Though vagrancy statutes had existed in the United States since the colonial era, widespread efforts to round up men on vagrancy charges occurred after the fugitive slave laws were struck down, as Black people migrated to Northern cities after emancipation. In turn, these statutes were stricken from the books in the 1960s and 1970s, just as the laws and practices of the tough-on-crime era began to take effect.3
From this history it would seem that large numbers of Black people in the United States have been assigned not only a diminished form of citizenship but a fugitive status through slavery, sharecropping, the Northern migration, and now through the systems of policing and penal supervision accompanying the War on Crime. In this sense, what I have described here represents only the latest chapter in a long history of Black exclusion and civic diminishment in the United States.
Yet it would be incorrect to conclude that the history of US race relations has been one of unrelenting domination. Instead, there have been gains and reversals, and the quality of African American citizenship has expanded significantly in recent decades. An important difference between current levels of policing and imprisonment and earlier periods of racial oppression is that heavy policing and high levels of imprisonment are restricted largely to poor Black men and their communities, as well as to many poor white and Latino men. Educated Black men and their families are not enveloped in intensive penal supervision: they may on occasion be subject to public police harassment and mistreatment, but they are not spending their twenties sitting in jail, or living on parole or with warrants out for their arrest.
. . .
If the current treatment of poor Black people in US cities bears at least some similarity to earlier periods of racial oppression in the United States, it might also remind readers of the experience of other groups whose ethnicity, religion, caste, or sexual orientation has in various moments placed them on the social and economic margins. Tools of state oppression may vary, but the experience of persecuted groups throughout history—from the Jews in Europe to undocumented immigrants in the United States to people anywhere living under a repressive, authoritarian, or totalitarian regime—shows astonishing threads of commonality across time and space.
At the level of lived experience, these cases all involve the denial of basic rights to large groups, and the risk of some extreme sanction—confinement, expulsion, deportation, torture, or death—becoming a real possibility facing many people. The combination of restricted rights and threatened extreme sanction criminalizes everyday life as people work to circumvent their restrictions and avoid the authorities. We frequently see curfews as well as identity checks and searches being established, and the practices of evasion, hiding, and secrecy becoming techniques for daily living. A black market in false documents and prohibited goods flourishes. We also see the pernicious issue of informants, both through the police’s efforts to cultivate them and through people turning each other in for their own gain. The authorities not only cultivate professional informants but routinely pit close friends, neighbors, and family members against each other, asking people to choose between their own freedom and the security of those they hold dear. Residents experience frequent acts of state violence in the streets—people getting beaten, strangled, kicked, or even shot in public view, for example—and see that the authorities are fairly useless for protection or mediation, despite their omnipresence. Diminished rights and the looming threat of extreme sanction are felt at the level of the community’s social fabric—for example, the taking on of legal risk is understood as a gesture of sacrifice and personal attachment—and legal restrictions and diminishments become key social distinctions, particularly the divides between those more or less safe from the authorities.
To be sure, these cases involve as many differences as similarities. In many instances, those seized by the authorities didn’t circulate back into the general population; once they were gone, they didn’t return. The fear of torture and death isn’t the same as the fear of prison or deportation. But these cases share enough so that a deep knowledge of one may teach us something about the experience of people living in others. Certainly, the contemporary US ghetto can take its place among them.
Taken in these terms, we might understand the US ghetto as one of the last repressive regimes of the age: one that operates within our liberal democracy, yet unbeknownst to many living only a few blocks away. In a nation that has officially rid itself of a racial caste system, and has elected and reelected a Black president, we are simultaneously deploying a large number of criminal justice personnel at great taxpayer cost to visit an intensely punitive regime upon poor Black men and women living in our cities’ segregated neighborhoods.
EPILOGUE
Leaving 6th Street
Some say you should stop a research project when you stop learning new things. I’m not sure it usually goes that way. At any rate, I never got to a point of “saturation”; never felt that I’d understood enough and it was time to leave and write up my findings.
