Black Ghetto Research Articles

Million Man March Appeases Racist Exploiters

rulers of America are conducting a one-sided class war against the working class, targeting as their main scapegoats, the black ghetto masses. With barely a peep from the leaders of organized labor, they have gutted industry, busted unions and driven down wages. The wealthy few have condemned the impoverished many in the black ghetto as a surplus population. Permanent unemployment, the elimination of welfare, the assault on Medicare, intensified police terror, an overflowing prison population and the speedup on death row all speak to the impulse to genocide inherent in the policies of the racist rulers.

Did the Black Ghetto Have a Golden Age?

Did the Black Ghetto Have a Golden Age?

Images of Subversion: Ishmael Reed and the Hoodoo Trickster

HooDoo explains Ishmael Reed in Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, might be called Vodoun, streamlined. In New Orleans it's all over town, invisible to all but the trained eye. Faced with curious and sometimes comical suppression by the police, it never went underground; it merely put on a (10). As Reed makes clear in this illuminating discussion of the voodoo ritual pervading Mardi Gras, the principal mask behind which blacks perform in this orgiastic, white celebration is that of trickster. King Zulu and his followers wear this trickster's mask when blacks mimic the white parade led by King Rex, and what begins as an outrageous white caricature of a slave society with black victims adopting the oppressor's parody of themselves ends in the masked comic rebellion of the hoodoo trickster. While you're laughing at us, comments Reed, pointing out how the black trickster appears to accept the roles demanded by white authority only to reverse them through disguised mockery, we're laughing with but the joke's on you (29). Like King Zulu, each of Reed's protagonists - from Bukka Doopeyduk and the Loop Garoo Kid in his first two novels, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), to PaPa LaBas in Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), Raven Quickskill in Flight to Canada (1976), and Black Peter in The Terrible Twos (1982) - assumes the trickster's role. Each is driven by a mocking wit that subverts white authority and destroys white illusions of superiority while simultaneously promoting numerous value-laden symbols of black culture. A fundamental source of Reed's subversive imagery is hoodoo, with its rituals, conjure men and women, and its spirits, or loas, of whom chief examples are the trickster deities Legba, Guede, and Erzulie. In Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, Robert Farris Thompson traces the origin of the Legba to the Yoruba trickster deity Eshu-Elegba (151-52). As described by Zora Neale Hurston in Tell My Horse, Guede, like Legba, is a hilarious divinity filled with the stuff of burlesque; Guede is also the only loa which is entirely Haitian (232). Erzulie, the goddess of love, is also a trickster who, according to Hurston, can be gracious and beneficent one moment and a red-eyed demon terrible to look upon the next (145-47). Two correlative sources of Reed's subversive imagery, sources tied closely to hoodoo, are jazz history, with its abundant depictions of the playful artist, and black Egypt, an Egyptology promoting the black Osiris over the white Nefertiti. Reed, like his protagonists, dons the trickster's mask to expose society's hidden evils, and a weapon wielded with telling force is scatological parody bordering on the obscene. This is nowhere more clearly seen than in The Free-Lance Pallbearers, where Reed deflates the agents of tyrannical white power through their association with subhuman hairiness and the processes of decay and elimination. Reed introduces hairiness as a visual sign of brutish power through his invention of a white authority figure whose name, a pun, is Harry Sam. This white dictator has given his name to the city in which the protagonist, Bukka Doopeyduk, lives and also to Sam's island (alias Manhattan), the place from which he rules. Harry Sam communicates with the public by means of TV, but he maintains order in the black ghetto of Harry Sam proper (alias Newark) through the offices of a henchman whose name, ABOREAL HAIRYMAN (25), with its play on boreal 'northern' and aboreal 'away from the mouth,' makes him not only the apotheosis of atavistic hairiness but his leader's cloacal son. This mordant identification of white power with hairiness and the excretory functions is a development of the figure of elimination introduced in the novel's first pages with Doopeyduk's comment on Harry Sam's peculiar withdrawal from the public eye: SAM has not been seen since the day thirty years ago when he disappeared into the John with a weird ravaging illness (1). …

The Insider/Outsider Dilemma

"Getting in," the process of gaining, building, and maintaining trust with the group under study, is difficult for any researcher. Differences of ethnicity, age, and class between the researcher, who is considered an Outsider, and the Insiders, members of the group being studied, pose special problems. A 3-year nursing ethnography of a senior citizen center in a poor, inner-city black ghetto is used to analyze the Insider/Outsider dilemma; to highlight the five phases of getting in (impressing, behaving, swapping, belonging, and chillin' out); and to provide strategies to help researchers studying groups different from themselves.

