Stepping into the shoes filled by oral historian Studs Terkel in his book Working, a former Columbia University anthropologist followed the lives of 300 young people in Harlem who applied for a job at a local fast food franchaise. Chutes and Ladders by Katherine S. Newman chronicles t
he lives of the applicants from 1993 to 2002.
The traditional approach of sociologists, Newman writes, is to see the inhabitants of urban ghettoes as outsiders “separated from the rest of American society,” in the grip of an “oppositional culture.” But the crowd she followed isn’t like that at all. They have a strong commitment to middle-class values, she reports, especially around work and welfare. They are, in fact, “closer to a conservative, ‘red state’ perspective than the liberal, ‘blue state’ view that most sociologists, myself included, subscribe to.” They moralize about deadbeats on welfare — even those who have been on welfare put down welfare — and they are proud of the steps, big and small, that they have taken toward middle-class respectability. (“You know that saying, ‘Keeping up with the Joneses?’ ” Adam asks at one point. “Well, I’m not keeping up with them. I am the Joneses.”
Read the whole article in The New York Times
Posted on October 22, 2006 by D. Bell