In the end, I left when my funding ran out, and I had to write a dissertation and get a job. By then it didn’t feel like I was leaving the 6th Street Boys as much as the 6th Street Boys had left me—or rather, that the group as we had known it had ceased to exist. By 2008 Chuck was gone, along with two other members we’d also lost to shootings. Steve committed suicide the following year, a tragedy that some attributed to his growing addiction to PCP, and others to his inability to keep going without Chuck. Mike went to federal prison, and when he came home in 2011, he moved to another neighborhood and got a job washing cars. Chuck’s middle brother, Reggie, and his youngest brother, Tim, were in prison upstate on long bids. Anthony served a three- to five-year sentence in state prison and was shot to death by the police shortly after his return to 6th Street in 2013. According to neighbors, the police had been working undercover, and when they ran up on Anthony in the alleyway he shot at them, thinking they were 4th Street Boys. Alex has long since moved off the block and out of the area.
I continue to see Aisha and some of her family when I return to Philadelphia, and also visit Alex and Mike, who now hold regular jobs and live with their children and partners. I stay in touch with Reggie and Tim by letter and through phone calls, as well as by the occasional trip upstate when I’m in the area. Reggie and Tim have been bored enough by their incarceration to ask how the book was coming along, so sometimes we talk about that. But more than that, I believe we remain tied to one another by times past, and by the memory of the men who are no longer with us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For a decade of generosity and friendship, I thank Miss Deena and her grandchildren, Aisha and Ray; Miss Regina and her son Mike; and Ronny, Anthony, Steve, Josh, and the Taylor family: Mr. George, Miss Linda, and her sons, Chuck, Reggie, and Tim. Over many years, Mike, Chuck, and Reggie provided substantial research assistance and feedback on the writing; Reggie gave his from a prison cell.
My parents, William Labov and Gillian Sankoff, provided crucial comments on drafts of the work, every step of the way to the final manuscript. Their unwavering support, as well as that of my sister, Rebecca Labov, and the entire DelGuercio family, made the book possible.
At Penn, Elijah Anderson supervised the undergraduate thesis I wrote about the struggles of the 6th Street Boys. I hope these pages make evident just how much his ideas continue to inspire me. David Grazian, Charles Bosk, Randall Collins, and Michael Katz also gave freely of their time and assistance, joining with Elijah to provide a vibrant intellectual community for a young person to conduct urban ethnography. Many of these early mentors continued to lend their advice and support long after I left Penn, and I am in their debt.
At Princeton, Mitch Duneier devoted himself to my sociological education with more care and attention than any graduate student deserves. Ethnography is a tradition passed down from teacher to student in a set of sensibilities and practices conveyed in off moments and parenthetical conversations. Over many years, Mitch instilled
these ethnographic ways of being, transmitting the ideas of his teachers as well as his own. One lesson he stressed above the others: the importance of investigating the social world while treating people with respect. His contributions to the research and writing of this book are more than I can express here; he is a teacher in the highest sense of the word.
Viviana Zelizer, Paul DiMaggio, Devah Pager, and Cornel West joined Mitch to form a dissertation committee second to none. Marvin Bressler, Bruce Western, Martin Ruef, Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, and Sara McClanahan also gave generously of their time and advice. The doors of these Princeton faculty members were always open to me, and to them I owe this book’s core arguments.
Part of this work had its origins in a paper published in the American Sociological Review. Editor Vincent Roscigno, coeditor Randy Hodson, and reviewers Steven Lopez, Philip Kasinitz, Jack Katz, and Patricia Adler gave me crucial feedback (and graciously disclosed their names to me after the article was accepted).
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Scholars in Health Policy Program and the University of Michigan provided the time and resources I needed to revise the dissertation. In Ann Arbor, a terrific group of fellow postdocs pored over chapter drafts: Trevon Logan, Edward Walker, Greggor Mattson, Sarah Quinn, Brendan Nyhan, Graeme Boushey, Seth Freedman, Jamila Michner, and Christopher Bail.
