In Search of Respect

by

Philippe Bourgois

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A lookout at the Game Room, crack user, and close friend of Primo’s. He is the only person in Ray and Primo’s network who graduates high school, and he spends some time working for the military afterwards. Despite this experience, he has difficulty finding respectable legal work—for instance, as an animal-lover, he signs up for a job with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and then discovers that this job involves collecting the corpses of animals who have been euthanized. Unable to find other work, he turns to the underground economy, although by the time of Bourgois’s second Epilogue in 2003, he has rejoined the military and moved to the suburbs.

Willie Quotes in In Search of Respect

The In Search of Respect quotes below are all either spoken by Willie or refer to Willie. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Anthropological Research and its Consequences Theme Icon
).
Chapter 4 Quotes

Contrary to my expectations, most of the dealers had not completely withdrawn from the legal economy. On the contrary—as I have shown in Chapter 3, in discussing the jobs that Willie and Benzie left to become crack dealers and addicts—they are precariously perched on the edge of the legal economy. Their poverty remains their only constant as they alternate between street-level crack dealing and just-above-minimum wage legal employment. The working-class jobs they manage to find are objectively recognized to be among the least desirable in U.S. society; hence the following list of just a few of the jobs held by some of the Game Room regulars during the years I knew them: unlicensed asbestos remover, home attendant, street-corner flyer distributor, deep-fat fry cook, and night-shift security guard on the violent ward at the municipal hospital for the criminally insane.

Related Characters: Philippe Bourgois (speaker), Benzie, Willie
Page Number: Chapter 4115
Explanation and Analysis:

It almost appears as if Caesar, Primo, and Willie were caught in a time warp during their teenage years. Their macho-proletarian dream of working an eight-hour shift plus overtime throughout their adult lives at a rugged slot in a unionized shop has been replaced by the nightmare of poorly paid, highly feminized, office-support service work. The stable factory-worker incomes that might have allowed Caesar and Primo to support families have largely disappeared from the inner city. Perhaps if their social network had not been confined to the weakest sector of manufacturing in a period of rapid job loss, their teenage working-class dreams might have stabilized them for long enough to enable them to adapt to the restructuring of the local economy. Instead, they find themselves propelled headlong into an explosive confrontation between their sense of cultural dignity versus the humiliating interpersonal subordination of service work.

Related Characters: Philippe Bourgois (speaker), Primo, Caesar, Willie
Page Number: Chapter 4141
Explanation and Analysis:
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Willie Quotes in In Search of Respect

The In Search of Respect quotes below are all either spoken by Willie or refer to Willie. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Anthropological Research and its Consequences Theme Icon
).
Chapter 4 Quotes

Contrary to my expectations, most of the dealers had not completely withdrawn from the legal economy. On the contrary—as I have shown in Chapter 3, in discussing the jobs that Willie and Benzie left to become crack dealers and addicts—they are precariously perched on the edge of the legal economy. Their poverty remains their only constant as they alternate between street-level crack dealing and just-above-minimum wage legal employment. The working-class jobs they manage to find are objectively recognized to be among the least desirable in U.S. society; hence the following list of just a few of the jobs held by some of the Game Room regulars during the years I knew them: unlicensed asbestos remover, home attendant, street-corner flyer distributor, deep-fat fry cook, and night-shift security guard on the violent ward at the municipal hospital for the criminally insane.

Related Characters: Philippe Bourgois (speaker), Benzie, Willie
Page Number: Chapter 4115
Explanation and Analysis:

It almost appears as if Caesar, Primo, and Willie were caught in a time warp during their teenage years. Their macho-proletarian dream of working an eight-hour shift plus overtime throughout their adult lives at a rugged slot in a unionized shop has been replaced by the nightmare of poorly paid, highly feminized, office-support service work. The stable factory-worker incomes that might have allowed Caesar and Primo to support families have largely disappeared from the inner city. Perhaps if their social network had not been confined to the weakest sector of manufacturing in a period of rapid job loss, their teenage working-class dreams might have stabilized them for long enough to enable them to adapt to the restructuring of the local economy. Instead, they find themselves propelled headlong into an explosive confrontation between their sense of cultural dignity versus the humiliating interpersonal subordination of service work.

Related Characters: Philippe Bourgois (speaker), Primo, Caesar, Willie
Page Number: Chapter 4141
Explanation and Analysis: