Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier

 

Another fascinating urban ethnographic fieldwork study by my old college chum Mitchell Duneier. He spends several years among the sidewalk magazine vendors on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, NY, delving deeply into the culture, commerce and psychology of the mostly "unhoused" African American men who created a micro economic ecosystem in order to maintain their own self-respect.

To be sure, there are some "broken windows" on these blocks. But mostly there are windows that look broken to people who are just passing by. Because Americans ruthlessly use race and class categories as they nagivate through life, many citizens generalize from the actual broken windows to all the windows that look like them-- and assume that a person who looks broken must be shattered, when in fact he is trying to fix himself as best he can. Only by understanding the rich social organization of the sidewalk, in all its complexitiy, might citizens and politicians appreciate how much is lost when we accept the idea that the presence of a few broken windows justifies tearing down the whole informal structure. [315]

Ghetto by Mitchell Duneier

 

A very interesting sociological history of the American "ghetto," tracking its origins (at least eytmologically) to the Venetian ghettos of the 1500s, where Jews were sequestered. My old college chum analyzes a handful of scholars since the 1940s who have attempted to quantitize and reason out how the American ghetto began and how it might be corrected. Among other revelations to me, Duneier traces the origin of the concept of "white privilege" to Blauner in 1972.

This made it easier for the Nazis to take the genocide to the Jews than to take the Jews to the genocide. [218]

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

 

Cyberwars by Kathleen Hall Jamieson