Poverty, Race, and Moralism in American Urban Ethnography

Abstract This chapter is a methodical epistemological and theoretical critique of three canonical books of urban ethnography, Mitchell Duneier’s Sidewalk (1999), Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street (1999), and Katherine Newman’s No Shame in my Game (1999). These books are emblematic of the perennial blinders and flaws of urban ethnography conducted in the mold of the Chicago school and in the stream of policy debates. Thoughtless empiricism, acceptance of problematics prefabricated by ordinary and political common sense, confusion between folk and analytical categories, confinement to the immediate perimeter of interaction, bifurcating moralism, ignorance of the role of capital and state: these are some of the traps that every ethnographer encounters sooner or later on her path and that only collective vigilance can hope to thwart. Dissecting these three ethnographies of the nexus of race, class, and morality in and around the ghetto discloses the hidden code of writing about the black poor in America in the age of triumphant neoliberalism: separate the worthy from the unworthy poor; emphasize success stories, even as these are marginal and nonreplicable; eschew issues of power and domination; euphemize analytically the specificity of racial subjugation; and bring good news and leave the reader feeling reassured that individual- and local-level remedies will resolve a structural quandary.