The Uptown Kids: Struggle and Hope in the Projects
Williams, Terry and Kornblum, William (1994).
New York: Gorsset/ Putnam; 256 pages. $24.95. ISBN 0399138870.
Black youths are probably America's most despised population. In headlines, news programs, and political demagogy they- and their parents- are linked reflexively not just with poverty but with almost every other ostensible ill, from high taxes to moral decay. When it comes to black boys and young men, the popular association is with street violence.
Confronting these stereotypes has become an imperative for social scientists, many of whom recognize the need to broaden the context in which society views minority youths' behavior and that of their families. As politicians of both major parties unanimously trumpet “individual responsibility” and dismiss as “big government” any whiff of social reform, researchers who explore these youths' subjective worlds must attend also to the nature of the society of which they are marginally part. This can help to show that they are not alien to “our” way of life, but are embedded in it.
Urban public housing projects are an important part of minority children and youths' social and personal lives. Can these environments incubate youths who are “successful” -that is, successful according to both their own criteria and society's? Terry Williams and William Kornblum, in The Uptown Kids: Struggle and Hope in the Projects defend public housing in Harlem, New York City against the oppressive weight of society's prejudices. The projects, they assert at the outset, should be viewed as centers of neighborhood renewal, islands of hope.
The book's origin, we are told, is in a seminar some years ago in which Kornblum took strong exception to the blithe characterization of the projects, by several prominent social scientists present, as “failed social policy.” His objection eventually attracted the attention of MacArthur Foundation officers, who, having being impressed with Williams and Kornblum's Growing Up Poor (1985), supported the present “sequel.” Kornblum does all the non-fieldwork tasks (including research design and compiling historical statistics) while Williams does nearly all the fieldwork. Significantly, Williams is a young black scholar who lives in Harlem (not in the projects); he teaches at a private college in Greenwich Village. Kornblum, a generation older than Williams, is a white professor at the City University of New York. This summary cannot convey the fascination of their autobiographical statements at the book's opening.
The vehicle for the book's ethnographic data is the Harlem Writers’ Crew, consisting of youths in their late teens and early twenties, led by Williams. The Crew, meeting in Williams' apartment over nearly four years, in fact had many functions besides encouraging writing; it served as support group, social gathering and refuge. The Crew's loose membership was large, although the precise enrollment is unspecified. Five members are the focal point, an emphasis that helps the reader recognize individual voices. The idea of the Writers’ Crew itself is a fair and effective data-gathering device: clearly, the informants want and need to be heard every bit as much as the researchers want to listen, and so there is little doubt of their getting a “fair return” for their participation. The sections in which the Crew appear take up by far the bulk of the book.
Kornblum and Williams present the Crew's sections in a clear, uncluttered style, although the third-person voice precludes the sense of engagement one finds in such first-person writers as Jonathan Kozol and Robert Coles. Williams and Kornblum know when to hold back and let the kids speak, which the kids do in language that is vivid, spontaneous, and highly personal. Tina writes:
The D's, Dad and divorce, lead me searching for a piece of dad from boys and men who are basically dicks. But then there are the uncles. All of Papa's ace boon coons love and look out since there is no dad in New York City, I make papa by taking a little piece of everyone and making them into one collective dad....
The kids' words come to us in forms other than excerpts from their writings, including Williams' dialogues with individual members and heated discussions among the Crew. Thus the method is not a presentation or analysis of these youths' writing but an attempt to see their world through their eyes using all available sources. Although this main part of the book uses the Crew's own words, Kornblum and Williams do not pretend that the book wrote itself; they themselves are obviously the glue that binds the narratives. They use their own learning to provide information and to meditate on such topics as alternative interpretive approaches to graffiti and graffiti artists, and the historical origins of rap.
Rap, not surprisingly, is a major theme in these kids' lives, and hence in the book; it is a rallying point for some of the most heated- and cogent- passages. In talking about rap the kids reflect not only on the music itself but on the white world's reaction to it, and whites' exploitation of rap. Another prominent theme is school and GED classes: these come across as a prodigious waste of time punctuated at too-long intervals by inspired and caring teachers, but ultimately are viewed as the only road to success. Other themes include the “po-lice” who hassle youths relentlessly; drugs, which, interestingly, are as widely condemned as much as they are used (I would have welcomed a description of whatever feelings- positive or negative -the kids get from being high); and sex, which is cast in a rather negative light, associated with confusion and confrontation between the sexes more than with growth and pleasure. These are, of course, all fairly well-known areas in studies of adolescents and young adults, but the Crew's expressiveness and the authors' economy make it worthwhile reading. More subtle, and more likely to be new to readers, are the revelations of the growing interest among Harlem youths in serious reading, as seen in the activity around the 125th Street sidewalk book vendors, recalling the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s and 30s, and the fascinating if too brief section on “places of peace:”
'The place of peace is where we go to chill out,' Budd says, pulling up the collar of his jacket. 'We smoke blunts [a marijuana cigarette rolled inside Phillies Blunt cigar leaves], drink forties [forty-ounce beers or malt liquors], and just hang out.' The places of peace are the projects' version of suburban tree houses, nooks and crannies where kids avoid adult supervision. 'We have places of peace all over the 'jects,' Budd says, ‘cause if we wanna be by ourselves, this is the place to be. We talk, do rap, we in-tel-lec-tu-al-ize.'
