In Search of Respect CH 9

Cambridge Books Online
http://ebooks.cambridge.org/
In Search of Respect
Selling Crack in El Barrio
Philippe Bourgois
Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511808562
Online ISBN: 9780511808562
Hardback ISBN: 9780521815628
Paperback ISBN: 9780521017114
Chapter
9 - Conclusion pp. 318-327
Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511808562.011
Cambridge University Press
9
CONCLUSION
Ooh, Felipe! You make us sound like such sensitive crack dealers.
Caesar [commenting on the manuscript]
There is no panacea for the suffering and self-destruction of the protagonists in these pages. Solutions to inner-city poverty and substance abuse
framed in terms of public policy often appear naive or hopelessly idealistic. Given the dimensions of structural oppression in the United States,
it is atheoretical to expect isolated policy initiatives, or even short-term
political reforms, to remedy the plight of the poor in U.S. urban centers
in the short or medium term. Racism and class segregation in the United
States are shaped in too complex a mesh of political-economic structural
forces, historical legacies, cultural imperatives, and individual actions to
be susceptible to simple solutions.
There are also the inevitable limits of political feasibility. For a number
of complicated historical and ideological reasons the United States simply
lacks the political will to address poverty in any concerted manner.
Nevertheless, I hope my presentation of the experience of social marginalization in El Barrio, as seen through the struggles for dignity and
survival of Ray's crack dealers and their families, contributes on a concrete practical level to calling attention to the tragedy of persistent
poverty and racial segregation in the urban United States. I cannot resign
myself to the terrible irony that the richest industrialized nation on earth,
and the greatest world power in history, confines so many of its citizens
to poverty and to prison. In these final pages, consequently, I address
some of the short-term public policy debates, even if ultimately they
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511808562.011
Cambridge Books Online Cambridge University Press, 2015
Conclusion
prove to be nothing but sideshows for confronting long-term structural
problems. l
Confronting Racial and Class Inequality Instead of Drugs
Substance abuse is perhaps the dimension of inner-city poverty most

