In Sidewalk, sociologist Mitchell Duneier presents the results of his research on sidewalk life by staying and working on the street along with other vendors for a period of time. While working on the street Duneier learned that respect plays an important role, that people on the street require respect to stay on the sidewalk. Respect allows Duneier to successfully perform him research, determines how individuals are going to be treated, and helps maintain order on the sidewalk as all the people related to the sidewalk, also including pedestrians and store employees, desire to be respected.
Mitchell Duneier began this research in the Nineteen Nineties in New York. Sixth Avenue was a place where numerous vendors and panhandlers, mostly blacks and other minorities, earn money every day. Vendors were to sell magazines and books they could find(bought from scavengers or found from dumpsters by themselves) and panhandlers either stood and sat on the sidewalk and asked passerby for spare change. There were also several other kinds of “jobs” on the street such as scavengers, movers, and storage keepers. Duneier wanted to uncover more about the sidewalk life, so he decided to work on the street along with the vendors and panhandlers in order to get first hand experience and to have the opportunity to interview the people working on the street with ease.
Respect is vital to Duneier as he needs the vendors’ complete approval and cooperation to finish his research in order for Duneier to finish his research. Since Duneier is exceedingly different from the people working on the street in various aspects(he is a wealthy and educated white sociologist who did not have to worry about anything while growing up), he has to gradually gain resp...
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...estroom because “[His] body and clothes was dirty and stinking and smelling of liquor”(177). Ron did not want to affect customers in businesses so he decided not to use those restrooms. Ron was an alcoholic and a drug user, and he knew that when he is drunk he could bother a lot of people and cause a lot of nuisance if he chose to go into businesses and use the restrooms.
No matter what kind of person you are you want to be respected in some way, and that is why respect is significant throughout the book. Duneier, people working on the street, and people affected by the street workers all need respect from each other, but their motives are a little bit different. Even though there are still some discriminations and stereotypes against the people working on the street, if they try to reach out to people and respecting people the stereotypes might slowly go away.
The laboring poor’s leisure activity was brief, casual, and non-commercial. Amusement was and had to be cheap. It mostly consisted of walks, visiting friends, and reading the penny press. The people of the Lower East Side entertained with sights of interest and penny pleasures such as organ grinders and buskers, acrobats performed tricks and vendors and soda dispensers competed for customers.
More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (Issues of Our Time)
Lars Eighner's short essay, "Dumpster Diving," reveals the stereotypes about homelessness in America. In order to confirm these known stereotypes about American culture, Eighner includes autobiographical accounts of the economically inferior class, as well as revealing his elitist rules that governs the life of a homeless person. According to Eighner, homeless people fall into the following categories, 'can scroungers', 'Dumpster divers', and 'scavengers.' (Eighner, 1993). In addition, Eighner's blatant demonstration of his superiority to the people he scavenges from reveals his true character of snobbery.
Mark Peterson’s 1994 photograph, Image of Homelessness, compares the everyday life of the working class to the forgotten life of the lowest class in society. In the image, the viewer can see a troubled homeless man wrapped in a cocoon of standard manipulated 12in by 12in cardboard boxes and yarn. The yarn is what is keeping the man and box tied to the red bench. This bench has chipped paint and is right in front of a black fence. Underneath the bench is dirt and debris from the dead fall leaves. The center focal point is the homeless man on the bench. He is the focal point because he is the greatest outsider known to man. Behind this man is vibrant life. There is pulsating people crossing the clean street, signs of life from all the advertising on store windows, families walking and blurred cars filled with
...sidered not respected are usually noncitizens or freedwomen. They enjoy the freedom and the diversity of different occupations such as selling things, and flute playing. Many not respected women in society turn to prostitution for work.
Ann Petry’s The Street is more than a story of racism and poverty in America. This novel is about how the intersectionality of identities limit African-Americans from achieving equality in the dominant race’s society. The protagonist, Lutie Johnson has three barriers dragging her down. She is not only a woman, but a black woman that is also a lower class single mother. In the novel Lutie faces the realities of the American Dream, which for African- Americans is literally just a dream. Lutie also experiences the harsh effects of poverty and how it shapes one’s life.
