There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America

by William Julius Wilson, Richard P. Taub

A stunning, long-awaited book that looks at the (still) shocking truths of race, ethnicity, and class in America today.

William Julius Wilson, among our most admired sociologists and urban policy advisers, author of When Work Disappears ("Profound and disturbing," Time; "His magnum opus," David Remnick, The New Yorker), and Richard P. Taub, chairman of the Department on Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, spent three years with a group of researchers studying four working- and lower-middle-class Chicago neighborhoods: African American, white ethnic, Latino, and one in transition from white ethnic to Latino.

Their focus: to understand how and why certain urban residents react to looming racial, ethnic, or class changes, and what their reactions mean in terms of the stability of their neighborhood.

Using first-person narratives and interviews throughout, There Goes the Neighborhood gives voice to attitudes and realities few Americans are willing to look at. Their findings lay bare a disturbing and incontrovertible truth: that the American dream of racial integration, forty-two years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, still eludes us - and, in fact, may not happen in the foreseeable future.

The authors examine the ways in which forces that contribute to strong neighborhoods work against the idea of integration. They explain why residents of neighborhoods with weak social organizations often choose to move rather than confront unwanted ethnic or racial change. Finally, the authors make clear that the racial and ethnic tensions that have become all but inherent to urban neighborhoods have urgent implications for Americans at every level of society.

Groundbreaking, authoritative, eye-opening, and certain to rekindle, and permanently alter, the discussion of race relations in our time.

Genres: Sociology, Race, Nonfiction, Urban Studies, Politics, History, Cities

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist, a professor at Harvard University, and an author of works on urban sociology, race, and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.

Reviews

[Katherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a quick, reasonably well-written, often very disheartening read about well, racial and class tensions in four (Southwest Side) Chicago neighborhoods. I definitely want to read Wilson's other works, but my rating of this one may be unduly harsh because I truly don't understand why it took the researchers so long to publish this work. I've lived in Chicago a long time (12+ years) and many areas (South Loop, Maxwell Street, much of East Village/West Town) are incredibly, almost unrecognizably different from when I moved here. Yet the research for this book was done before that (1993-95), and several of the researchers had long-ago published their own books based on this research by the time this one came out in 2006. I'm used to sociological books being based on work done years before publication, but it just seems so extreme in this case. The SW and NW sides of Chicago tend to change more slowly than the North Side and central areas, but still...

I'm also someone who gets extremely cranky with the convention among some sociologists of giving neighborhoods/cities fake names. It's not too hard to figure out these four, but I still found it an unnecessary contrivance. So many works of sociology/history/oral history don't change names: Black on the Block (Oakland-Kenwood); The South Side (Calumet Heights); The Near Northwest Side Story (Humboldt & Wicker Park); Back of the Yards (uh...).

Forgive me if these complaints are petty, but I couldn't get past them. There's real value to this work; I'd just like a comparison of what these neighborhoods are like NOW, 10+ years later.

[Chris Turek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Being very familiar with the neighborhoods analyzed in this book, I expected a bit more graular content. It seems that the researchers completed very in depth research, but only brought abbreviated or truncated content into the book itself.

Also, the conclusion was rather rushed and briefly stated (Republican presidents are bad, and a few more Great Society programs would fix the problems). For all of the research clearly undertaken, the trite conclusion and prescription seemed like it stole few bases.

[m · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a mess. I read this in 2010 and thought it merely lame. Now, after several more close rereadings, I think it's worthless, forgettable, not worth my concentrated readings.

This book's problems are numerous, one of which may be due to the fact that authorship is credited to two professors (Wilson & Taub) and nine graduate students. Too many chefs in the kitchen creates problems of interpretative continuity; the valence given to facts or testimony in one section don't hold throughout.

Possibly, the problem may be the genre itself; perhaps all urban ethnographies come off as badly outdated soon after their publication, especially those (like this one) that apply pseudonymous names to real neighborhoods, depriving the text of the historical relevance to which it might aspire.

I'm a big fan of Christopher Lasch, so I liked seeing his ideas cited. But I can easily imagine Lasch blasting this book if only given the chance.

I can imagine how a book like this could help the careers of post-docs, but the end result amounts to little more than is available in the daily newspapers.

The tragic shooting deaths of two 13-year-old-girls, referred to in Chapter Two, was widely covered by the local press, who in some ways provided a much deeper analysis of the neighborhood called Clearing than is proffered by this book.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/19...

The language in this book is often unbearably stilted, presumably the result of their striving to achieve as objective a report as possible, as if the reporters were flies-on-the-wall, not real persons possibly influencing the testimony being acquired.

My candidate for the dumbest line in the book goes to:

This study shows that in a city experiencing ongoing ethnic migration, the metamorphosis of neighborhoods continues and expressions of ethnic antagonisms vary in subtle ways" (164).

I'm not sure what this book was trying to say. It's possible that whatever one of the nine credited authors might have liked to have emphasized was rounded-off or sanded-down in the pre-production phase to suit the other eight authors, producing in the end only mush.

