Most recent public comments by Matthew Frank https://nowcomment.com/users/51164 https://nowcomment.com/documents/136072?scroll_to=1314404 https://nowcomment.com/documents/136072?scroll_to=1314404 This sentence and this paragraph as a whole made me question the extent to which the participant-observer method violates ethics when it comes to inadvertently or indirectly covering for drug dealers. As a white person, Bourgois unintentionally alters the criminal environment he is trying to study simply by virtue of his presence there. How does his ethnicity influence the degree to which others let him in to see the whole story? Also, he spent 5 and a half years observing a crack operation. How can someone who lived that reality go back to being an academic? Is this a reasonable academic exercise to expect from people? If it were a psychology study, no subject would ever be allowed to go through that. Wed, 03 Apr 2019 19:49:05 -0700 https://nowcomment.com/documents/136072?scroll_to=1314338 https://nowcomment.com/documents/136072?scroll_to=1314338 I think this a strong observation. One aspect I would like to add is labor relations between the owner of production and the workers. These class antagonisms are well-documented, but they become increasingly complicated in the drug trade. First, they are all "family" or close friends, which makes subjugating workers more difficult. Second, there is no means of unionizing because collective bargaining could be broken by violence. And third, the drug game, of course, is illegal. However, we still see the issues involved in a capitalist system that has a manager and low-skilled laborers with decreased wages and hours that accompany poor output. Wed, 03 Apr 2019 18:14:12 -0700 https://nowcomment.com/documents/136072?scroll_to=1314312 https://nowcomment.com/documents/136072?scroll_to=1314312 I think the point the article is trying to make is that like most Americans, they get money, they spend money. When you are born in poverty, you donʻt learn from your parents to put money away in the bank or invest it. There was no money to save. While there is definitely waste, I donʻt find this substantially different from how most Americans blow their paychecks on expensive dates, new clothes, or a concert ticket. I think we tend to view drug dealers, especially young men of color, as wasteful when they spend money on non-necessities like jewelry or expensive clothes, but it all relates to a cultural capital that Elijah Anderson describes in his article. When you grow up without tradition markers of wealth, being fashionable can substitute as a mark of respect. Spending money on those things likely carried over from those childhood value systems. Wed, 03 Apr 2019 18:01:54 -0700 https://nowcomment.com/documents/136072?scroll_to=1314290 https://nowcomment.com/documents/136072?scroll_to=1314290 It doesnʻt surprise me that some racial antagonism exists between minority groups coexisting in a persistently poor urban environment; it just shocked me how fundamental that racism is for Caesar. For him, it isnʻt a matter of dark-skinned people being less than in a stereotypical way but rather a more generalized "eviler." I think oppressed minorities look to assert their dominance over other minorities for the same reason that poor, uneducated whites in a similar circumstance will have racial biases towards Blacks and Hispanics: they have the need to distinguish themselves as better or more deserving to cope with the fact that they are in a similar economic situation. This relates to the 2016 election, where Trump harped on these implicit racial biases to a base of mostly lower class whites who faced economic uncertainty similar to lower class Blacks. In a way, this wedge issue is essentially built-in because people want to feel themselves hierarchically superior to others. Wed, 03 Apr 2019 17:30:33 -0700 https://nowcomment.com/documents/136072?scroll_to=1314053 https://nowcomment.com/documents/136072?scroll_to=1314053 Iʻm also a bit critical of this kind of relationship because it asserts the male bond over the harm it causes the women they conquer. The example of Ray and Luis illustrates the idea that men are drawn together in relation to starting families with the same woman, yet it is not clear that this has positive results such as taking care of the woman or the children but rather a horizontal affiliation between the two fathers. I may be interpreting this incorrectly because it quite possibly might originate from non-nuclear family structures in Puerto Rico, but it seemed to me that the family was of less importance than the friendship of the two men. Wed, 03 Apr 2019 14:20:55 -0700 https://nowcomment.com/documents/134033?scroll_to=1307840 