Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in In Search of Respect, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Anthropological Research and its Consequences
The Crack Trade and the Underground Economy
Poverty, History, and Public Policy
Street Culture and Drug Use
Gender Roles and Family Violence
Summary
Analysis
After noting Caesar’s commentary on the book—“Ooh, Felipe! You make us sound like such sensitive crack dealers”—Bourgois admits that “there is no panacea for” the problems he outlines in the book. Given the long, complex, and institutionally embedded histories of racism and classism in the United States, it is unrealistic to expect that single or straightforward policies might resolve the problem. And the United States also “simply lacks the political will to address poverty,” which is astonishing given the nation’s wealth. Although he knows they are excuses to ignore “long-term structural problems,” Bourgois decides to address possible policy solutions.
Here, Bourgois ties together his analyses of the economic and social problems that plague El Barrio by examining the structural relationship between all of these issues. He not only acknowledges the structural causes of these problems, but the changes that would be necessary to remedy them. He sees prejudice toward the poor as a far greater challenge than the mere difficulty of passing and implementing policies, and his focus on the relationship between societal structure and personal agency in hopes of changing the conversation about the intersection of poverty, morality, and personal responsibility.
Themes
Under “Confronting Racial and Class Inequality — Instead of Drugs,” Bourgois notes that drugs can be addressed directly because they are the surface level problem that emerges from “deeper, structural dilemmas.” Drugs are “the medium for desperate people to internalize their frustration, resistance, and powerlessness.” And addressing drug abuse will not change “the class- and ethnic-based apartheids that riddle the U.S. landscape.” The crack epidemic, like most drug epidemics, has little to do with the substance itself and everything to do with the cultural assumptions around the drug and economic pressures that drive people toward it, as working people lose any semblance of influence over the economy and the poor and unemployable multiply under globalization. As of the 1990s, poverty is growing rapidly, especially child poverty, which remains about 50% for Puerto Ricans in New York.
Bourgois’s conclusion here might be the opposite of what a reader might expect from a study on the crack epidemic. This reaction shows how severely the public narrative about crack has been twisted to justify further disempowering the same communities the drug has ravaged. If drugs are only a symptomatic problem, addressing one drug simply makes way for another, and for other equivalent ways of releasing the tension that comes from growing up in a disenfranchised neighborhood. Indeed, Bourgois seems to be predicting that these problems will only worsen with coming economic and demographic changes.
Themes
Accordingly, Bourgois thinks solutions to the drug epidemic must be primarily economic: because selling drugs is “the biggest equal opportunity employer” for poor inner-city youth, both “the economic dynamism of the drug economy must be reduced” and “the fragility and hostility of the entry-level legal labor market needs to be transformed.” An ounce of cocaine costs $8 to $10 to make, and sells for at least $2000, and so “decriminalization would make drugs less accessible to youths on inner-city streets” by making the illegal trade less attractive. Beyond saving the government billions in drug enforcement and incarceration costs, this would make the drug economy less visible.
For Bourgois, the solution to the epidemic of drug use, illegal labor, and violence in American inner cities is remarkably straightforward: the legal labor market simply has to become a better economic option than the illegal drug trade. While conventional policy is driven by moral imperatives—for instance, since drugs can harm people, drugs are illegal—Bourgois’s proposals are driven by a combination of utility and evidence. By making the drug market more like any other market, profits would decrease, and inner-city youth would have less incentive to pursue careers in the underground economy.
Themes
The second necessary transformation is the creation of “economic opportunities for the marginal working class,” including dignified and attractive entry-level jobs. The policies that punish poor people for reporting legal income (taking them off public assistance, prohibiting them from getting education, and making them pay taxes) must also be revamped.
Since shifts in the labor market—the domination of service work and the decline of unions—are so central to El Barrio residents’ loss of employment opportunities, it will be impossible to bring economic stability to the neighborhood without using policy to again shift the market in a way that gives low-income people reasonable work opportunities and rewards them for choosing the legal market.
Themes
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For Bourgois, the abject conditions of East Harlem represent the confluence of “state policy and free market forces,” and these conditions lead even liberal elites to increasingly “dissociate themselves from the ethnically distinct, urban-based working poor and unemployed.” In contrast to these actual causes, government and public sphere actors often blame people’s “bad attitude” for their poverty, individualizing a problem that is really structural. In short, “the United States needs to level its playing field.”
Whereas policies are supposed to supplement the market and correct its wrongs, certain United States policies can act to support particular market actors and therefore only make conditions worse for those who lack economic power. Bourgois notes that expanding inequality also cuts off inter-class identification, making even the liberal elites who believe in addressing poverty unable to fully understand its causes, effects, and solutions.
Themes
In the conclusion’s other section, “Hip Hop Jíbaro: Toward a Politics of Mutual Respect,” Bourgois emphasizes that the crack dealers he studied sought “dignity and fulfillment” through their work, and not only money. There is a complex street culture around respectability, status, and gender that policies must take into account, particularly by “prioritz[ing] the needs of women and children instead of marginalizing them.” If women get opportunities to provide for themselves instead of “seek[ing] men with unreported illegal income,” as the current system promotes, as well as “safe, affordable child care,” they can give their children the economic stability necessary for them to pursue legal work.
Bourgois summarizes how his study of crack dealers challenges the common wisdom that people only sell drugs for easy money. For Bourgois’s subjects, crack is not a get-rich-quick scheme, but often a reasonably respected in communities that largely reject traditional measures of status because they are excluded from accessing them. Improving women’s lives promises to drive a wedge between the familial and economic woes of inner cities, and in turn offer better opportunities to the next generation.
Themes
Bourgois acknowledges that all of his solutions are long-term, politically difficult, and contrary to “the U.S. common sense” about poverty, which is essentially to ignore any structural dimension to the worsening problem. Bourgois’s “most immediate goal [...] is to humanize the enemies of the United States without sanitizing or glamorizing them.” He hopes to illuminate how oppression works and who drug dealers really are: “not ‘exotic others’” but “highly motivated, ambitious inner-city youths” seeking the “American Dream” through entrepreneurship, “the classical Yankee model for upward mobility,” which those in this book largely interpret through the model of the jíbaro. They are a reflection of so-called “‘mainstream America’” and only fail to answer that mainstream because they “internalize their rage and desperation.”
Although he is pessimistic about the United States’ likelihood of serving its urban underclass, Bourgois does at least have the power to insist on giving his subjects the dignity they are denied in the mainstream. This means taking their struggles seriously, but also refusing to let those struggles excuse their violence and poor decision-making. Bourgois reminds the reader one more time that, despite the many negative media and popular culture representations of the American urban poor—who are treated as a foreign element or scourge on the population—his friends in El Barrio are eminently American, perhaps to a fault. The people of El Barrio do not lack in motivation or entrepreneurial ability, merely accessible resources for bettering themselves.
Themes
