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

present due to racial barriers. Because they are segregated, black neighborhoods encompass a range of behaviors that cross not only class lines and lifestyle choices, but also the lines between criminal and legal activities. Patillo establishes that the average black person lives in a neighborhood with a median income of $35,306, whereas the average white person lives in a neighborhood with a median income of $51,459. Some “legacy” homeowners of the next generation become involved in drugs and let their houses run down, and there are many “grown children” who live at home, so they enjoy leisure time rather than finishing school or starting a career. The more accessible life, street life, constantly tempts Groveland’s middle-class youths, and the same close ties that provide stability also mean adults turn their heads and tend to ignore the situation when their children get involved in the catastrophe. Although their parents have provided them with cultural capital in the form of job contacts, Catholic school or magnet education, and information about college, the street life and quick money found through drugs have strong appeal to young people trying to establish their image amongst themselves.
Patillo argues that Groveland is not a contest between families who are distinctly “street” or “decent” families. Rather the balance between good and bad behavior is constantly being negotiated by individuals, families, and the community. Groveland has black-owned businesses, readily apparent pride in beautiful homes, yards, and black culture and symbols celebrated throughout the neighborhood and its institutions. The author describes how these networks are mobilized to assist individual members of the community in achieving upward mobility and to promote social control at the neighborhood level. However, the industrial jobs that made mobility possible are disappearing, and the public sector and mid-level professional jobs that appear in their place are less stable or require more education.
Patillo also claims that social disorganization is not a problem.

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

position in the strati cation system. This point is best exemplified in Patillo’s discussion of consumer culture in the black community. She begins by identifying the role of conspicuous consumption as a potentially destabilizing factor in the black community. Patillo take this analysis beyond the obvious and points out that mass consumption can promote empowerment and class consciousness in the black community. In part, this results from the black community’s recognition of the contradictions inherent in corporate strategies that target young people and the poor as potential consumers of luxury goods. However, community empowerment and class consciousness also stems from the black community’s adaptation of aspects of mass society for its own purposes. For example, Patillo describes how mass culture is appropriated and re-marketed by black gang members who modify the images of Nike sold in the informal economy. Gang members are then able to forward their economic and organizational interests. Subtly, Patillo argues that the concept of homeownership is appropriated by blacks in an effort to cultivate and reproduce social status. For instance, she argues that the inheritance of homes by the children of the black middle class is the principle mechanism by which middle class status is reproduced intergenerationally in an era shaped by deindustrialization, global economic restructuring, and downward mobility.
In essence, the cultivation and maintenance of middle class status is a source of stability and autonomy in the black community. Nevertheless, the efforts of the black middle class to transfer wealth and status to their children through home-ownership are frustrated by the deteriorating material condition of black neighborhoods in the contemporary period. Patillo describes how black neighborhood are at a disadvantage due to their stigmatization in the broader society, historic patterns of racial segregation, and declining opportunity structures for young African Americans. Yet, in the face of community disinvestment, downward mobility, and racial intolerance, she ends that black neighborhoods continue to articulate mainstream values and support the status quo. In essence, Patillo suggests that a conscious strategy of maintaining middle class status has been adopted by the black middle class in order to forward the interests of the black communities more generally.