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Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

Explore the Chicago School of Sociology's focus on African Americans in the city, key figures like William Julius Wilson, and the impact of societal factors on the black community. Learn about issues like the crack epidemic, mass incarceration, and the evolving dynamics within Black America. Delve into the culture of poverty debate, the decline of race significance in social mobility, and the splintering of the black population into distinct categories.

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Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

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

  2. “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

  3. 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

  4. 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 African-American's socioeconomic class is comparatively more important in determining his/her life chances • The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987) • When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996)

  5. 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

  6. “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)

  7. 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"

  8. 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

  9. Is Black America now “splintering”? • In Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (2010), EugeneRobinson, 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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