At UCLA, a community of scholars dedicated to the study of social interaction and urban life lent office space and encouragement to a part-time visitor. For their support and advice, I am particularly indebted to Jack Katz, Robert Emerson, Stefan Timmermans, and Brandon Berry.
At the University of Wisconsin, Erik Olin Wright, Mara Loveman, Joan Fujimura, Doug Maynard, John Delamater, Pamela Oliver, Monica White, and Mustafa Emirbayer offered generous comments. I am deeply in their debt. Students in the undergraduate seminar “The Ghetto” gave sound advice on early drafts. I thank Mitch Duneier for inviting me to co-teach the course with him while I was a graduate student, as well as our students in Princeton, Rome, and Krakow, and then in Madison. I also thank the students in the ethnography seminar at Madison, the participants in the CUNY Graduate Center Methods Workshop, the Harvard Justice and Inequality Working Group, and the UCLA Ethnography Working Group for their close readings and helpful advice on chapter drafts.
Over the course of this research and writing, a number of people hosted conferences, read portions of the book, or took the time to mention things about the project that significantly shaped my thinking. Others extended friendship when I felt myself losing the struggle to inhabit university classrooms and the 6th Street community simultaneously. Among these generous friends and colleagues are Eva Harris, Rebecca Sherman, Sara Goldrick-Rab, Hilary Levey, Alexandra Murphy, Mafalda Cardim, Theo Strinopoulos, Kathleen Nolan, Forrest Stuart, Colin Jerolmack, Joseph Ewoodzie, Jooyoung Lee, Jacob Avery, Mariah Wren, Susanna Greenberg, Nikki Jones, Laura Clawson, Corey Fields, Matthew Desmond, Anna Haskins, John Sutton, Mario Small, Loïc Wacquant, Paul Willis, William Kornblum, Terry Williams, Megan Comfort, Iddo Tavory, Fredrick Wherry, Brian Kelly, Cristobal Young, Glenn Loury, Javier Auyero, Monica White, Marion Fourcade, and Diane Vaughan.
Carol Stack, Howard Becker, and Herbert Gans have been invaluable correspondents—I am grateful for all they taught me from afar. Howard Becker, Robert Emerson, Jack Katz, David Garland, Bruce Western, and Susanna Greenberg read the final manuscript with great care, each providing comments that improved it considerably. Doug Mitchell deserves his reputation as the heart of the editorial group at the University of Chicago Press. Working with him, and with his colleagues Tim McGovern and Levi Stahl, has been a great gift.
In the final stages of writing, I relied on the superb research and editorial assistance of Morgen Miller, Martina Kunovic, Esther HsuBorger, Heather Gordon, Katrina Quisumbing King, Sarah Ugoretz, Matthew Kearney, and Garrett Grainger. Sandra Hazel at the University of Chicago Press lent her considerable wisdom and editorial assistance to the final manuscript.
This book is dedicated to Reggie and Tim’s older brother Chuck, whose ready laugh and moral strength live on in our memories.
APPENDIX
A Methodological Note
To evaluate any work of social science, it helps to learn how the researcher found out what he or she claims to know. For the study that became this book, this means explaining how a white young woman came to spend her twenties with Black young men dipping and dodging the police in a lower-income Black neighborhood in Philadelphia. In what follows, I describe how the study came about, how the research was approached and conducted, what difficulties arose and how I tried to overcome them, how the project developed, and how it ended. The reader may also learn something about how my identity shaped what I came to learn, what those inside and outside the group made of my presence in the neighborhood, and how the years on 6th Street affected me.
