This book examines how black children, who grow up in an impoverished environment, construct their social reality and why this process is a particularly critical factor in their perception and creation of self. It argues that black disadvantaged children develop a lifestyle and adopt values based on an identity grounded in racism, inequality, violence and poverty. This text contributes to the scholarship by investigating the phenomena of poverty from cognitive, linguistic and experiential perspectives in the lives of disadvantaged black adolescents.