susceptible to short-term policy intervention. In part, this is because
drugs are not the root of the problems presented in these pages; they are
the epiphenomenonal expression of deeper, structural dilemmas. Selfdestructive addiction is merely the medium for desperate people to
internalize their frustration, resistance, and powerlessness. In other
words, we can safely ignore the drug hysterias that periodically sweep
through the United States. Instead we should focus our ethical concerns
and political energies on the contradictions posed by the persistence of
inner-city poverty in the midst of extraordinary opulence. In the same
vein, we need to recognize and dismantle the class- and ethnic-based
apartheids that riddle the U.S. landscape.
The crackcocaineheroin epidemics of the late-1980s through mid1990s, however, have been qualitatively worse than the narcotics and
alcohol scourges of most previous generations. The contemporary exacerbation of substance abuse within concentrated pockets of the U.S. population has little or nothing to do with the pharmacological properties of
the particular drugs involved. Indeed, history teaches us that the effect,
or at least the meanings, of drug use are largely culturally constructed.
Most important, in the United States they articulate with class inequalities and racialideological hierarchies. To reiterate: The problem of
substance abuse in the United States is worse in the 1990s than in the
recent past because of a polarization of the structural roots that generate
self-destructive behavior and criminal activity. The economic base of the
traditional working class has eroded throughout the country. Greater
proportions of the population are being socially marginalized. The
restructuring of the world economy by multinational corporations, finance capital, and digital electronic technology, as well as the exhaustion of social democratic models for public sector intervention on behalf of the poor, have escalated inequalities around class, ethnicity, and
gender. 2
The 1990 U.S. Census reveals sharp bifurcations in socioeconomic
319
status at the margins of society. This is part of a longer-term trend
between 1968 and 1992, when poverty rose by one-third in the United
States. More specifically, the poorest sectors of the population during
these years experienced the greatest increment in poverty levels at the
same time that the rich increased their relative numbers by 40 percent.
Children suffered the most, with an almost 100 percent increase in the
number of children living below the official poverty line between 1968
and 1992. 3 Polarization occurred at all levels, both across class and
within ethnic groups. For example, while the aggregate socioeconomic
statistics for many ethnic groups, including Puerto Ricans, improved
during the 1980s, this masked internal class, gender, and regional increases in inequality and social suffering. The class stratification of
African-Americans has already been well documented. The same phenomenon is emerging among Puerto Ricans living in the United States.4 This
assumes a regional dynamic as well. Puerto Ricans residing in New York
City are considerably poorer than Puerto Ricans in most other parts of
the mainland United States.5 Even within New York City there has been
an increasing polarization of social inequality among Puerto Ricans along
class, gender, and generational lines. For example, during the 1980s, at
the same time that Puerto Rican household incomes rose by 28.5 percent
in New York City, Puerto Rican female-headed households with children
lost 6.1 percent of their incomes, and elderly household incomes decreased by 7.6 percent. Married Puerto Ricans in New York dramatically
increased their incomes by 40.6 percent to a figure that is almost 70
percent higher than the median Puerto Rican family income. Perhaps
most significantly, more than half of New York City's Puerto Rican
children remained below the official poverty line, as did 38 percent of all
Puerto Rican New Yorkers as a whole.6
These secular trends in the polarization of U.S. poverty as well as the
longer-term transformations in the structure of the world economy need
to be related back to the public policy debates I promised to broach in
the opening paragraphs of this conclusion specifically, substance abuse.
Any realistic attempt to address the "drug problem" has to alter the
economic imbalance between the rewards of the legal economy versus
those of the underground economy. In the case of narcotics retail sales
the biggest equal opportunity employer for males in the street economy
this requires a two-pronged attack: (1) The economic dynamism of the
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Conclusion
drug economy must be reduced; and (2) the fragility and hostility of the
entry-level legal labor market needs to be transformed.
In terms of concrete, short-term public policy, the single cheapest and
simplest way to wipe out the material basis for the most violent and
criminal dimensions of street culture is to destroy the profitability of
narcotic trafficking by decriminalizing drugs. Experts estimate it costs
approximately $8 to $10 to produce an ounce of pure powder cocaine.7
This same ounce in East Harlem is worth more than $2,000, once it is
adulterated and packaged into $10 quarter-gram vials. This extraordinary
$1,990 profit represents the economic incentive for participation in the
most violent and destructive facet of the underground economy. Ironically, therefore, decriminalization would make drugs less accessible to
