The Boundaries of Class in Urban America: Street Gangs, Social Workers, and the Meaning of the Mean Streets

Abstract

Race and class have doubly determined how social difference in the United States is calculated and experienced, and thus can never be fully disentangled, but they have on occasion alternated as the principal valence in political culture and in wider discourses of inequality and opportunity. Tracing the contours of the American race/class relationship, and identifying these points of inflection, has now occupied a generation of new social and post-new social historians. In the twentieth century, World War II and the early Cold War have in recent work come to mark a divide between the unabashedly class politics and social language of the 1930s (which depended entirely on various forms of racial exclusion and silencing) and the equally dominant question and civil rights/black power politics and social language of the postwar era. As the meanings and significance of race and class changed in relation to one another across midcentury, few dimensions of American life felt the shift more profoundly--or contributed more to it-than the social geography and welfare systems of major cities. A pair of new books, Eric C. Schneider's Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings and Daniel J. Walkowitz's Working With Class, engage this shift and its consequences to frame studies of two counterposed urban worlds: adolescent New York gangs in Schneider's case, professional social workers in Walkowitz's. Together, they offer a dual challenge to historians of the race/class dyad: to make gender more central to how we conceptualize recent urban transformations and to problematize the consensual nature of middle-class identity.