Place narratives and the origins of inner Sydney's Aboriginal settlement, 1972-73

The district of Aboriginal residence in inner Sydney is familiar to Australians throughout the country, but its formative processes are much less widely known and certainly less rigorously understood. Using primary sources from three levels of government that have never before been released, this paper charts the story of the founding of the Aboriginal settlement in Sydney's Redfern in 1972-73. Its approach is to frame the quest for territory around the competing narratives articulated to it. It will be shown how the utopian concept of a "Black cooperative" became pitted against the defensive concept of a "Black ghetto" in struggle for dominance that revealed the fracturing ideological regimes of the day and the contradictory practices of a divided polity. European control over the allocation of urban space was on this occasion intercepted by a social movement for a stake in White Australia that for two hundred years had been disempowering its indigenous peoples. It is a struggle that endures in Aboriginal Redfern to this day.

Metaphors of Discrimination: A Comparison of Gunnar Myrdal and Gary Becker

Introduction The critique of positivism is old news. Marxian and institutionalist economists have long believed that economics is an interpretive, value laden and historically conditioned discipline, and have argued against the simplistic empiricism and rationalism characteristic of the neoclassical majority (e.g., Dobb, 1973, ch 1). In recent years, however, the writings of Donald McCloskey (especially 1985) have brought this critique into much wider currency. This may be due to his orthodox credentials, his stature as an economic historian, the grace and wit of his writing style, or the sheer quantity of his publications. No matter; his point is well taken. Economics is another form of communication, an ongoing conversation conducted in terms of metaphorical allusions, established appeals to authority and other rhetorical devices. If economics is not physics, perhaps it is a form of literature, albeit one which would elicit little praise for the typical quality of its prose.(1) McCloskey's description of economics as rhetoric is seductive, but it is not without its dangers. The communicative nature of economics leaves open the question of what it is that economists communicate about. Though all economists engage in rhetoric, the differences in their questions and answers are nonetheless real. Sassower (1988, p. 554) suggests that McCloskey glosses over these differences by ignoring non-neoclassical paradigms. In a similar vein, Waller and Robertson (1990) accuse McCloskey of being anti-rhetorical in the sense that he is so tied to the premises of neoclassicism that he cannot acknowledge the validity of alternative perspectives. Dyer goes so far as to chide McCloskey for his intolerance for theoretical variety (1988, p. 163). Sebberson agrees that McCloskey's belief that rhetoric will not affect the substance of economics demonstrates his blindness to the relative character of his own point of view, and Sebberson wonders, happens if there is more at stake than just winning a given argument? What happens if the truth of the matter has to be discerned so that the best course of action may be followed (1990, p. 1021)? This paper explores the relation between argumentative rehetoric and analytical substance in the economics of discrimination. I shall try to follow the advice of Robert Solow to analyze the between particular lines of economic analysis and particular rhetorical conventions, though I would have put the word connection in the plural (1988, p. 35). A metaphor not only expresses an idea by combining disparate images; it also relates that idea to a larger system of social beliefs. Metaphors, in other words, convey an ideology as well as an analysis. For example, one popular model of racial inequality in the 1960s was based on a concept called internal colonialism. The metaphor of colonialism explained inequality as a consequence of unequal exchange between the center -- the white metropolis -- and the periphery -- the black ghetto. But it also provided a condemnation of inequality insofar as colonialism is an undemocratic exercise of domination and exploitation. In this way, metaphors establish a criteria for judgment as well as analysis. They reflect beliefs as well as ideas. The metaphor chosen will have moral as well as theoretical and empirical interest. Metaphors matter not just because they are metaphors, but because of the choice to employ one rather than another. McCloskey just has trouble taking the second step.(2) To illustrate this point, I will compare two classic texts on discrimination: Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1972; first edition 1944) and Gary Becker's The Economics of Discrimination (1971; first edition 1957). These are undoubtedly the two most influential books ever written by economists on the subject of race, but two more different books could hardly be imagined. Myrdal headed one of the largest and most complex social research projects of his time (Southern, 1987, ch 2); his findings span two volumes and over a thousand pages of text with nearly five hundred additional pages of appendices, notes, bibliography and index. …