In light of this and other demonstrations of the neeed for social space among youths, it is dispiriting to find that Williams and Kornblum harbor an unexamined disapproval of the streets, one that makes them sound almost like genteel turn-of-the-century urban reformers or 1950s JD squads. For instance they paraphrase, but do not question, Harlem's disapproval: “A good girl is one who stays off the streets; a bad boy is one who stays in them.” Elsewhere they write, “... he is on a route which promises a better life beyond the Harlem streets.” In the authors' narration, the phrase “the streets” is seldom unattended by the word “temptation” (nor for that matter is the word “sex”). The authors repeatedly characterize the tenement and townhouse environments just beyond the projects' borders as blight next to the better-managed projects. Yet this all seems architecturally backward and socially puritanical. A “vibrant street life,” with windows and small businesses flanking streets that are not too wide, is no longer a nostalgic reaction against functional architecture, but an imperative of every urban bureaucrat and chamber of commerce; it has been recognized as enhancing safety and economic development. Why don't Williams and Kornblum at least consider this as being applicable to Harlem? Of course, their thesis is built around the idea that the projects have gotten a bad rap, but it is still apparent that the projects' spatial form leaves much to be desired. Harlem's valued book vendors are, after all, located not on the projects' grounds but along 125th Street.
In reading about so many aspects of Harlem life, the reader soon knows that Uptown Kids is trying to do a lot more than evaluate housing environments. Williams and Kornblum themselves put their emphasis in perspective when they write:
uptown kids are thinking, feeling, resourceful young people.. ..The consciousness of all these young people is shaped by their encounters with the city, by their largely negative experiences with school, and by the legacies of racism. Their community may be confined to Harlem, and their immediate neighborhood to a single high-rise project, yet the moral and intellectual quality of their experiences in these locales is far from stunting.
Thus Uptown Kids is about much more than the original research question because the kids' consciousness is about so much more than the housing projects. It is they, and not any research agenda, that determine the parameters and content of the book.
Ironically, it is on that strength that the book fails. Uptown Kids is a sandwich: Williams' superb ethnography is the meat between Kornblum's rather dry white bread, bread that absorbs no gravy. Thus the remainder of the book harks back to the introduction, but it bears little relationship to the kids' stories. Not only are the conclusions and speculations found there unrelated to the ethnographic sections, they seem unrelated to present urban sociological knowledge and to common sense.
As an example, take the chapter presenting adult community leaders in the projects. These interesting and constructive people are without a doubt important to the community, and their appeal is not diminished by their rather ordinary social philosophies; one of two elderly Puerto Rican tenant leaders says, “My boys never stood on no corners. Three of them are correction officers.” But it is extremely disappointing then to have the authors echo their homilies (“What [Mrs.] Montana calls old-fashioned values might be referred to as discipline. And that is what young people need to make it out of the projects and into the larger world of possibility”). What these youths really “need” may in fact be beyond Mrs. Montana's vision or vocabulary: they need jobs, they need indoor and outdoor space to live, they need good schools. Incidentally, it is also a disservice (make that simply a “diss”) to the kids themselves- who talk frequently of their rivalry with the apparently more privileged local Puerto Ricans -to then showcase Puerto Rican moralizers. But more to the point, this highlighting of individual accomplishment flies in the face of the authors' own data; they praise the elders' “hard work, education, and discipline,” when obviously a large part of these people's success in making their housing habitable consists in qualities not mentioned, such as collective action and the questioning of authority (and especially of The Authority, that is, the New York City Housing Authority, Big Brother Landlord). Much of one's sense of community action in Harlem seems lost in the authors' attention to individual activists and not to groups. At the end of this chapter the authors observe, with naïve approval, that “real estate speculation abounds” and that this lends to Harlem “an air of stability.” How strange to say this when, in urban studies, one would be hard pressed to find two terms as perfectly mutually-exclusive as “real estate speculation” and “stability.”
The book's conclusion- where, one gathers, we leave Williams and are now Kornblum's audience- reintroduces the discussion of public housing and urban structure raised in the introduction. But since there has been no sustained empirical investigation into that area, the reader watches as policy proposals are raised without substantiation. It is asserted, for example, that public housing should return to its original mandate- that is, of temporary housing for upwardly-mobile families. But upward mobility is not what it was in the 1950s and, besides, the book itself suggests that good projects depend on strong tenant activism, which is in turn well served by longstanding tenants. Another repeated fallacy is that the fortunes of Harlem's workers are tied to a rapidly declining urban manufacturing base; Harlem has in fact always suffered from a lack of local employment opportunities. Unmentioned is another employment trend that has dimmed the prospects of young Harlemites: the decline in civil service hiring, which in the postwar years provided a tremendous boost to black achievers.
Finally, one is left confused as to Williams and Kornblum's concepts of Harlem, its projects, and its people. They trumpet the projects as solid bases upon which residents can yet forge a strong community, yet they relentlessly define youth's “success” as consisting in their somehow escaping the place. Little is made of youths maturing and remaining in or returning to Harlem in order to serve it. In Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing, a young black woman declines to join the boycott of a white-owned business by telling the snarling young agitator, “I'm into doing something positive in the community.” Williams and Kornblum apparently do not consider either agitation or “positive” community involvement as within the parameters of the uptown kids' “success.” Only escape will do.
Ironically, then, Uptown Kids' weakness is that it is a book and a half. Williams' superb ethnographic description and interpretation stands by itself, and is worthy of its own volume. Kornblum's desultory speculations on public housing are an empty shell that needs to be filled by different research for a different book. There is much unfinished work for the MacArthur people to underwrite.
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