Heart of Darkness page 2
But Bourgois is not content to simply present the brutal and brutalized lives of his subjects and allow us to draw our own conclusions about how they got that way. He insists on constantly leaning over our shoulder to tell us, in the sententious, often jargon-ridden language of academic social science, why a specific act of degradation, violence, or self-destruction is the result of societal oppression. If his own reporting were not so honest, deep and textured, this voiceover might be more convincing. But the reality Bourgois depicts is so messy and complicated, so funny, tragic, horrifying, depraved and monotonous, that his attempts to draw pious meanings from it become, at times, almost ludicrous."In Search of Respect" is a strange amalgam of brilliant reporting and orthodox leftist academic theorizing. Bourgois tries to link the most intimate details of the often horrific lives of his subjects to larger societal structures -- poverty, racism, cultural antagonism. The problem is that the two simply don't fit: they operate at different levels of descriptive validity.
It's not that larger historical factors don't matter. From 30,000 feet above the ground (which is, after all, where policy decisions should be made, not at street level being sputtered on by some choleric citizen who just had his car radio stolen), the primacy of structural factors is undeniable. If El Barrio were not the desperate wasteland that it is, Bourgois' informant Caesar might not have burned down classrooms and smashed teachers with chairs, nor his informant Ray have fathered nine children without providing for them. No task facing America is more urgent than a commitment to take the necessary steps -- doubtless difficult and expensive ones -- to rectify the dreadful conditions of the inner city. The bootstrap exhortations of William Bennett et al, while not without merit, remain empty without such a commitment. As Bourgois notes, "No society is propelled by 'values' alone."
But Bourgois, fearing that his book might give ammunition to conservatives, falls into the opposite error: he dismisses individual responsibility, absolving those who embrace the pathologies of street culture from all blame. He does this, as the title of his book indicates, by romanticizing that culture as an "oppositional" one that exists to create "respect" for people who get none from mainstream society, with its "middle-class," "Anglo" values. Once the debate is framed in these deterministic terms (the legacy of Marxist thinking is plain here), the inhabitants of El Barrio have a blank check: whatever they do, oppressive society made them do.
But neither street culture nor an individual's choices are simply "oppositional." As Oscar Lewis argued in "La Vida," his classic 1965 study of an extended Puerto Rican family in New York and Puerto Rico, what he calls the "culture of poverty" exists not merely as a form of resistance to oppression, but becomes an autonomous tradition, with its own independent codes and values. Moreover, individuals are not stuck in their culture like flies in glue: far more than Bourgois wants to admit, they are capable of separating themselves from aspects of their culture. Which leads to a difficult, but unavoidable, question: Why has this particular version of the "culture of poverty" continued to exist for decades, when other formerly impoverished groups have joined the economic and social mainstream? Is racism and injustice the only answer? Or can some responsibility be placed on the "victims" themselves, or the cultural values some of them embrace?
Next page: Revolutionary rage -- or bad attitude?