At points I wished I could check the informant's unabridged testimony against the published version.

I wonder if the authors' claim that "The rapid exodus of whites from Dover will very likely continue until they become a negligible percentage of the population" has proven true.

I don't doubt the authors' good intentions, but books like this contribute to urban sociology's increasing irrelevance—a topic Orlando Patterson recently bemoaned:

http://chronicle.com/article/How-Soci...

There are many instances in this book where the narrator invites the charge of being either deaf or dumb to a counter-interpretation than the one supplied.

I accept that pseudonyms are often necessary in fieldwork, and I doubt that testimonies were fabricated or embellished. But without dates, names, or deft writing, these case studies amount to much less analytically than what one might get from newspapers. I found myself repeatedly thinking: Why should I care that a supposedly real person said X at some point in time about Y?

There are many instances in this book where the author(s) could have cited empirical data to confirm or refute various claims or assertions, which would have added enormous heft to this too often superficial analysis.

The fact that Wm. J. Wilson has taken to writing/thinking about "The Wire" calls to mind a funny line in Don DeLillo's satire of the academy ("White Noise") in which a professor states: "I understand the music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes" (10).

If the social life of inner-cities were thought of as an analysand, the psychoanalyst-authors of this text would be deigned deaf & dumb. Although this book is loaded with lots of comments, bar-talk, grocery-store talk, man-on-the-street asides, community meeting discourse, and other tales told (not by idiots) full of sound and fury, without illuminative analysis it all sums to pretty much nothing, a waste of time, like having spent time with Oprah or Dr. Phil.

There Goes Urban Sociology: Jargoning, Featherbedding, and Theorizing Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Its Meaning for Contemporary Ethnography.

May 2010
June 2015

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately, I didn't find anything in this book very surprising. Some people in Chicago can get along with each other, but many others only want to live by people just like themselves. Many old people are suspicious of young people, many Polish people are angry about Mexican people, many Puerto Rican people are afraid of black people. Sad, but a fairly obvious situation if you've ever walked around in any neighborhood of Chicago. I wish they had studied at least one neighborhood that was gentrifying instead of just focusing on ones with increased lower-income/minority residents. I'd like to hear how locals deal with wealthier people buying up space and changing things. One encouraging factor was the increased comfort people had with each other when they were involved in groups together - PTA, etc. If only the churches in Chicago could serve as unifying areas more often.

[Jake Berlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

clearly written, easy to digest, and enlightening, particularly on urban racism in the 1990s. however, it bothered me to no end that pseudonyms were used for the names of the neighborhoods; i can understand wanting to protect individuals, but there was really no need to mask the real neighborhood names -- especially since the book was published a decade after the primary field research was conducted. luckily, it wasn't hard to find out the real names of the neighborhoods, but the poor choice by the authors makes the book less usable.

[TJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting insight into changing neighborhoods and racism and classism. Two things would have made it better- one to know the neighborhoods and 2 to have cho send at least one neighborhood on the north side. Otherwise worth reading

[Greta Gilbertson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting comparison of four Chicago neighborhoods based on ethnographic research. All nabes except one have become predominantly Latino. The portrayals show a trend of continued segregation.

[Gabby M · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm sure that this is a tiny bit outdated, but I still found the uncomfortable truths of Wilson's research to have a contemporary relevance. Systemic inequities such as redlining and prejudiced urban planning, coupled with uncontrolled waves of migration from Mexico and Latin America, have quite obviously perpetuated the movements of white flight that birthed Chicago suburbia, and Wilson is probably right in thinking that there's nothing we can do about it now. From an economic angle, migrants fill holes in the labor market and tend to add positively to the economy when they have families. Humanitarianly, everyone should have the chance to seek refuge here or at the very least pursue the American Dream— if it exists. Wilson examines what happens to the neighborhoods these immigrants flood into when they arrive and the social upheavals that may ensue. He found that, in all four cases, original residents of the respective neighborhoods harbored racial and class prejudices that stoked intense fear of their communities being "taken over" by immigrants and their families. He concludes that, due to these animosities, full-fledged integration may never be possible, which is grim. I think his research is uniquely applicable to neighborhoods outside of major metropolitan areas, such as Chicago, at the very beginning of the creation of their suburbs and the following decades. I'm not convinced that the findings here are true for most of America, but the lessons of social tensions and fears of community decay should exist as the backdrop for understanding race and class divides across the entire country.

[Sean]

As a Chicagoan, I found this quite engrossing. The book is a readable ethnographic dive into the racial, ethnic, and class attitudes, tensions, and demographic shifts of four (anonymized) Chicago S & W side neighborhoods (one white, one black, one Latino, one shifting from white to Latino; all lower-middle class except the long-time Latino neighborhood which was slightly poorer).