THE SILENT MAJORITY SPEAKS: Antiwar Protest and Backlash, 1965–1972

Campus‐based antiwar protest and black activism in the 1960s exposed fundamental class and cultural divisions in America. This study focuses on the role a liberal and increasingly cosmopolitan university had in provoking a white working‐class backlash in its community. As activist academics and students sought to influence the Democratic party at the national and local level, the progressive New Deal coalition fractured. This article will examine the largely blue‐collar and Roman Catholic city of Buffalo, New York, a bastion of New Deal democracy, which in response to university protest and black ghetto discontent increasingly embraced conservative Republican candidates. This “silent majority” of culturally and politically threatened whites generally opposed both antiwar protest and the Vietnam War iiself.

The Social Logic of Boxing in Black Chicago: Toward a Sociology of Pugilism

Drawing on a 3-year ethnography and participant observation study of a ghetto gym in Chicago, this article purports to (a) de-exoticize the subproletarian bodily craft of boxing by uncovering its embedded social logic and meaning, and (b) contribute to a theory of practice that escapes the false antinomies associated with rational choice and normative models of action. The first part explores the peculiar relation of symbiotic opposition that ties the boxing gym to its proximate social matrix of the black ghetto and to the masculine street culture from which it draws its sustenance and shelters its members. The second part treats boxing as a Durkheimian “social art” whose mastery involves an intensive, ascetic, and strictly regulated manipulation of the body designed to inculcate through direct embodiment the set of corporeal, visual, and mental schemata immanent to pugilistic practice. The social production of the pugilistic habitus as embodied practical reason thus suggests the need to place the socialized lived body at the center of the analysis of social action.

Comparing the Wilder and Gantt Campaigns: A Model for Black Candidate Success in Statewide Elections

Racism has been a part of black American heritage for over three centuries. Across the centuries, the systematic discrimination and oppression of blacks has raised barriers to opportunity as well as normality. Racism can take several forms including individual racism, institutional racism and cultural racism. Individual racism is fostered by individuals who categorize blacks as inferior. Even interracial contact under favorable conditions may not reduce this racist outlook. Institutional racism consists of institutions which are conceived as mechanisms to systematically oppress and limit the opportunities of black people. Cultural racism is exhibited by those who would like to homogenize black Americans—making them more white (Jones 1988: 127–31). We expect these forms of racism to have an impact on the political success of black candidates for office.During the late 1960s and early 1970s, efforts were made at the national level in particular to eliminate barriers to equal opportunity for black Americans. Many whites were unwilling to support full racial equality. The turbulent riots in predominantly black ghettos and the formation of black groups, such as the Black Panthers, spawned fear among some white populations.

Comparing the Wilder and Gantt Campaigns: A Model for Black Candidate Success in Statewide Elections

Racism has been a part of black American heritage for over three centuries. Across the centuries, the systematic discrimination and oppression of blacks has raised barriers to opportunity as well as normality. Racism can take several forms including individual racism, institutional racism and cultural racism. Individual racism is fostered by individuals who categorize blacks as inferior. Even interracial contact under favorable conditions may not reduce this racist outlook. Institutional racism consists of institutions which are conceived as mechanisms to systematically oppress and limit the opportunities of black people. Cultural racism is exhibited by those who would like to homogenize black Americans—making them more white (Jones 1988: 127–31). We expect these forms of racism to have an impact on the political success of black candidates for office.During the late 1960s and early 1970s, efforts were made at the national level in particular to eliminate barriers to equal opportunity for black Americans. Many whites were unwilling to support full racial equality. The turbulent riots in predominantly black ghettos and the formation of black groups, such as the Black Panthers, spawned fear among some white populations.

Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (review)

Vol. 10, No. 3 Spring 1992 BOOK REVIEWS 127 Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground, by Steve Stern. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1990. 256 pp. $19.95. The old Jewish neighborhood of Memphis, known as "the Pinch," provides the setting for most of the stories in Steve Stern's marvelous collection of short fiction, Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven and Other Stories (penguin, 1986). These tales do not describe growing up Jewish in the South, but instead rework such Judaic myths and motifs as the thirty-six righteous men and the angel of death. The last story in the collection, however, is an American ghost story. A reclusive, minimalist writer is blocked on a novel about a reclusive, minimalist writer, but is jolted out of sterility by an encounter with a "ghost writer," who teaches him to revel in his artistic imagination rather than restrain it. Stern's character finally allows his protagonist to glimpse "a neighborhood on top of a river bluff ... full of cunning old world Jews." It is the Pinch transmuted by the magic of Stern's own bravura prose: "From their wagons and stands they were peddling prayer shawls and siddurs, goofer dust and mojo hands.... Their tzaddiks pulIed rabbits from under their yarmelkes and gutted them. on the spot ..." (p. 248). In this neighborhood, and adjacent Black ghettos, Harry Kaplan, the bookish adolescent hero of Stern's latest work, discovers the pungent mysteries of adult sexuality and the unfathomable otherness of Blacks. He also learns what it means to harbor racial prejudice, to be betrayed, and to betray others. As in many a Jewish immigrant bildungsroman, the narrator/protagonist comes of age in a lunatic family, this one comprising a nagging mother, a hapless father, a duplicitous uncle, a senile grandfather, and, before she dies, a comicalIy odoriferous grandmother. But the book's vitality depends not on yet another caricatured Jewish clan, but on Stern's dazzling use of language, his eye for wild similes, and his detailed inventories of the mad worlds he invents. Stern contrives a number of opportunities for verbal acrobatics, beginning with a flood which turns the central city into a labyrinth of lagoons. Wandering out of his father's pawn shop, the adventurous but terrified Harry first explores this transformed world on a makeshift raft steered, by two brothers, Black Huck Finns to his Jewish Tom Sawyer: 128 SHOFAR When we'd sailed past those islanded storefronts, out beyond the quicksilver reach of the reflections, I noticed a change in the air. The mild breeze, brackish with the stench of the renegade river, was laced now with the keener odor of barbecued treyf. (p. 64) Harry's Virgilian guides, Lucifer and Michael, live in their aunt's brothel and run errands of a petty criminal nature, and Stern catalogs this underworld with a zestful, sometimes exhausting prose that matches Harry's wide-eyed wonder: What I'd been prepared to see, I saw: a cavern of topaz light inhabited by languid mermaids. . .. There was a neon clock, an enamel Dixie Peach calendar on a water-stained wall, and a ponrait of a gimlet-eyed Jesus with a rich golden tan. (p. 106) Lucifer is cagey, streetwise, and voluble, while Michael, a virtual mute, devours books procured by Harry from his cousin Naomi. When the sight of a white beauty queen catapults Michael into a trance, Stern renders his nonstop ravings by commingling local idiom withscraps from the Bible, Greek mythology, and assorted literary classics: "She got to be mine! ... Her am the one and only puredee supreme, the realest gospel dove. Done made up by a opostle on a bootleg still, then sprankle her on a cypress knee which it is whittle into a honey gal by sweet Jesus hisself. How we meet up is I strum 01 Prospero's starvation box, or do I bust me a jack bottle fresh off a bottle bush, and out she pop." (p. 188) Harry hopes to end the trance by bringing Naomi to Michael's bedside dressed up as the beauty queen, but instead has some gawky sexual grappling with her atop their grandmother's coffin. When Michael dies, Harry feels guilty for...