STARTING OUT
During my freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania, David Grazian offered an urban ethnography class to undergraduates. Dave was a new hire from Chicago, steeped in a tradition of studying urban life through firsthand observation. Early in the course, he instructed us to pick a field site where we would be able to observe social life and take notes. My first choice was to work at TLA, an independent movie rental store in downtown Philadelphia. I believe I was interested in the relationship between the rather snooty staff, who carried on a near-constant internal conversation about obscure and artsy films, and the far less knowledgeable and ambitious customers, who glanced through the offbeat movies but usually chose from among the newest Hollywood releases. This idea was an utter failure: the manager wouldn’t give me a job, the stated reason being that I didn’t know enough about film.
The next place I tried was a large cafeteria building on the western edge of Penn’s campus, where I ate with fellow students a few times a week. There, too, I noticed an interesting tension between staff and customers: the mostly white and fairly privileged Penn undergrads spent a lot of time complaining about the older Black women who served their lunch and dinner, though to me the staff seemed perfectly pleasant and highly competent. I wanted to get a job there and understand what the staff made of the students.
Success! I got the job the week after I applied.
I was hired by Miss Deena, a short and reserved Black woman in her sixties who managed a largely Black staff on the basement level. Miss Deena was entering her third decade of service at the university’s cafeteria, and her fifteenth year in management. That fall I worked under her twice a week, mostly making sandwiches and taking food orders.
In the first week I learned that the cafeteria staff didn’t spend any time worrying about their interactions with students. Instead, they were embroiled in internal disputes over de-unionization. Penn had stopped hiring student workers, and had begun changing over its almost entirely Black cafeteria staff from a unionized labor force to part-time employees working for a private food services company. As the union workers retired or went on medical leave, the University replaced them with women and men in their twenties who worked under twenty-five hours a week and were being paid through this outside company. I watched Miss Deena patiently train these new employees who were taking the place of her lifelong friends, and the conflicts between the older unionized women and the younger part-time staff became the focus of my field notes.
After a few months, it dawned on me that many of Miss Deena’s employees—both union and nonunion—couldn’t read very well. I began to notice the things she did to accommodate them, like offering job applicants the option of taking the employment forms home and returning them the next day instead of filling them out on the spot. The sandwich-making job required affixing a small white label to the plastic wrap covering each sandwich to indicate whether it was turkey and Swiss, ham and cheddar, peanut butter and jelly, and so on. The salad-making job didn’t require labeling, as there were only two kinds of salads, and they were easily distinguishable from each other. Miss Deena separated the sal
ad making and the sandwich making into two rooms so that her staff could choose which room they wanted to work in. Her staff gave lots of reasons for wanting to work in the room she had designated for salads: because the chairs were more comfortable there, or the music more to their liking. Alongside these perfectly legitimate reasons were hidden ones: the salad room allowed a person to work an entire shift without coming across any printed words.
When workers called in sick or had to care for their children, Miss Deena was occasionally obliged to move someone from the salad room over to the sandwich room. To deal with this eventuality, she organized a system by which the sandwich labels went in manila folders marked with drawings, so workers could memorize that turkey and Swiss went with the star, and ham and cheddar with the smiley face. Those not attuned to this system would sometimes return the labels to the wrong folders, so Miss Deena checked the folders and re-sorted them at the end of each day. One week, when she was out with kidney stones, I came to work to find that forty peanut butter and jelly sandwiches had been labeled turkey and Swiss.
Another problem for staff with lower levels of reading were the time cards they had to use for clocking in and out; these sat in towering rows in metal holders on the wall near management’s office on the first floor. With over seventy name cards lined up on the wall, and the names written in a small cursive hand, it often took me more than a minute to locate my own card. It wasn’t possible to memorize a card’s position on the wall, because the upper-level managers removed the cards each day to count the hours.
Staff members had different ways of dealing with this problem. A few of the older women would stand under the clock, telling anyone who asked that the clock on the wall was fast, and that they were waiting for their final hour to clear so they would get their full pay. While they waited, someone who was “taller” would offer to take down their card for them, for which they got thanked politely.
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