Bloom, Alexander and Wini Breines. Takin' it to the Streets. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Conflict is an important part of any short story. The short story, “On the Sidewalk Bleeding,” contains three major conflicts: man vs. man, man vs. nature, and man vs. himself. In this essay, I intend to explain, prove, and analyze these three struggles.
The author of Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich, began her experiment in Key West because she lived near there. Then she moved to Portland, ME since it was mostly white. She finished her investigation in Minnesota, where she thought there would be a pleasant stability between rent and wages. From the beginning, she ruled out high profile cities as a result of the high-rent and the lacking amount of jobs. As a secretive journalist, she related the near poverty experience to a life long ago when she was a child or raising her own children, as a result she endured the crushing feeling of anxiety. She knew she had a home to return to and her savings to fall back on therefore, the feeling of anxiety would not be experienced
The book asks two questions; first, why the changes that have taken place on the sidewalk over the past 40 years have occurred? Focusing on the concentration of poverty in some areas, people movement from one place to the other and how the people working/or living on Sixth Avenue come from such neighborhoods. Second, How the sidewalk life works today? By looking at the mainly poor black men, who work as book and magazine vendors, and/or live on the sidewalk of an upper-middle-class neighborhood. The book follows the lives of several men who work as book and magazine vendors in Greenwich Village during the 1990s, where mos...
Kelley, Robin. “Looking to Get Paid: How Some Black Youth Put Culture to Work.” Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. 43-77. Print.
Sociology student Sudhir Venkatesh sets out on a journey within the Chicago housing projects with a quest of finding out how it feels to be black and poor. Sudhir was an Indian native from a middle class Californian family and he was unfamiliar with the black culture within Chicago. In his book Gang Leader for a Day, he tells of his sociology research within one of the roughest housing projects in Chicago. Sudhir starts his research by talking to a few elderly gentlemen he played chess with at the park. His conversation with them led him to the Robert Taylor Housing Projects which was described as one of the worst Ghettos in America. His research began the first day he arrived with his clipboard of questionnaires ready to ask the question, “How does it feel to be black and poor?” His intent was to interview a few families within the projects and then go home but something unexpected happened. He ended up spending much longer gaining an insight of the lives of poor blacks, gangs, and drug dealers.
Respect is something you earn by being a good person or doing something admirable. All of the citizens of Maycomb look up to Atticus and see him as a respectable person. Atticus is the character in the novel that has the most respect. He is a caring, loving father, the only member of Maycomb who will actually defend a negro, and he always displays respect for other people.
In Brent Staples’ "Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space," Staples describes the issues, stereotypes, and criticisms he faces being a black man in public surroundings. Staples initiates his perspective by introducing the audience in to thinking he is committing a crime, but eventually reveals how the actions taken towards him are because of the fear linked to his labelled stereotypes of being rapists, gangsters and muggers. Staples continues to unfold the audience from a 20 year old experience and sheds light onto how regardless of proving his survival compared to the other stereotypical blacks with his education levels and work ethics being in the modern era, he is still in the same plight. Although Staples relates such burdens through his personal experiences rather than directly revealing the psychological impacts such actions have upon African Americans with research, he effectively uses emotion to explain the social effects and challenges they have faced to avoid causing a ruckus with the “white American” world while keeping his reference up to date and accordingly to his history.
For this assignment I decided to read the book Code of the Street: decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city by Elijah Anderson. This book is about how inner city people live and try and survive by living with the code of the streets. The code of the streets is basically morals and values that these people have. Most of the time it is the way they need to act to survive. Continuing on within this book review I am going to discuss the main points and arguments that Anderson portrays within the book. The main points that the book has, goes along with the chapters. These points consist of Street and decent families, respect, drugs violence, street crime, decent daddy, the mating game, black inner city grandmother. Now within these points there are a few main arguments that I would like to point out. The first argument is the belief that you will need to accept the street code to get through life. The other one is the belief that people on the street need “juice”. For the rest of this paper we will be looking at each one of main points and arguments by going through each chapter and discussing it.