FROM INITIAL DETERRENCE TO LONGTERM ESCALATION: SHORT‐CUSTODY ARREST FOR POVERTY GHETTO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE*

Persons arrested for misdemeanor domestic violence are held in custody for widely varying lengths of time. To test the effects of this variance, we randomly assigned short (X̄= 2.8 hours), full (X̄= 11.1 hours), and no arrests (warning only) to a sample of 1,200 cases with predominantly unemployed suspects concentrated in black ghetto poverty neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Victim interviews and one official measure showed that short arrest had a substantial initial deterrent effect relative to the warning group. Longer term follow‐up and before‐after analysis, however, found neither arrest group reflected any deterrence. On the most comprehensive official measure, short arrest consistently showed significantly higher long‐term recidivism than no arrest. Its deterrent effect ended at 30 days, but its criminogenic effect was significant after one year. We conclude that short‐custody arrests for domestic violence in poverty ghetto areas may pose a dilemma between short‐ and long‐term crime control, but longer custody arrests have no clear long‐term effect in either direction.

A New Type of Black Ghetto in the Plantation South

Abstract In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the War on Poverty, and alterations in agriculture, the black population in the plantation regions of the American South has been redistributed. The predominant spatial trend is nucleation of a group of people that was dispersed throughout farms and plantations. Among the types of places where blacks are concentrated are municipalities in which they comprise the majority of the population. This article assesses recent spatial changes in the municipal black population in the Yazoo Delta, a nonmetropolitan region of Mississippi. At the regional scale, unequal changes in white and black municipal populations produced an increase in segregation among the municipalities of the Yazoo Delta. At the local scale, a pattern of residential desegregation has emerged in particular municipalities. This pattern is indicative of a stage in the transformation of the municipalities into ones in which the population is essentially all black. The geography of municipalities that are now predominantly black not only has been altered by movement of blacks into the previously white residential areas, but also by construction of new federally-sponsored housing and by decline and restructuring of the business district. Municipalities in which blacks comprise 75 percent or more of the population are interpreted as a new type of black ghetto. Black ghetto towns have characteristics that are similar to those of metropolitan black ghettos, including a high poverty rate, federal housing that has contributed to the concentration of a minority population, and lack of employment opportunities. Such towns are not confined to the Yazoo Delta, but are scattered across the old plantation regions of the American South. Despite their importance as spatial concentrations of a minority population, black ghetto towns are obscure places that face bleak futures.

Paradoxes in Black Economic Progress: Incomes, Families, and the Underclass

Over the last twenty years, widely reported earnings increases for Black men' and the emergence of a Black middle class2 have documented the progress of efforts to reduce racial economic inequality. Nevertheless, the enigmatic Black ghetto remains with us. Its distressing features-crime, teenage pregnancies, welfare dependency, low educational attainment, male joblessness, drug abuse, and AIDS-have taken on alarming proportions. The recent focus on a population called the has emerged from the coincidence of these social ills in the nation's largest urban areas.3 Today, I will present new estimates of the size and growth of the underclass in a nontechnical way. I will briefly review trends in Black economic progress and discuss how these trends might have contributed to the development of this underclass. Finally, I will discuss the implications of these trends for policies aimed at reducing some of the lingering disparities between

Slavery's End in Tennessee, 1861-1865 (review)

