Summary Of Mary Patillo's Black Picket Fences

Mary Patillo’s Black Picket Fences recounts her experience in the city of Groveland, Chicago, where she points that race is a determinative factor in the success of an individual. Her focus on the neighborhood shows the effects of the precarious economic and social positions of young people in middle-class families, not only in the city of Chicago, but also everywhere else. She captures the complexities of the social world of black middle-class youths in the 1990s and makes the case that racial segregation in America means inequality persists even between the middle classes. Patillo delivers her message efficiently.
Society associates middle-class blacks as equal to middle-class whites because of their class position, but the inequality is

Rather, neighborhood networks are described as resilient and adaptive to emerging political and economic changes in the broader society. It is argued that the black community remains organized internally. This point is illustrated through an analysis of networks encompassing family members, black institutions, coworkers, and street gangs. These networks promote structure and social stability. Patillo goes further in her critique of past scholarship, arguing that organizational stability in black neighborhoods is the product of norms and values, and that these community standards are negotiated among an assortment of class and status groups. For instance, she argues that social control is promoted in a neighborhood context where “legitimate” members of the black middle class participate in the cultivation and maintenance of common community norms. In particular, this parallel is found in her discussion of the manner in which gang members and law-abiding citizens share the responsibility for maintaining local social institutions. The gang is seen as part of the neighborhood’s social fabric and a stabilizing in uences on the community. Patillo develops an image of the black community as socially engaged, despite the harsh realities of economic restructuring. She demonstrates that middle class status and values are maintained and articulated through community action, despite changing material conditions in society and structural shifts in the global economy. Of course, the new black middle class she describes is different from the black middle class that came to Chicago in search of manufacturing and public sector jobs during the Great Migration. Patillo’s black middle class is the product of the contemporary economic and political milieu. Class formation for this group is seen as a process where individuals adapt to structural change and appropriate aspects of the dominant culture to reconstitute their