5. During an interview, his mother reported that Harold wanted to be on a sports team but that she “couldn’t find one around here” and was not going to travel “all the way over” (about a forty-five-minute bus ride) to a community that did have a team. We found that there was a football team that was close to the housing project, but Ms. McAllister was not aware of it. It also was costly. In addition to paying registration fees, the players were involved in fund-raisers, and Harold would have had to have bus fare to get back and forth to practices and games.
6. Whites who drive into the housing project often receive prolonged, hostile stares from residents (arriving in a car is itself the sign of outsider status, since few living in public housing can afford a car). This hostility is situationally specific, however. When I attended the big family reunion picnic after the study ended, although I was one of only two white people in a crowd of more than two hundred, no one stared (perhaps because neither white drug users nor Department of Human Service officials would likely attend such an event).
7. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid.
8. It is striking that she only mentions the Black male field-worker, and did not include the white female field-worker, or me, a middle-age white woman. I concluded that she did not see white women to be at risk for intimidation in the project in the way a young Black male would be.
9. In one of the more carefully done studies of speech, Betty Hart and Todd Risley, Meaningful Differences, found (using a sample of forty-two children) that by about the age of three, children of professionals had larger vocabularies and spoke more per hour than the parents of similarly aged children on welfare.
10. As I explain below, Harold did engage in elaborated and embellished speech in his interactions with peers.
11. On the issue of language use and social class, see the classic work of Basil Bernstein, especially Class, Codes, and Control.
12. Unlike Ms. Williams, Ms. McAllister does not use this as a “teachable moment” for a short math lesson.
13. I found this exchange distressing, partly because Runako did not actually hear the announcement that Ms. McAllister would not be cooking that evening. I also found it difficult to accept the idea of a child going to bed hungry. In keeping with the field work approach, however, I did not say anything or express my concern. Indeed, worried about being seen as judgmental on a highly sensitive topic, I didn’t ask Ms. McAllister about the logic behind her reasoning. I presumed, however, that aside from potato chips and orange juice, there wasn’t much food in the house or, given the tight economic constraints, what food there was had been reserved for other purposes.
14. Note that in the example presented earlier, when Ms. McAllister yells at Alexis for swearing, she implicitly acknowledges that her daughter may say such words outside the house (“Don’t in here.”).
15. The field-worker explained the meaning of this term in his field notes: “Breaking someone’s ankles is an offensive term used to refer to how low the ball is being dribbled (i.e., at ankle height). At this height, it is very difficult to control and dribble the ball. The term also refers to the speed and swift change of direction that an offensive player uses. This can cause the defensive player to twist his ankles.” The field-worker, himself a good basketball player, also described Harold’s game as “A lot better than [mine].”
16. This term, often pronounced as “bull,” is used as a taunt here, referring to someone with prowess, but as Elijah Anderson notes in Code of the Street, it can also mean friend (p. 81). In our observations we did not see Harold engage in a classic form of “the dozens.” Janice Hale-Benson, Black Children.
17. As the field-worker pointed out in his field notes, this episode demonstrates that often it is more important how one looks or performs in attempting to reach a goal than it is to actually achieve the objective.
18. The field-worker, Caitlin, wrote: “I give her what I hope is an understanding look and reach out to pet her shoulder.” The fight was difficult for the field-worker (Caitlin) to witness, especially because the children seemed upset.
19. Ms. McAllister threatened Jill with a stick, but she did not hit her. A few days later, when I visited, Ms. McAllister reported that she would have hit her sister if the field-worker had not been present.
20. Another field-worker arrived early the next morning. His field notes record Ms. McAllister’s concern.
JANE: (smiling) I know Caitlin think I’m crazy. (I try to act as if I haven’t heard.) Me and my sister had got into it yesterday, and I know Caitlin was scared, but I had to kick [my sister] out. I was tired of her shit. She on drugs. . . . I threw all of [Jill’s] shit out of the door and Caitlin was like this [Jane stands stiff and erect, wide-eyed]. I felt bad that she had to see me get like that. (She begins to laugh again.) I know I scared her. (Jane is shaking her head as she smiles.) The kids were out there watchin’. I tried to give them the signal to get her out here. So I tell [them] to pick up the glass and stuff out on the pavement in the front. Caitlin starts pickin’ it up, too. I have to tell her, “Not you, Caitlin!”
21. The field-workers have not seen any of the children eat a green or yellow vegetable since the visits began. The dinner including canned spinach and yams came after this checkup.
22. Carol Heimer and Lisa Staffen, For the Sake of the Children.
23. It is theoretically possible that concerted cultivation, particularly the emphasis on reasoning, could still cultivate a keen sense of familial obligations. But there are countervailing forces. In concerted cultivation there is a stress on individualized choices and leisure activities, which take people out of the family into wider and more diverse arenas. This reduces the time available for family members to “hang out” together. Schedule conflicts also increase. There also are increasing numbers of conflicts as children, with voices that count in family decision making, often complain about having to sit through family gatherings. They prefer to spend time with their own friends. In the accomplishment of natural growth, children have fewer individualized alternatives.
24. Anderson, Code of the Street.
25. There are limits to familial support, as when Ms. McAllister felt she had no choice but to have her drug-addicted sister, Jill, leave. Still, Ms. McAllister’s decision was rooted in other family obligations. Notably, her duty as Harold and Alexis’ mother “to make it a home not a house” overrode her obligation to her twin sister. In middle-class homes, Black and white, familial obligations were fewer, partially because family members were farther away. But see the next chapter for a discussion of a Black middle-class girl, Stacey Marshall, who has a very acrimonious sibling relationship as well as weak extended ties.
CHAPTER 8: CONCERTED CULTIVATION IN ORGANIZATIONAL SPHERES
1. For similar results on parent involvement in schooling see Elizabeth Useem, “Student Selection into Course Sequences in Mathematics,” Annette Lareau, Home Advantage, and the U. S. Department of Education, The Condition of Education, 2001. But see also John Diamond, “Beyond Social Class.”
2. During the summer, the girls went to spend a week visiting their maternal grandparents, but after a few days, they called home, clamoring for their parents to come and get them. They found life with these elderly relatives unduly restrictive.
3. The field-worker was shocked. She noted that Stacey’s remark “[was] something that would have gotten a lot of kids slapped in the mouth.”
4. It is also possible, of course, that children could learn helplessness and dependence upon their parents to fix life problems for them.