youths on inner-city streets because it would no longer be worthwhile for
dealers to hawk their wares in small quantities on street corners. Street
dealers would be forced out of business by the laws of neoclassical
economics. If illicit drugs were decriminalized, youths walking to school
every day in East Harlem would no longer be bombarded with offers of
psychotropic stimulants because the retail sale of drugs would no longer
be so extraordinarily profitable. The government would also not have to
waste billions of dollars prosecuting and confining drug users in ridiculously inefficient and expensive prisons. Violent crime, property theft,
and medical costs would be dramatically reduced once addicts no longer
had to pay exorbitant sums for their daily doses. Dealers would also no
longer have such high profits to fight over. The alternative, of course, is
to lock everyone up. Incarceration is not only prohibitively expensive, but
it cannot be accomplished without violating individual human rights. In
the 1990s, the United States already bore the shame of having the
highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. The U.S. prison
population increased threefold from 1980 through 1994. 8
Decriminalization of drugs in a vacuum would not significantly reduce
violence and self-destruction in the inner city so long as it remains so
difficult in the United States for high school and college dropouts to earn
a dignified subsistence income by legal means. The private sector and the
free market over the past several generations have proven themselves
incapable of generating materially and emotionally rewarding entry-level
jobs. Aggressive political intervention is necessary to promote economic
opportunities for the marginal working class. Another simpler and
321
shorter-term solution would be to dismantle the hostile bureaucratic
maze that punishes the poor for working legally. This means that transfer
payments for obvious human needs - which are taken for granted in
almost all other industrialized nations in the world - such as health,
shelter, education, and nutrition should not be rigidly penalized when
an impoverished household reports supplemental legal income. Once
again, dozens of concrete policy initiatives come to mind that would help
to rebalance the incentives for pursuing legal careers instead of illegal
ones from allowing the unemployed workers to be enrolled in educational programs while they receive their unemployment stipends, to
continuing food stamp payments, income subsidies, and Medicaid eligibility to individuals and households that leave public assistance and enter
the labor market. In the long term this would allow mainstream society
to benefit from the immense brain drain and crushed human potential
within the cohorts of energetic, entrepreneurial inner-city youths who
choose to bank on drugs rather than on minimum-wage jobs. The "American Dream" of upward mobility has to be reinvented by boosting the
credibility of the legal economy as an alternative to crime. On a theoretical level, it is clear that no society is propelled by "values" alone. From a
practical perspective, it is simply unrealistic, in the highly materialistic
context of the larger U.S. culture, to deny the straightforward economic
logic of criminal enterprise. Concrete, material alternatives have to be
available to motivated youths who live in poverty if anything is to
change.
The increasing material and political powerlessness of the working
poor in the United States needs to become a central concern. The concentration of poverty, substance abuse, and criminality within inner-city
enclaves such as East Harlem is the product of state policy and free
market forces that have inscribed spatially the rising levels of social
inequality discussed earlier. More subtly, this urban decay expresses itself
in the growing polarization around street culture in North America,
giving rise to what some observers call a "crisis in U.S. race relations."
Middle-class society and its elites increasingly have been able to disassociate themselves from the ethnically distinct, urban-based working poor
and unemployed who inhabit the inner city. Budget cuts and fiscal
austerity have accelerated the trend toward public sector breakdown in
impoverished urban neighborhoods, while services improve, or at least
stay the same, in Anglo-dominated, wealthy suburban communities.
322
Conclusion
Public sector breakdown in El Barrio. Photo by Philippe Bourgois.
The psychological-reductionist and cultural-essentialist analyses of social marginalization that pass for common sense in the United States
frame solutions to racism and poverty around short-term interventions
that target the "bad attitude" of individuals. The biggest sociological
unit for most poverty policy intervention, for example, is the nuclear
family. Job training programs emphasize attitude and personal empowerment. Seminars designed to promote multicultural sensitivity are fashionable in both public and private sector institutions. While these initiatives are not harmful, and might even help superficially on the margins,
it is the institutionalized expression of racism - America's de facto
apartheid and inner-city public sector breakdown - that government
policy and private sector philanthropy need to address if anything is ever
to change significantly in the long run.
323
In other words, to draw on a classic metaphor from sports, the United

