On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (45 page)

18
. The frustration and shame with which poor young men of color view their reliance
on the drug trade and their inability to obtain a “real job” have been a recurrent
finding in the urban ethnographic literature over the past three decades. Anderson
summed up this tension in a statement by a respondent: “Why is it so hard for me to
get a job, and so easy for me to sell drugs?” (Elijah Anderson, presentation, Community
Justice Symposium, Baltimore, Maryland, March 8–10, 2007). For particularly strong
accounts of young men’s struggles to leave the readily available but dangerous and
morally tainted drug trade for low-wage work in the legal economy or for small-business
ownership, see, for New York, Philippe Bourgois,
In Search of Respect
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and, for Springfield, Massachusetts,
Timothy Black,
When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers On and Off
the Streets
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2010).

19
. Goffman, “On Fieldwork,” 125–26.

20
. Jennifer Hunt discusses how she worked out a nonsexual role in a group of male police
officers in “An Ethnographer’s Journey,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, September 2010; and “The Development of Rapport through the Negotiation of Gender
in Field Work Among Police,”
Human Organization
43 (1984): 283–96. Also see the discussion in Emerson,
Contemporary Field Research
.

21
. On this point see Emerson,
Contemporary Field Research
.

22
. Anderson,
Cosmopolitan Canopy
, 40–42.

23
. Collins (
Violence
, 185) points out that most would-be violence does not happen, but ends in bluster
and empty threats. This certainly appeared to be the case for young men around 6th
Street.