The discussion of these three issues illustrates the debates about black youth as a politicized dimension of contemporary political debates about race relations and the transformation of policy images about black youths. The author argues that throughout the 1970's there was a tendency to identify the dangers posed by specific groups of the black population - particularly the young, the criminalized, the militants, the Rastafarians, and the unemployed. A continuing preoccupation throughout the 1970's was the connection between deprivation and supposedly pathological or weak black cultures that produced special problems for young blacks. This ideology had the effect of externalizing the source of the problem and locating it within the black communities themselves. The net result of this process of externalization was that official thinking and policy initiatives were constructed on the basis that young blacks were a "social problem," which was developing within the heart of the major inner-city areas. The phenomenon of street crime, particularly mugging, was a symbol of a broader process through which young blacks were constructed both in policy and popular discourses as caught up in a vicious circle of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, crime, and conflict with the police. By the late 1970's, the image of the areas of black settlement as urban ghettos that bred a culture of poverty, unemployment, and crime came to dominate both official reports and media coverage of black youth issues. 48 notes