Last week our discussion was focused on \u201cthe persistence of the ghetto\u201d and readings and class discussions were centered around unpacking what the term \u201cghetto\u201d means today, both as a noun and adjective and how the ghetto as a place continues to exist today.<\/p>\n
Patrick Sharkey\u2019s article, \u201cStuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress towards Racial Equality\u201d proposed the urban ghetto as an inherited place and how poverty in the ghetto persists across generations due to a multitude of factors. While I did find this piece a little difficult to read at some times due to his focus on qualitative evidence, Sharkey does bring up some very interesting findings.<\/p>\n
What I found to be Sharkey\u2019s most surprising, but also compelling, finding is how the ghetto is often passed down to children even by parents who have left the ghetto to pursue higher education and good careers. In the section \u201cThe Lingering Influence of Childhood Neighborhoods\u201d Sharkey examines the roots of racial inequalities by looking at the family environments in which children were raised. On page 116 Sharkey states, \u201cWhile the black child\u2019s parents may have the same amount of income and the same education as the parents of the white child, neighborhood inequality means that the black child is likely to be surrounded by peers who have been raised by parents with less education and fewer resources to devote to their children, less cultural capital and social connections to draw upon.\u201d I think this finding is very interesting in the context of our readings for tomorrow (Sherman on rural poverty) and<\/em> urban poverty. In both the Sharkey and the Sherman readings we see how people\u2019s strong sense of place and connection to place can influence their decision to stay in an environment that may not provide them with the brightest future (by some standards). Sharkey focuses a good amount of his research on the economic mobility of blacks and whites and how neighborhood environments can influence the direction of mobility. Sharkey argues against the idea that poorer blacks are not economically mobile by showing that there actually is more mobility than people may perceive, but it is just not always a constant upward mobility. While some blacks living in urban ghettos may leave that place, due to their sense of community and connection to place, successful parents may return to the ghetto to raise their children because that is where the parents grew up and they have ties to that neighborhood. I think this example is a good show of the actual mobility because it shows that some residents of the ghetto may become upwardly economically mobile but that does not guarantee that their children will be upwardly mobile as well. Sharkey found that if parents return to the ghetto to raise their children, the children may end up following a trend of downward mobility due to their surroundings and trying to fit in with their peers (who may not have aspirations to leave the ghetto). The Sherman reading also focused on Golden Valley residents\u2019 connection to place and how that shapes their lives. In many of Sherman\u2019s interviews he cites residents\u2019 emotional ties to their identities as Golden Valley residents (\u201cbeing loggers, hunters and outdoorsmen, mothers, daughters and pivots of social and community life\u201d p. 45) as being a primary driving force behind their continued residency in the Valley.<\/p>\n As someone who moved around a few times when I was younger, I can completely relate to the sense of place and how one would be drawn back to a certain community or compelled to stay in one that was maybe not so easy, both socially and economically, due to community ties. I think the ways that both Sharkey and Sherman have studied how these connections affect people\u2019s social and economic statuses is very compelling and I look forward to studying this more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week our discussion was focused on \u201cthe persistence of the ghetto\u201d and readings and class discussions were centered around unpacking what the term \u201cghetto\u201d means today, both as a noun and adjective and how the ghetto as a place continues to exist today. Patrick Sharkey\u2019s article, \u201cStuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":522,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cities-and-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/522"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}