The Painful Symptoms of Inner-city Apartheid and Drug Abuse

C. Wright Mills, in a statement of the sociological perspective, suggests that the sociological imagination offers insight into the relationship between personal troubles and public issues: “… it is by means of the sociological imagination that men now hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society.” Sociologist Philippe Bourgois applies Mills’ idea of the sociological imagination in his study on drug dealers in New York City.
Philippe Bourgois’ study of street-level drug dealers took place in East Harlem, New York during the 1990s. During his informal study, Bourgois lived among Puerto Rican drug dealers and observed them: focusing on their lives as drug dealers and their place in American society. The participants of the study were Bourgois’ friends at the time and they had no idea that they were being studied.
Bourgois studied the drug dealers to deeper understand the political economy of inner-city street culture. He suggested that inner-city areas promote “racial segregation and economic marginalization” on the Latinos and African Americans dwelling in them. He believed that these people were strongly affected by social marginalization and alienation: they were discriminated against, not given the same rights and benefits as white middle-class Americans, and thus had no other choice but to turn to illegal jobs like drug-dealing as a source of income.
During his study, Philippe Bourgois made some very interesting findings. He found that due to discrimination against minorities, most Latinos and African Americans were forced to work minimum wage jobs, barely earning enough to make a living. The men he ...

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...forcement, fair and equal schooling for children, and cleaning up inner-city neighborhoods.
In his final remarks regarding his study, Philippe Bourgois states, “The painful symptoms of inner-city apartheid will continue to produce record numbers of substance abusers, violent criminals, and emotionally disabled and angry youths if nothing is done to reverse the trends in the United States since the late 1960s around rising relative poverty rates and escalating ethnic and class segregation.” Bourgois uses the sociological imagination to connect the problems faced by the drug dealers of East Harlem to those that span nationwide among minorities living in similar inner-city areas. He suggests that policies need to be changed across America to ensure that the quality of life for individual living in inner-city areas, like the drug dealers in East Harlem, will improve.