrete subject at hand - the disaffection or not of young black males in American society. So the danger of losing what little links to hard facts there are here is very real. That said:

Culture can be a site of struggle, a space for change, and looking for ways it can do this can be a valuble addition to other inquiries into the possibilies of social change related to the means of material production.

Certainly, I agree that ignoring culture and cultural context completely severely limits the usefulness of any analysis, for the reasons given before. But finding the primary cause of any significant social phenomenon in "culture" itself is tendentious at best, impossible at worst. Any such project has to be approached very, very carefully, and with a real understanding of the limited explanatory value it's going to have. Not because the cultural context isn't having a real effect, necessarily, but because you can't ever be very sure what sort of (and how strong) an effect it's having.

If folks are choosing not to assimilate to our culture, even when their culture is dangerous, are they "doing something wrong" or are we?

This is interesting, but I think this is refuted (or at least brought into serious question) by the vast amounts of people who are choosing "our" culture willingly. Cf., immigrants, black women, etc. While any number of young black male individuals may reject mainstream culture because of its "soulessness" or whathaveyou, I have a hard time believing that they do so as a class. I think Andy's closer here:

...In other words, can the poor white kid from the country still speak and act in a way similar to he is used to and gain respect, where the poor black kid from the inner city must learn entirely new forms of performance to get by. If this is so, wouldn't that be a pretty clear signal of still-functioning racial predjudice in our society?

Perhaps this is true in a certain structural way. However, as anyone familiar with the concept of "trailer trash" can tell you, black urban youth culture does not have a monopoly on "low class" speech and behavior in the collective conciousness. Any poor white kid will have to undergo a certain cultural assimilation to move up the social ladder, similar to (but certainly distinct from) the assimilation a poor black youth would have to undergo. I think studies such as this one, which look at whether "black" names hold people back vs. having "white" names, point to a similar conclusion.

Patterson seems to see the obverse of this phenomenon; young black male rejection of mainstream society. The problem remains, without digging beyond this cultural explanation you can't figure out why black males make this rejection (as opposed to black females, for instance) and how to fix it. (By the way, I think Andy hits the nail on the head when he says Patterson is blaming the victim in this case - I missed that, and he's totally right. Another example of what I was talking about in the first place - people have these "misconceptions" about culture and cultural explanations because so often that's exactly the way they are used by their proponents.)

Ultimately, I don't know why young black males aren't succeeding - I've done no studies on the topic, and I haven't read the studies that other people have done. I think that investigating the cultural contexts and justifications that all the participants have is important and a good way to get at what's really going on here. I just think the investigation is going to start rather than end there.