book reviews361 Slavery's End in Tennessee, 1861-1865. By John Cimprich. (University: University of Alabama Press, 1985. Pp. iv, 191. $27.50.) In recent years, historians have at last showed more interest in understanding the social and economic history of the Confederacy and relatingit to whathappened after thewar. Butbeforethe appearanceofJohn Cimprich's brief but well-researched and clearly written monograph, there was not a single book-length study which dealt with slavery at the state or community level. Cimprich's work thus fills a significant gap. We can begin to interpret thebehavior of freedmen and southern whites during Reconstruction in the light of wartime preliminaries. Basing his account mostly on newspapers, federal army and Freedmen 's Bureau records, and the Tennessee file of the American Missionary Association Archives, Cimprich organizes his book chronologically and topically. The first three chapters deal with slavery in Tennessee under Confederate control and federal occupation. The next four chapters cover the emergence of black ghettos and contraband camps, the beginnings of social and economic Reconstruction, black service in both Confederate and Union armies, and the role of black freedmen in state and local politics during the war. A final chapter is mostly concerned with how whites and blacks reacted to emancipation in 1865 and its effects on the state's social and economic systems. Overall, the balance and topical emphasis of the book is good. Cimprich could have improved his coverage of some items had he systematically mined local government primary sources, particularly those of Tennessee's larger cities. The theme that Cimprich argues throughout his book is black assertiveness and independence. He divides white antislavery reformers into two categories: "laissez-faire" adherents (who wanted to minimize social and economic aid to blacks as slavery died so that they would be forced to stand on their own) and paternaliste, who believed that slavery had rendered blacks temporarily unfit for freedom without white supervision and assistance. Cimprich demonstrates that both reform groups shortchanged black freedmen: slaves needed federal and state aid when they became freedmen but they were far less dependent psychologically on whites than the patemalists ever realized. In arguing his case, Cimprich provides many interesting tidbits of information . He offers additional evidence to support Herbert Gutman's thesis concerning the stability of black family life. Only 7 percent of slave marriages in three counties in west Tennessee during the war ended by choice of the partners and only 23 percent by decision of owners. The author's description of Andrew Johnson's racial attitudes adds fresh detail to that subject. While infected by racism, as Eric McKitrick and others have documented, Tennessee's military governor emerges in Cimprich's study as a sincere advocate of emancipation. This book is a useful addition to the literature on slavery. It does not 362civil war history offer any major methodological or theoretical insights, but very few books do. Those interested in slavery and the Civil War period should read it. There is a definite need for studies of wartime slavery in other states. Partially because of the state's sizable white Unionist population, the history of slavery's end in Tennessee (especially the political events) may be very different than what happened elsewhere. James M. Russell University of Tennessee at Chattanooga The Seed of Sally Good'n: A Bhck Family of Arkansas, 1833-1853. By Ruth Polk Patterson. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Pp. xvi, 183. $19.00.) In recent years oral history, genealogical records, and artifacts unearthed by trained archeologists have become acceptable tools for historical study. Dr. Ruth Polk Patterson in The Seed of Sally Good'n has skillfully used these tools and orthodox methods of historical documentation to recreate one hundred fiftyyears of her family's history. It is the history of a black Arkansas family struggling to survive and maintain respectability during the turbulent years that followed the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. Sally Good'n was a slave of African-Choctaw Indian descent purchased by Taylor Polk, a white planter on the Arkansas frontier in the 1820s, who sired fourchildrenby her. Their third child was Spencer Polk, the grandfather of the author, and it is their story that Dr...

