10. Ned might have been homeless and on the run, but he was still compensated, as W. E. B. DuBois would have it, by a “psychological wage” that involved disparaging black people. See Black Reconstruction in America (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1969 [1935]), 700.
11. The weight of the shame, sociologists have long thought, explained why many relationships fell apart in poor black neighborhoods. Especially for jobless men, the indignity of facing your family empty-handed built up to the point where abandonment became the lesser disgrace. To stay in a committed relationship was “to live with your failure, to be confronted by it day in and day out….In self-defense, the husband retreated to the streetcorner.” Most single mothers had no streetcorner reprieve. Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 135–36. See also Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson, Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
12. Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1998), 134; Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 276.
13. Carl Nightingale, On the Edge: A History of Poor Black Children and Their American Dreams (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 76–77; Patterson, Rituals of Blood, 133–34.
In the days of slavery and sharecropping, black mothers and fathers often disciplined their children harshly “to prepare them for life in a white-dominated world where all blacks had to act cautiously.” Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrows: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 96. Later, during Jim Crow, black parents sometimes trained their children to be subservient and docile. “In low-class [black] families,” wrote one observer, “a child is taught that he is a ‘nigger’ and that he must be subservient to white people, since he must work for them.” A saying emerged among black families at the time: “It’s a white man’s world and you just happen to be here, nigger.” See Jennifer Ritterhouse, Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 98.
Today, poor mothers are less supportive, less emotionally invested, and less solicitous of their children’s needs, desires, and dreams. They give fewer hugs and tender fewer compliments. Mothers experiencing severe levels of economic deprivation hit and scold their children more frequently. The sociologist Orlando Patterson has gone so far as to say that “the parenting of boys and girls by the Afro-American lower classes has become increasingly abusive.” The standard explanation for these troubling patterns goes like this: poverty diminishes a person’s capacity for affirming and supportive parenting because it causes mothers to become irritable, depressed, and anxious. If parents are irritable, depressed, and anxious, that increases their tendency to be punitive and less supportive of their children. The cluster of disadvantages and traumas we call “poverty” can siphon a mother’s joy. But poor mothers are not the only ones who are irritable, depressed, or anxious. These conditions are not unique to poverty. What is unique to poverty is poverty. It is the experience of parenting in scarcity itself that impels mothers like Arleen to become harsh caregivers some of the time. Their barbed coolness is a necessary protection, a defense mechanism in the teeth of deprivation. Patterson, Rituals of Blood, 133. A vast literature connects nonsupportive and punitive parenting styles to lower self-esteem, aggression, and antisocial behavior in children. See Robert Bradley and Robert Corwyn, “Socioeconomic Status and Child Development,” Annual Review of Psychology 53 (2002): 371–99; Elizabeth Gershoff, Rashmita Mistry, and Danielle Crosby, eds., Societal Contexts of Child Development: Pathways of Influence and Implications for Practice and Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Vonnie McLoyd, “How Money Matters for Children’s Socioemotional Adjustment: Family Processes and Parental Investment,” Health Disparities in Youth and Families 57 (2011): 33–72.
In the developing world, it is scarcity that pressures mothers of sickly infants to say that their babies were born “already wanting to die” and to soothe their indifference with the reassurance that “little critters have no feelings.” “Here,” the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes has written about a shantytown in Brazil, “good enough mothering can require almost superhuman effort.” Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping, 342, 128, 361.
20. NOBODY WANTS THE NORTH SIDE
1. I never personally witnessed maintenance men propositioning shelter residents, but Crystal, Vanetta, and other women I met at the Lodge said this happened. In subsequent interviews, Salvation Army staff reported having no knowledge of such interactions between their guests and workers.
2. Institutions charged with managing the poor, those that brought together people with similarly pressing needs, were especially fertile ground for disposable ties. Welfare offices, food pantries, job centers, Alcoholics Anonymous clubs, methadone clinics, homeless shelters, even the waiting areas of eviction court—disposable ties regularly were initiated in such venues. On the role of organizations in network formation, see Mario Small, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
3. According to Vanetta, the seizures began after a day-care worker dropped Bo-Bo on his head.
4. Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967); Matthew Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor,” American Journal of Sociology 117 (2012): 1295–335.
5. From Vanetta’s court records and her own accounting.
6. In its Admissions and Continued Occupancy Policy (2011), the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee states that it “is not required or obligated to assist applicants who…have a history of criminal activity by any household member involving crimes of physical violence against persons or property and any other criminal activity” (page 16).