by Jay MacLeod
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Product Description
“I ain’t goin’ to college. Who wants to go to college? I’d just end up gettin’ a shitty job anyway.” So said Freddie Piniella, an eleven-year-old boy from Clarendon Heights low-income housing project, to Jay MacLeod, his counselor in a youth program. MacLeod was struck by the seeming self-defeatism of Freddie and his friends. How is it that in America, a nation of dreams and opportunities, a boy of eleven can feel trapped in a position of inherited poverty?The author immersed himself in the teenage underworld of Clarendon Heights. The Hallway Hangers, one of the neighborhood cliques, appear as cynical self-destructive hoodlums. The other group, the Brothers, take the American Dream to heart and aspire to middle-class respectability. The twist is that the Hallway Hangers are mostly white; the Brothers are almost all black. Comparing the two groups, MacLeod provides a provocative account of how poverty is perpetuated from one generation to the next.Part One tells the story of the boys’ teenage aspirations. Part Two follows the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers into adulthood. Eight years later the author returns to Clarendon Heights to find the members of both gangs struggling in the labor market or on the streets. Caught in the web of urban industrial decline, the Hallway Hangers—undereducated, unemployed, or imprisoned—have turned to the underground economy. But “cocaine capitalism” only fuels their desperation, and the Hallway Hangers seek solace in sexism and racism. The ambitious Brothers have fared little better. Their teenage dreams in tatters, the Brothers demonstrate that racism takes its toll on optimistic aspirations.This edition retains the vivid accounts of friendships, families, school, and work that made the first edition so popular. The ethnography resonates with feeling and vivid dialogue. But the book also addresses one of the most important issues in modern social theory and policy: how social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next. MacLeod links individual lives with social theory to forge a powerful argument about how inequality is created, sustained, and accepted in the United States.
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 An Accessible, Enlightening Page-Turner, 2007-10-18
When I was in college, I read several chapters of Ain't No Makin It as assigned reading for a sociology class. Years later, I came back to the book because I had frequently thought of it and wanted to reread it. Not only is the study enlightening, the writing is clear, insightful and elegant. MacLeod makes highly intelligent arguments without using pretentious language. His sense of metaphor is lovely, always helpful, and never a stretch. Overall, it is a humble body of work from someone who has every right to toot his own horn.
0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 Ain't No Makin' IT, 2007-09-13
Book came fast. And in good shape.
Warning: The F-Bomb is used over 100 times. So if you are sensitive to swearing, there is a lot of it.
6 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
Useful facts and stories; out-dated left theory, 2007-03-26
There are two books here, one useful and interesting and one not.
The useful and interesting book tells the story of two groups of young men growing up in a public housing project. One group is mostly white and bitterly alienated from society. The other group is mostly black and is hopeful about the future. The group of poor whites turns into junkies, criminals, alcholics and losers. The group of poor blacks turns a modestly less poor version of their parents. The poor whites experience absolutely no upward mobility; the poor blacks experience a modest amount of it. The story is detailed enough to be interesting. These are not people most of us know, in day to day life, so the book is worth reading to get to know them.
The less interesting book is the Marxist theory in which all of this is embedded. MacLeod does not argue for Marx. He just assumes that all educated people think in Marxian terms and all educated people are respectful of theoriests such as Antonia Gramsci, the early 20th century Italian Communist.
As a result, in quiet, understated sort of way, MacLeod produces yet another Left wing manifesto whose purpose is to make the reader hate the United States and lose all faith in our society. Starting out with a conclusion that ought to be common sense -- poor people tend to stay poor, generation after generation, and it is very hard for a poor person to lift themself out of poverty -- MacLeod goes on to conclude that, therefore, the United States is a radically evil society that all people should despise.
This conclusion is not new, and it is not helpful. OK, say we all agree that America is horrible, terrible bad, what good does that do anyone? At least past thinkers such as Gramsci really believed that the Communist Revolution was coming, and would make things better. MacLeod knows perfectly well that there is no Communist Revolution coming in America, and that, if there was, it would makes things a great deal worse.
In fact, MacLeod's actual evidence undercuts his theory. His evidence shows that hard work does pay off. No, none of his subjects jump all the way from the bottom of the society to the top in one lifetime. A number of them, however, make modest improvements by working hard. If they keep it up, and particularly if they teach their children to do the same, it is not hard to see progress here. At this rate, in two or three generations, these guys are going to be solidly middle class. They are coming up in the same way, and at the same speed, as the immigrants who got here in the 19th century.
On the other hand, all of MacLeod's embittered loser heroes -- who he loves, because they see the falsity of America's promises -- do nothing but hurt themselves. MacLeod goes back and talks to them years later. Uniformly, their lives have gone nowhere. They have crummy jobs. They are in and out of jail. Virtually all of his subjects have come to believe that they should have worked harder at school and tried harder to make something of themselves.
These guys changed their minds, because they have to live with the consequences of blowing off their education and not trying to get ahead. MacLeod, however, has not changed his mind. He still loves his embittered loser heroes, because he would rather than their lives get flushed down the drain than that anyone challenge his empty left wing rhetoric. Who cares about the poor? Not the MacLeoods of the world; the poor, to them, are just vehicles for scoring propaganda points.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Think again, 2006-05-30
This book is not rubbish. Yes it is slightly propagandistic on the part of "socialism" (though I agree with the views of a previous reviewer), though if you'd seen this type of poverty and social immobility in a FIRST WORLD COUNTRY you'd want to do the same thing. If you read this book and come out with the view that "they should have worked harder", then I believe you are only accepting the view that these people projected onto you. THEY believe they won't make it, so they don't do any work. Also to these Calvinists, maybe you'd like to do a little research of your own into the US education system, especially concentrating on the amount spent on these individuals. They say segregation is dead in the US, it's just gone underground (I'm including "involuntary minorities" eg the Hallway Hangers).
25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
Moving and Troublesome, 2003-09-07
I read this years ago in an anthropology/sociology class in college, and I can say that it still carries as much weight today as it did then. Jay manages to weave entertaining narration with factual reporting, resulting in a moving work that points a critical finger at our society. I've actually met the author, and can say that he is an honest, engaging and professional writer. At no point did he milk the drama angle of this work, nor use it to further his own agenda. I noticed another reviewer called this book "socialist junk"; to this person I say: just because this work is a testament to some of the failures of America's precious capitalist model does not immediately make it socialist. Moreover, if socialism means having a conscience about racism and socioeconomic discrimination, then sign me up!
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