States needs to level its playing field. Concretely, this means that the
garbage needs to be picked up, schools have to teach, and laws must be
enforced, as effectively in Latino/a, African-American, Asian, and Native
American communities as they are in white, middle-class suburbs. There
is nothing particularly complicated or subtle about remedying the unequal provision of public funds and services across class and ethnic lines.
Hundreds of short-term policy and legal reforms immediately jump to
mind: from tax reform namely, taxing the home mortgages of the
upper middle class, and exempting the federal and state transfer benefits
of the poor to streamlining access to social welfare benefits and democratizing educational institutions - namely, universal affordable health
care coverage, free day care, equalizing per capita funding for schools and
universities, and so on.
Hip Hop Jibaro: Toward a Politics of Mutual Respect
One message the crack dealers communicated clearly to me is that they

are not driven solely by simple economic exigency. Like most humans on
earth, in addition to material subsistence, they are also searching for
dignity and fulfillment. In the Puerto Rican context this incorporates
cultural definitions of respeto built around a personal concern for autonomy, self-assertion, and community within constantly changing social
hierarchies of statuses based on kinship, age, and gender. Complex
cultural and social dimensions that extend far beyond material and logistical requirements have to be addressed by poverty policies if the socially
marginal in the United States are ever going to be able to demand, and
earn, the respect that mainstream society needs to share with them for its
own good. Specifically, this means evaluating how public policy initiatives and the more impersonal political economy forces of the larger
society interact with rapidly changing cultural definitions of gender and
family. Women, children, and the elderly constitute most of the poor in
the United States. Public policy intervention consequently should prioritize the needs of women and children instead of marginalizing them.
Most important, poor women should not be forced to seek desperate
alliances with men in order to stay sheltered, fed, clothed, and healthy.
Current welfare policy explicitly encourages mothers to seek men with
unreported illegal income. In this vein, the lack of safe, affordable child
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Conclusion
care in the United States contradictorily encourages mothers to stay at
home and have more babies rather than seek careers in the legal economy,
because anything they might earn goes to pay for private baby-sitters.
Almost none of the policy recommendations I have made so far are
politically feasible in the United States in the short or medium term. I
only attempt to raise them for discussion in the hope that in the inevitable ebbs, flows, and ruptures around popular support for new political
approaches to confronting poverty, ethnic discrimination, and gender
inequality in the coming years, some of these ideas could be dragged into
the mainstream of public debates, and that maybe bits and pieces of them
could be instituted over the coming decades in one form or another.
Once again, on a deeper level, the U.S. common sense, which blames
victims for their failures and offers only individualistic psychologically
rooted solutions to structural contradictions has to be confronted and
changed. We have to break out of the dead-end political debates between
liberal politicians, who want to flood the inner city with psychiatric
social workers or family therapists, and conservatives, who simply want
to build bigger prisons, cut social welfare spending, and decrease taxes
for big business and the wealthy. The fact that Head Start is widely
considered to be the most successful poverty intervention program indicates the banality of policy debates in the United States. Essentially,
Head Start seeks to take inner-city preschoolers who live in lead-painted,
rat-infested tenements without steady heat or hot water, and metamorphose them into bright-eyed, upper-middle-class overachievers. It illustrates well the long-term inadequacy of policy initiatives that focus on
individual symptoms of social misery, such as low self-esteem, violent
persona, or deficient academic skills, instead of addressing the material
and political forces that generate the neglect, battery, or hunger of
children in economically fragile families. The painful symptoms of innercity apartheid will continue to produce record numbers of substance
abusers, violent criminals, and emotionally disabled and angry youths if
nothing is done to reverse the trends in the United States since the late
1960s around rising relative poverty rates and escalating ethnic and
class segregation.
Given the bleak perspectives for policy reform at the federal level, on
the one hand, or for political mobilization in the U.S. inner city, on the
other, my most immediate goal in this book is to humanize the public
enemies of the United States without sanitizing or glamorizing them. In
325
documenting the depths of personal pain that are inherent to the experience of persistent poverty and institutional racism, I hope to contribute
to our understanding of the fundamental processes and dynamics of
oppression in the United States. More subtly, I also want to place drug
dealers and street-level criminals into their rightful position within the
mainstream of U.S. society. They are not "exotic others" operating in an
irrational netherworld. On the contrary, they are "made in America."
Highly motivated, ambitious inner-city youths have been attracted to the
rapidly expanding, multibillion-dollar drug economy during the 1980s
and 1990s precisely because they believe in Horatio Alger's version of the
American Dream. 9
Like most other people in the United States, drug dealers and street
criminals are scrambling to obtain their piece of the pie as fast as possible.
In fact, in their pursuit of success they are even following the minute
details of the classical Yankee model for upward mobility. They are
aggressively pursuing careers as private entrepreneurs; they take risks,
work hard, and pray for good luck. They are the ultimate rugged
individualists braving an unpredictable frontier where fortune, fame, and
destruction are all just around the corner, and where the enemy is
ruthlessly hunted down and shot. In the specifically Puerto Rican context, resistance to mainstream society's domination and pride in street
culture identity resonates with a reinvented vision of the defiant jibaro
who refused to succumb to elite society's denigration under Spanish and
U.S. colonialism. The hyper-urban reconstruction of a hip-hop version of
the rural jibaro represents the triumph of a newly constituted Puerto
Rican cultural assertion among the most marginalized members of the
Puerto Rican diaspora. The tragedy is that the material base for this
determined search for cultural respect is confined to the street economy.
At the same time, there is nothing exotically Puerto Rican about the
triumphs and failures of the protagonists of this book. On the contrary,
"mainstream America" should be able to see itself in the characters
presented on these pages and recognize the linkages. The inner city
represents the United States' greatest domestic failing, hanging like a
Damocles sword over the larger society. Ironically, the only force preventing this suspended sword from falling is that drug dealers, addicts,
and street criminals internalize their rage and desperation. They direct
their brutality against themselves and their immediate community rather
than against their structural oppressors. From a comparative perspective,
326
Conclusion
and in a historical context, the painful and prolonged self-destruction of
people like Primo, Caesar, Candy, and their children is cruel and unnecessary. There is no technocratic solution. Any long-term paths out of the
quagmire will have to address the structural and political economic roots,
as well as the ideological and cultural roots of social marginalization. The
first step out of the impasse, however, requires a fundamental ethical and
political reevaluation of basic socioeconomic models and human values.
327

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Cambridge Books Online

Substance abuse is perhaps the dimension of inner-city poverty most

Public sector breakdown in El Barrio. Photo by Philippe Bourgois.

In other words, to draw on a classic metaphor from sports, the United

Hip Hop Jibaro: Toward a Politics of Mutual Respect

One message the crack dealers communicated clearly to me is that they

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