https://nowcomment.com/documents/134033?scroll_to=1307840 I don't think that the media is the only factor in the depiction of African Americans as aggressive and dangerous. To do so would be to both give no credit to people's pre-existing personal biases and let those who produce the media images off the hook. I have been thinking about whether or not "The Wire" is guilty of perpetuating these images of the Black drug dealer and criminal despite its attempts to balance these with images of Black politicians, police officers, and teachers. For all its focus on the institutions causing societal ills in inner-city Baltimore, I wish "The Wire" focused more on good, noncriminal Black civilians in the neighborhoods who earnestly attempt to live their lives in spite of the tremendous danger around them. By avoiding those Black faces not associated directly with the game, "The Wire" does a disservice to the city of Baltimore and runs the risk of perpetuating dangerous stereotypes about people living in poverty. Mon, 25 Mar 2019 20:48:15 -0700 https://nowcomment.com/documents/134033?scroll_to=1307823 https://nowcomment.com/documents/134033?scroll_to=1307823 I take your point that the Constitution was not built around slavery, but the Founders had to find a way to write it around slavery and the results are no different than if they wrote it with the intent to preserve slavery. There is no way the Constitution would have been ratified without the support of the Southern colonies. Because of this, the Constitution includes horrible pro-slavery clauses such as the 3/5th compromise, which gave greater representation in Congress to the Southern colonies under the guise of recognizing partial humanity for Black people who still could not vote. There is also the clause that says slavery should end in 20 years, but what it really did was preserve slavery during that time, without any penalty to enforce is abolition thereafter. All of this is to say that while no maintaining slavery was not the stated purpose of the Constitution, it was the effect nonetheless. Mon, 25 Mar 2019 19:54:56 -0700 https://nowcomment.com/documents/134033?scroll_to=1307815 https://nowcomment.com/documents/134033?scroll_to=1307815 I was speaking to my coworker who is from India about what she thought when I said Alexander is describing Black people in America as a caste. At first she was dismissive, saying that in her culture a lower caste is a group of people who are treated worse than other people purely based on the position in which they were born. I described the historical racial discrimination of Black people in this country that Alexander talks about and asked her if that isn't the exact definition she gave. Then she decided that African Americans are indeed treated like a caste. I bring this up to illustrate the effectiveness of Alexander putting the societal treatment of Blacks in frames such as "New Jim Crow" and "Caste" because they carry such great cultural significance. We want to believe that we are progressing as a society, but when confronted with the facts it appears as though at least definitionally we have not. Mon, 25 Mar 2019 18:58:34 -0700 https://nowcomment.com/documents/134033?scroll_to=1307792 https://nowcomment.com/documents/134033?scroll_to=1307792 I feel like the difficulties people associate with overhauling the prison system are valid, but a bit overblown. We seem to forget that the government was able to generate mass support for overhauls to the criminal justice system in the 1980s and 1990s that led to many of the problems we see with young Black people in the inner-cities making up a disproportionate percentage of our prison population. It is truly a matter of whether or not we as an electorate can generate enough support to overhaul the system to reverse these devastating changes. Mon, 25 Mar 2019 18:44:34 -0700 https://nowcomment.com/documents/134033?scroll_to=1307617 https://nowcomment.com/documents/134033?scroll_to=1307617 Since this book's release, I have seen the conversation around racial inequality shift dramatically from affirmative action to examining the structural inequalities in our criminal justice system. For example, the 2016 presidential primary on the Democratic side focused on this issue of the prison-industrial complex, especially given Secretary Clinton's relationship to and support for her husband's harsh punishments for minor drug offenders in the 1990s. Similarly, the film 13th which became immensely popular built on ideas raised in this book. When we discuss the impact of media such as this book or The Wire, we have to look at it not only as a singular product but in context of the broader conversation and how they shift the way we talk about real world issues. Mon, 25 Mar 2019 16:39:41 -0700