Gang Leader for a Day – background

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets Sudhir Venkatesh, Penguin Books, 2008

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“Chicago School” of Sociology  Emerged in 1920s – 1930s  Specialized in urban sociology  Used ethnographic techniques, immersed selves in local settings  Focused on micro-level interaction  Emphasized individual’s relation to immediate social environment, small units like family, workplace, neighborhood, local community groups  Saw sociology leading to social reform 2

African Americans in Chicago   

“Great Migrations” from 1910-1960 brought hundreds of thousands of blacks from the American South to Chicago White hostility and population growth combined to create a black ghetto on the “South Side” of Chicago The “Black Belt” of Chicago was the chain of neighborhoods on the South Side where 3/4s of the city's African American population lived by the mid-20th century 3

William Julius Wilson 

African American Professor of Sociology at U of Chicago (1972 -1996), then Harvard 

The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (1978)  argues that significance of race is waning, and an AfricanAmerican's socioeconomic class is comparatively more important in determining his/her life chances

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The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987) When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996) 4

The “culture of poverty”  

Tried to explain why generations of poor people reproduce same circumstances 1965 “Report on the Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (aka “Moynihan report,” after Sen. Moynihan, D, NY) investigated why African Americans were not participating in the “affluent society” and highlighted the following factors:  

Weak family structure: "the fundamental problem is that of family structure, that the negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling“ Rejection of values around self-reliance and work

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“Culture of poverty” critique  Critics charged the thesis “blames the victim” rather than “the system” or “institutional racism”  deeply embedded, historical racial discrimination

 Critics say problem is not “black culture” (i.e., values & norms) but socioeconomic structures  prefer structuralist theories of poverty

 Today, researchers have re-conceptualized culture and look at interaction between “culture” & “structure” to explain persistent poverty (see NYT, 10/17/10) 6

The crack epidemic  Crack epidemic decimated urban neighborhoods, in 1980s, peaking early in the 1990s  First “crack babies” born in 1984

 Most children from the new generation stayed away from crack and never tried it themselves. Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist from Carnegie Mellon University, claims 4 factors account for the end of the epidemic: 1) getting guns out of the hands of kids 2) shrinking of the crack markets and their institutionalization 3) robustness of the economy – “There are jobs for kids now who might otherwise be attracted to dealing" 4) criminal justice response, or as he puts it, "incapacitation related to the growth of incarceration" 7

Crime and mass incarceration  1 in 31 adults in US is now in prison or jail or on probation or parole  Correctional control rates are concentrated by gender, race & geography:  1 in 18 men (5.5%) vs 1 in 89 women (1.1%)  1 in 11 black adults (9.2%); 1 in 27 Hispanic adults (3.7%);1 in 45 white adults (2.2 %)  Rates even higher in some neighborhoods: in one block-group of Detroit’s East Side, for example, 1 in 7 adult men (14.3%) is under correctional control  Georgia, where it’s 1 in 13 adults, leads the top 5 states that also include Idaho, Texas, Massachusetts, Ohio and the District of Columbia (Pew Center on the States, “1 in 31,” 2008)

 Recent books by Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow, 2010) and Douglas Blackmon (Slavery by Another Name, 2008) argue mass incarceration of blacks is parallel to enslavement and peonage laws

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Is Black America now “splintering”?  In Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America    

(2010), Eugene Robinson, carves modern American blacks into 4 categories: Transcendants: wealthy blacks, composed chiefly of athletes, singers and media darlings Abandoned: a "large minority" of African Americans that sociologists used to call the “underclass” in the 1980s Emergents: people who are biracial, children of parents from Africa or the African diaspora, or, like Obama, both Black mainstream: a "middle-class majority with a full ownership stake in American society"

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