The Narrows: A Black New England Novel

THE NARROWS: A BLACK NEW ENGLAND NOVEL Sybil WeirWhen Ann Petry published The Narrows in 1953, the novel was reviewed in the leading newspapers and magazines. Since then, however, critics have neglected it, preferring to focus on Petry's achievement in The Street (1946) and in short fiction such as "In Darkness and Confusion." This neglect of The Narrows is undeserved because the novel reveals the maturing of Petry's literary vision beyond the limited sociological determinism of The Street. The rich and complex rendering of black and white relationships in a small Connecticut city continues to compel readers. Of particular interest is Petry's use of both Anglo-American and Afro-American literary motifs. As Arna Bontemps wrote in his review in The Saturday Review of Literature, a novel about Negroes by a Negro novelist and concerned, in the last analysis, with racial conflict, The Narrows somehow resists classification as a "Negro Novel," as contradictory as that may sound. In this respect Ann Petry has achieved something as rare as it is commendable. Her book reads like a New England novel, and an unusually gripping one.' Arna Bontemps was right. To overlook the ways in which The Narrows is shaped by Petry's New England heritage is to miss part of its complexity , yet, aside from Bontemps, almost every critic who has analyzed Petry 's work has done so solely in relation to other Afro-American fiction. This context has been necessary and valuable for recovering the contours of the Afro-American literary tradition. Nevertheless, it is time to take seriously Sherley Williams' proposal that the most fruitful approach to American literature is a comparative one.2 Such an approach reveals that, in The Narrows, Petry is indebted to Nathaniel Hawthorne as well as to Richard Wright, that The Narrows belongs to the tradition of domestic feminism and realism created primarily by New England women writers as well as to the experience Petry had in Harlem in the 1940s. The New England tradition is most clearly exemplified in Abbie Crunch, the seventy-year-old black matron in The Narrows. While it is important to note that Abbie Crunch is only one of the novel's three major characters from whose perspectives the novel is narrated, Petry's * Sybil Weir is a Professor of English and American Studies at San Jose State University . She has previously published on Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Atherton, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Elizabeth Drew Stoddard, on whom she is currently writing a biography. 82Sybil Weir characterization of her is convincing, complex, and realistic.3 Petry shows the emotional and psychic reality of a black mother who has embraced the values of New England culture at the expense of her own racial heritage. Petry's treatment of the theme of the psychic costs of racism , a theme central to much of Afro-American fiction before and since The Narrows, is particularly moving and convincing. The Narrows is set in Monmouth, Connecticut. The title refers to Monmouth's black ghetto, Dumble Street, variously known as "The Narrows , Eye of the Needle, The Bottom, Little Harlem, Dark Town, Niggertown —because Negroes had replaced those other earlier immigrants, the Irish, the Italians and the Poles."4 To emphasize the universality of her vision, Petry went to Shakespeare for the names of her town and river, using a speech from King Henry V as her inscription: ... I tell you, captain, if you look in the maps of the OrId, 1 warrant you sail find, in the comparisons between Macedón and Monmouth , that the situations, look you, is both alike. There is a river in Macedón; and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth: it is called Wye at Monmouth; . . . but 'tis all one, 'tis alike as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both (Act IV, vii). In New England as in old Britain and Macedón, the river flows on, indifferent to the dramas of human aspirations and passions played out on its bank. The river is indifferent to human betrayal—Alexander killing his best friend in Macedón, Henry V shunning Falstaff, the black butler betraying the black bartender in Monmouth, Connecticut...

Pat’s Whores by Barding Dahl, and: Looking Glass by Barbara Cherne

Reviews 243 tions on Morris’s characteristic themes: evolutionary transformation; aliena­ tion, loss, and betrayal of affection; the puzzle of time. Although generaliza­ tions are risky, most of these stories comically explore how these themes involve accommodations to the social pressures exerted by “other people.” We encounter humans bewildered by the eccentric behavior of spouses and strangers, by social repressions accompanying old age, and by the obliviousness of the young. Morris frequently uses parallelism to reveal characters perceiving their human conditions. Colonel Huggins of “Fellow Creatures,” for example, dis­ covers solace in his similarity to animals, all victims of human aggression and human neglect. In “Victrola,” Bundy notes a moving correspondence between his old age and the death of his dog. In “Drrdla,” Walter, obsessed with “the emergence of life from darkness,” seduces a stray cat into rebirth, while his wife follows suit by seducing another man to her bed. And in one of the finest stories, “The Origin of Sadness,” Schuler, comparing himself to the fossils he finds in a Kansas gulch, attempts ironically to “slip time’s noose.” In addition to the intrinsic pleasures of the stories are the clues provided to the genesis of Morris’s preoccupations. The collection spans nearly the whole of Morris’s career, including fourteen previously uncollected stories; many of the stories initiate material developed with greater complexity in his novels. “A Safe Place,” for example, introduces the hapless Hyman Kopfman, later incorporated into the bizarre War Games and still later into Ceremony in Lone Tree. Similarly, the often anthologized “The Ram in the Thicket” expanded into Man and Boy, then more satisfactorily into The Deep Sleep. Several stories, like “Magic,” whimsically observe the inanities of group counterpoint so memorable in the novels. Finally, stories such as “Here is Einbaum” hint at technical parallels between Morris’s photographs and the images he crafts so carefully in prose. As always, Morris sketches closely observed pictures of the detritus of con­ temporary life, and he does so with subtle sympathy. JOSEPH J. WYDEVEN Bellevue College Pat’s Whores. ByBarding Dahl. (Santa Barbara: John Daniel, Publisher, 1986. 217 pages, $8.95.) Looking Glass. By Barbara Cheme. (Santa Barbara: John Daniel, Publisher, 1986. 181 pages, $8.95.) Two new books by Barding Dahl and Barbara Cheme explore the mean­ ing of the journey westward in the effect of place upon the changing con­ sciousness of the central character. In both Pat’s Whores and Looking Glass, place becomes the crucible through which the configurations of personality 244 Western American Literature are forged. For both Dahl and Cherne, the last frontier is the city of Los Angeles. For Cherne’s protagonist, it is the last remaining place where one can create oneself from scratch. For Dahl’s, the last frontier is the one place left “where nobody else wants to go.” Pat Fegan, Dahl’s protagonist, has come from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to try his hand at real estate. Ghetto real estate. “I don’t know anything about black tenants,” he admits as he closes the deal on his first ghetto apartment building. As his share of properties expands, Fegan gains not only wealth but a growing admiration for the tenants who occupy his buildings in their fierce determination to survive a life of poverty, fear, and humiliation. “Pat’s whores,” we learn, are Pat Fegan’s apartment buildings. The book charts the metamorphosis of the ghettos, as white businessmen flee the rising black tide of inhabitants, through its survival during the riots of the sixties, to the gradual transformation of black ghetto influence to Spanish dominance. For Pat Fegan, the ghetto is no wasteland, but the source of everything he still sees as vital—the source of life and the intoxicating possibility of death. It is clearly evident that Dahl has a compelling story to tell, and when the book follows this progression, it illuminates a whole arena of existence born of a critical point not only in the history of Los Angeles but America itself. Yet the book does not succeed as a work of fiction. At times it reads more like a first draft than final copy. The prose falls flat in numerous places...

