On the Edge: A History of Poor Black Children and Their American Dreams
Nightingale, Carl Husemoller (1993).
New York: Basic Books; 254 pages. $24.00. ISBN 0465036511.
The second part of the title of Carl Husemoller Nightingale's On the Edge is meant, one suspects, to give pause: A History of Poor Black Children and Their American Dreams. One is made to consider: do poor black children dare to have dreams at all, let alone “American Dreams”? Nightingale sets out to demonstrate that these children, although they may form what could be called a subculture, are steeped in mainstream American values. They want ordinary, comfortable lives, revere violence and its instruments, seek to command the respect of their communities, and most of all, are captive to media and thus have a bottomless craving for consumer goods.
The argument that Nightingale, who is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, puts forth is supported by an intriguing combination of data sources- youth workers' field reports from black neighborhoods in Philadelphia in the 1950s and 1960s, and the author's own acquaintances and friendships since 1987 with black youths in that city.
At first glance, then, On the Edge seems to be attempting something necessary and original: to add an historical dimension to the spectacle of decay and violence in poor black neighborhoods through the use of life histories. Given this, one would expect an account of changes in urban structure and neighborhood life, along with insights into the feelings and actions of children, and perhaps of their parents and teachers.
No such thing is in the offing, however, and what is offered is a pale substitute. Make no mistake, Nightingale is a good man and is wonderful for these children. He lives among his informants, knows them, invites them into his home (often having to count his spoons), and repeatedly puts himself in harm's way by entering their daily lives. Nightingale is white, and dealing with pre-teens and young teens, some of whom are terrifying: one youth threatens his life with chilling off-handedness.
The problem is not with Nightingale the man, or even Nightingale the interpretive social scientist, but with Nightingale the scholar of the history of social policy towards poor blacks. He can break no ground there since he immediately becomes deeply mired in a quicksand topic: poor blacks' childrearing practices. It is as though Nightingale, who seeks to provide a fresh alternative to such self-appointed paragons of family values as Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Newt Gingrich, lets them set the book’s agenda. Some examples:
Among the 110 boys [in the 1950s and 60s] whose...case reports I read, the thirty most troubled, most aggressive, and least responsive to the association's help were those whose parents most consistently acted on the belief that cooperative behavior needed to be taught to children by noncooperative and aggressive means, and who most consistently and cruelly practiced that philosophy.
The same observation could have been made by a 1950s caseworker, as it no doubt was. Or again:
Like all other families, the families of late-twentieth-century poor urban African-Americans have had vital and wide-ranging influence on the children they raise. However, the problems thought to be principally associated with single-parent households- lack of masculine identification, boys' troubles with mothers, and the paucity of role models and family supervisors -do not appear to be as important in the raising of children as the nature of parenting practices themselves.
Liberals take heart: black children’s failure is not a function of single motherhood: these families screw things up even when intact! Later Nightingale tries to put the findings into perspective:
None of this evidence, however, supports the notion that either single-parent household structure or parenting practices even come close to substituting for a complete historical explanation for the recent changes in inner-city social life...What has gone on...is due largely to historical factors that have origins beyond the limits of inner-city neighborhoods.
This admission would not be bad coming at the beginning of the book, but coming as it does well over halfway through it, and on the heels of an exhaustive discussion of childrearing practices, it is irrelevant.
Nightingale early on promises us a “new vocabulary” in dealing with inner-city black children. Yet, what he delivers is a book swarming with buzz-words from the speeches of the likes of Moynihan, Gingrich and company -parental “neglect,” “abuse,” “brutality,” and “cruelty.” Nightingale never does get around to the large-scale historical factors existing beyond the neighborhood. When he does allude to them, it is always as reflected in the children’s response to them; he does not confront them head-on. Thus such realities as inequality and urban blight become not examples of social problems but solely sources of psychological distress. Nightingale himself seems to lose all sense of the book's purpose: on page 112 (well over halfway through) he attempts to clarify his purpose- but coming so late in the game, the attempt is a sure sign that the purpose is lost.
One reason for this failing is that the world of On the Edge is not a concrete one but one that exists as a partly phenomenological, partly statistical kaleidoscopic image consisting of children’s words, harried caseworkers' jottings, and decades of academic treatments of “ghetto pathology.” There is no physical environment to ground the data: although the research is ostensibly neighborhood-based, we see no neighborhood, no description of a place- no houses, living rooms, streets, parks, stores, churches, movie theaters, parking lots, rooftops, buses and trains, parks, playgrounds, schoolyards and recreation centers.
This gaping hole relates to another: a lack of what historians call “historical imagination.” Nightingale gives us no sense of the past, nor of past-present connections, other than in dry statistics or scattered anecdotes. But the world has changed and it is incumbent on the historian to provide at least some sense of it. A point of historical comparison should be not just between, say, how many acts of violence per capita there were in 1955 as compared with 1985; one needs to know something of how a 1950s neighborhood overall differed from one in the 1980s and 90s. But Nightingale gives no clue.
Several miscellaneous distortions and errors appear. One is a lack of attention to girls (the “children” in the title might even be changed to “boys”). Others include a reference to “the riots of the late 1960s” (the riots in fact occurred between 1964 to 1968); placing the Rodney King beating in 1990 (it was in 1991); characterizing kids as “falling into” the juvenile system increasingly in the 1950s (they did not just “fall in”- the entire police apparatus was greatly expanded then in order to round them up); and lastly Nightingale points to a dwindling urban manufacturing base as removing prospects for gainful employment while ignoring the historically important role of civil service employment to black families.
Finally, it is dismaying to see, in the reference notes, no mention of two books that should be sine qua non for a life-history of poor inner city youths taking in the 1950s and 1960s- James Bennett's Oral History and Delinquency (1981) and especially, William Ryan's Blaming the Victim (1971). Ryan's debunking thesis has been the nemesis of all post-Great Society anti-black nonsense about the alleged moral failures of ghetto parents: consulting it may have helped Nightingale seize the ball from the reactionaries' court. He instead addresses black people's behavior strictly as such, and not as the underclass wreckage of the actions and imperatives of a hostile white society (which he himself asserts is at the bottom of the crisis). Thus Nightingale becomes, despite himself, a reactionary in liberal's ponytail, and On the Edge becomes a sincere, well-meaning mess.
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