Anthropologist Philippe Bourgois went deeper into America's crack culture than anyone before him.
Too deep.
Illustration by Mignon Khargie
By GARY KAMIYA
America's moral wars grow harsh and increasingly cartoonlike. On the right, resentful moralists, oblivious to the shaping power of history, demand that individuals be held absolutely responsible for their actions. On what's left of the left, pious academics, oblivious to the fact that individuals also choose their fates, insist that societal oppression excuses criminality.
Shocking images from the inner city -- pregnant women smoking crack, murderous dealers flaunting their Mercedes, teenagers gunned down for a pair of shoes -- are constantly invoked by conservatives as evidence of moral pathology. Now an academic named Philippe Bourgois has decided to reclaim that terrain for the left, by going far more deeply into the brutal reality of the ghetto than his ideological opponents ever have. His "In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio" is a stunning piece of reporting that overturns the dogmas of left and right alike -- including, disconcertingly, those clung to by Bourgois himself.
Bourgois, an anthropologist at San Francisco State University, lived among Puerto Rican crack dealers in New York City's East Harlem for five years. He immersed himself utterly in his subject's lives, hanging with them in crackhouses, partying with them, grieving with them, celebrating with them, dodging the cops with them, earning their complete trust. From thousands of hours of taped conversations, Bourgois constructs a densely-textured documentary that affords unparalleled insights into the culture of the street.
There are terrible revelations here, offered casually in project staircases over snorts of coke and heroin; there are brief moments of joy and banal cruelty and boredom. Few passages in contemporary literature are as heartbreakingly pathetic as the scene in which one of Bourgois' main informants, Primo, talks about his son, whom he has largely abandoned. Such passages, almost cinematically vivid, give human faces to a demonized group, revealing the shallowness of the moral judgments we are so quick to pass. And by demonstrating how structural economic changes -- the disappearance of factory jobs and the concomitant growth of the service economy -- have slammed the door on the dreams of young males in the underclass, Bourgois demolishes the conservative myth that opportunity is equal for all Americans. He convincingly demonstrates that crack dealing is indeed a "rational career choice" for many ghetto youths.
Next page: A jargon-ridden voiceover
