>> One of the pleasures of being president of A.S.A. is the - PDF document

>> One of the pleasures of being president of A.S.A. is the opportunity to shape the invited program, particularly the plenaries. We had a program committee that helped us with the other sessions. And so the panel before you this afternoon is one I wanted to have because with the theme hard times I think one of the important aspects of seeing how these hard times reverberate through daily life in countless ways. And, of course, these hard times are non- equally shared. We will have three speakers today and a discussion; William Julius Wilson who will join us shortly. And let me introduce them right before their talk. So it's an honor particularly to have Jay MacLeod join us. He is a preacher at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in New London, New Hampshire and he recently returned after spending several years as a clergyman in England. He does not usually attend A.S.A. But he's the author of classic work "Ain't No Makin' It," which was his undergraduate thesis. And he has followed these men for decades. And so today he is going to update us on the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers. His speech is called "Outclassed." Please welcome Jay MacLeod. [Applause] >> "I ain't going to college. Who wants to go to college? I'd just end up getting a shitty job anyway," so said Freddy Panella. Freddy was an 11-year-old white kid from the projects. I was a 19-year-old white kid from the sticks. We met at a summer youth enrichment program. Basically my job that summer was to prove Freddy wrong. I'd founded the program with another classmate and we each worked intensively with the group of eight to 10 kids in this low-income housing development that I call in the book Clarendon Heights. And my job was to motivate Freddy, to challenge him, to show him and his friends the world outside of Clarendon Heights and all the possibilities that therein. And I largely motivated them the way I had been motivated myself. I parroted what I call in the book the achievement ideology. Look, behave yourselves, work hard, put out in school, get good grades, go to college and end up getting a good job.

Of course, by denying any barriers to success, that ideology could end up reinforcing the feelings of personal inadequacy and failure that these kids would have felt anyway because none of them were from families who had made it. I cared about these kids. What I discovered over that summer is caring isn't enough. Good intentions aren't enough. We can actually do damage in communities like Clarendon Heights if we're not careful. We need analysis because I imported into Clarendon Heights all of the biases, values and assumptions from my own rural, lower middle class social world. Fortunately my job that summer was an intense one. We actually lived in the neighborhood. We spent our free time there. We got to know not just the kids but their parents and their siblings. And I saw plenty on the street that can confirm some of my prejudices but I also saw a great deal that challenged my perspectives, that surprised and bewildered me. In particular I was struck by the leveled aspirations of the kids I was working with, even the most energetic, even the brightest didn't even aspire to middle class work. And that surprised me. Here in an ostensibly open society, how is it that these kids' dreams didn't even cut across the lines of social class? How could this be? And "Ain't No Makin' It" seeks to answer that question. I'm not going to go over the argument because I gather that some of you have read the book. If you haven't, you should do. I thought the least I could do for Annette, she's paid my airfare to San Francisco, was to read it, which I did, finished it this morning. And it's not an easy read. By the end I was in tears. I had forgotten how compelling these kids or at the end of the book these men in middle age can be. That's a little disconcerting. Now I see why everybody uses PowerPoints. [Laughter] "Ain't No Makin' It" illuminates, it grounds, it makes real many of the things that you all have been talking about for generations. How structural inequality, class, race, and gender- based constraints can impact on actual human beings. How structure and social inequality can

reach down into communities like Clarendon Heights and into the lives, into the minds and also into the hearts of these kids. And so what we find in the Hallway Hangers, this group of white kids who look to be simply self-destructive hoodlums, we discovered beneath their behavior a conduct that has a rationality and a logic to it given the constraints that they face. When asked about their aspirations, Jinx's reply is typical -- I think you're kidding yourself to have any. We're just going to take whatever we can get. Given the hand they had dealt, the Hallway Hangers refused to gamely engage in a contest they are destined to lose. And instead they create their own distinctive subculture which inverts society's norms but which allows them some semblance of self-respect and dignity. Of course, the study had and I think this was one of the reasons why it appeals to all of you and one of the reasons I like it, is it's got this racial twist. Criminality is almost completely confined to the white kids. The black group of teenagers, or mostly black group, only the one white member, they do what you're supposed to do. They listen to what their parents say. They apply themselves in school. They shun alcohol, drugs, and violence and they optimistically embrace the future. Now by this time my thesis adviser sitting right there, Katherine McClelland, she'd had me read all the sort of theorists. So I read Bowles and Gintis. I've read Bourdieu which is hard work, brilliant but hard work to read Pierre Bourdieu at least as an undergraduate. But I suspected and I said in the first edition of the book that class and racially based constraints on their opportunity would mean that the kids would struggle. And for this pessimism I was panned. Media critics said the Hallway Hangers are burnouts and deserve what they get and the Brothers will make it, just give them a chance. The Washington Post called me a Marxist and my parents hid from their New Hampshire neighbors. [Laughter]

The big question the first edition of the book raises just that; what ends up happening to these kids? So I returned to Clarendon Heights after studying in England and four years in rural Mississippi. After ten years the guys were in their mid-20's to find out how they had fared. Most of the Hallway Hangers had slid deeper into marginality. To be fair they dug themselves mostly deeper into marginality. They abused alcohol and drugs. They fight, they steal, they deal crack. They can't stay out of jail much less hold down stable jobs. But what about the Brothers? I actually wrote in the first edition of "Ain't No Makin' It," with a high school diploma, a positive attitude and a disciplined readiness for the rigors of the workplace, the Brothers should be capable of landing steady jobs. Sadly, far from being overly cynical about the Brothers' prospects, like them, I was naive. Instead of climbing up the ladder, the Brothers tripped up in the new service economy. They graduated from high school, many of them did some college but they were still stuck in low-wage, menial jobs. Most of the new information processing jobs were located in the suburbs beyond their educational and physical reach. And neither did the Brothers have a thing the Hallway Hangers did which was white ethnic networking. They didn't have connections to a trade union or to the city where they can get decent jobs. And the service economy posed a special challenge for the Brothers. They're constantly in the new service economy as opposed to traditional, manual labor. They're constantly rubbing shoulders with supervisors and customers and this placed them in a bind. Because young, black street culture had been so sensationalized, even demonized in this country, the Brothers could be viewed by whites as criminally inclined if not downright dangerous. Now the Brothers, they don't look like hoodlums but neither did they immediately convey a mastery of middle class culture. They're honest, dedicated and hardworking, but these qualities are not easily projected across the class and cultural divides that separate them from white middle class America. And so for the Brothers, bussing tables in a swanky restaurant, photo copying files in a corporate