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As my internship continued, I was able to deepen my connection with a wide variety of social networks within the community and, in so doing, began to come into greater ethical conflict with the Eurocentric paradigms that dominate mainstream psychological discourse and that could not account for the historical catastrophe of the colonial encounter and ongoing institutionalized oppression. In the previous chapter, I mentioned that I had begun to work with a young man named William, under the supervision of Ron. Many of the conversations I had with William were focused on the destructive racial ideologies toward young African American males. William, in his wisdom, demanded that I refuse simplistic diagnoses; he did not want to be regarded as a person who acted out as a result of unresolved trauma, nor did he want to be judged as an unreachable "conduct-disordered juvenile." Rather, he insisted that I follow him into the complicated cultural, political, moral, and geographic terrain of his daily existence. William consistently pointed out the misperceptions that routinely occurred when authority figures and the media attempted to interpret the behaviors of people associated with the urban ghettos, or what Wacquant (2001, 2002) calls the "hyperghetto."

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-349-95038-6_3

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