Inside the Zone

This article seeks to illumine the street-level, internal, meshing of social structure, strategy and experience in the contemporary black American ghetto by dissecting the practices of a professional `hustler' who works the streets of Chicago's South Side. A socioanalytic interpretation of Rickey's life - his background, worldview and social attachments, as well as his techniques of coping and methods of predatory entrepreneuralism - shows how individual strategies of survival at the core of today's `dark ghetto' can aggregate into a trajectory of collective destruction that gives all appearances of being self-inflicted, even as it is (over)determined by the twofold retrenchment of market and state and by the social entropy that these determine. Through an ironic historical reversal, it is whites who, having vanished from the social universe and consciousness of ghetto residents, have become the `invisible men' of the new sociospatial structure of relegation that consigns poor urban blacks to an internecine war with neither victors nor end. The analysis of a single individual lifeworld thus serves to illumine the whole system of material and symbolic relations, visible and invisible, local and societal, that compose the late 20th-century ghetto as instrument of relegation and lived reality.