Flight from the Ghetto

Abstract. The movement of middle‐class Blacks from the Black ghettos is a phenomenon which greatly intensified in the 1970s. Using 1980 data for ten Florida Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas with large populations, it was determined that the intensity of the migration varied greatly among the cities, for a variety of different reasons. All ten cities, however, experienced clustering among the middle‐class Blacks who moved from the ghettos. This clustering was usually around large public service institutions, principal employers of the group. Tracts selected by the Black middle class generally have homes more expensive and newer than the tract average, and the period of occupancy of the residents was shorter than the tract average. Usually Black households in White tracts within the Florida cities do not have socioeconomic parity with their White cohorts.

The Politics of Urban Violence

Various theories have been offered to explain the violence that took place in and around hundreds of black ghettos woven throughout the fabric of urban America during the decade of the 1960s. Most of the theories put forth do not adhere to the narrow thesis of empiricism as a mark of social science research. Many are also devoid of a historical perspective as a guide to meaningful and fruitful concepts. Few, if any, meet the criteria normally used by social scientists in discussing theory or theory construction. Although such pseudotheories may sensitize us to aspect of social reality, they usually lack empirical referents necessary for verification. However, they cannot be summarily dismissed, for their acceptance is so widespread (especially in public policy) and they often contain an element of truth. Nevertheless, most are scapegoat hypotheses often blaming the victim. Most fall in the category of pop social science, often politically motivated. As H. L. Nieburg (1969: 19) points out, some of the least satisfactory are the most widely embraced; the fervor and frequency with which they are reiterated accent the fact that they are spurious and unconvincing. Peter A. Lupsha (1969) has provided an excellent categorization of the theoretical and popular notions

Cooper, Labov, Larry and Charles

David Cooper's ‘Labov, Larry and Charles’ performed a valuable service in showing how William Labov in ‘The logic of non‐standard English’ failed to provide a fair interpretation of the speech of Larry, a 15‐year‐old black ghetto boy and that of Charles, an educated middle‐class black. Labov's attempts to provide an unsympathetic interpretation of Charles were effectively exposed by Cooper. However, by relying on Labov's own deficient account of the logical form of Larry's arguments, he succeeds in giving an unnecessarily harsh presentation of Larry's acumen as a reasoner. An alternative approach, based on a methodological principle of treating speakers as coherent and reasonable unless there is decisive evidence to the contrary, would recognise Charles's reasonableness but would also recognise the unintentional deficiencies in Labov's treatment of Larry which make the latter seem less than reasonable. Labov's article can be seen as valuable in retrospect (a) because it provided damaging counter evidence ...