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 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 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  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 ( ), 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”?  Robinson, carves modern American blacks into 4 categories:  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"