I’ve read some reasonable critiques that the neighborhood sources the ethnographers drew on weren’t as fully representative of their communities as could be desired, but despite that this is helpful as a snapshot of at least some attitudes and dynamics in a way that’s hard to gain access to (as a neighborhood outsider) otherwise. Though lead author Wilson is frequently critiqued for his 1980 book arguing that the significance of race is declining in America (positing that class is instead the central salient factor), 26 years on he doesn’t stick to that argument here, instead highlighting the importance of both factors in the dynamics he sees.

The authors’ prognosis is poor for the chances of urban neighborhood racial integration, but they briefly offer other ideas for making life and racial harmony better for all urbanites, starting by saying political will needs to be developed across the racial spectrum for more extensive government assistance for the myriad problems faced by cities’ most stigmatized and underserved group: low-income Blacks.

[FL · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an easy enough read, but seems a bit closer to gossip-reporting than to analysis. Given how long the ethnographies took, one would expect the narrative to be a bit deeper, but perhaps I just need to look at other articles by the graduate students who co-authored the various chapters. Instead, each chapter has snippets of interviews and quotes, the honesty of which might have been made possible only by how long the authors spent in the neighborhood, but which really just don't add up to much more than some narratives of race and class that are fairly familiar to most people who've spent much time in Chicago.

[Suzanne McQuaid · Rating 1 out of 5]

I got 17 pages in before I realized that this was going to be a completely mind numbing book. The whole reason I picked up the book in the first place is because it's a very important topic that is more current and pressing now than ever. But if you can imagine trudging across a 110° desert, out of water for days and finally coming upon an oasis only to discover that it is filled with rice cakes...that's how dry this book is. There are no interesting character stories or dialogue to string this along, just stats, figures, graphs and footnotes.

[Kristen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I admit, I didn't finish this book. But I didn't finish because of the writing and because it wasn't exactly what I was thinking it would be. The first chapters concerned political, state- and/or nation-wide issues that were dealt with in more cooperative ways than the author expected, such as the Utah compact. It was heartening to read about these to a point. But a lot of pages were spent on them. I had been expecting something at more of a local, neighborhood level - person to person.

[Jocelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A field study about the racial demographics of four neighborhoods in Chicago. Although the study was completed in the late 1990s, many of the research cited in the book is outdated. Interesting parallels like social programs needed to support lower end communities still sadly apply today.

[Kenneth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Does not tie application into theory strongly enough to make a good sociological point. Also, just not well-written.

[Tyler Burns · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can check out my review here:

https://youtu.be/6ERmbtiKOpg

[Joleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dense but eye-opening sociology. Wilson & company dissect Chicago block by block, showing how race, class, and myth shape a zip code’s pulse. Great in chunks, though the stats can swamp casual readers.

[B. Cheng · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really good, quick read for those interested in how (and why) neighborhoods in Chicago have changed over the past 30 years and what can be done about it.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

You gotta love Wilson. This books describes 4 neighborhoods in Chicago with different racial make-ups and different levels of resident turnover. The book focuses on how residents choose to react to neighborhood change in terms of two options- voice or escape.

I wish I could say I was surprised by anything in this book, but our country's attitude toward race appears to be the same as it has been for decades. But it's always good to check in with the individuals who make this country, just to see if anything is changing. The book includes lots of quotes from residents, providing a look at their perspective in their words. It brings the situation to an individual level that reveals much about race relations and why there are so few racially integrated neighborhoods.

[Nancy Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Julius Wilson :
A fascinating easy to read study of 4 Chicago neighborhoods and how they each have dealt with issues of integration or self definition. Explains a lot about current tensions in cities.

[Kimberly · Rating 3 out of 5]

America has often been characterized as a melting pot, constantly creating an ever-changing blend of races and cultures. Indeed, many citizens still cling to the notion that the residential desegregation of neighborhoods is achievable. The research conducted for this book, however, strongly suggests that neighborhoods in urban America, especially in large metropolitan areas like Chicago, are likely to remain divided, racially and culturally. This has profound implications for the future of race and ethnic relations in the United States; national racial tensions cannot be disassociated from tensions originating in neighborhood social dynamics.
p 161

[Gajus · Rating 4 out of 5]

The authors are particularly focused on what causes a neighborhood to reach the "tipping point" of racial turnover. An interesting study, but unfortunately they have little to say about what conditions might lead to successful integration and coexistence (and, in fact, are somewhat pessimistic about it). Please write more about how to achieve my NPR-listening latte liberal fantasies next time.

[Melinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting account of change and stability in four Chicago neighborhoods. Is it possible to have a neighborhood that people care enough to fight for, that is stable and is still racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse? This book provides no examples of it, if it is. A pretty sobering account of neighborhood life in Chicago.

[RandomScholar · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book pretty much repeated what we already know: that Chicago is segregated due to deep seated racial tensions between different groups of people. I just wish this book offered practical advice on how to reduce segregation.

[Nick]

this is the next book i will read

[Krista · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW! This is a great read about the transformation that is happening in a lot of cities but is set in Chicago

[Addie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting study of changing neighborhoods in Chicago - not exactly riveting, but defintely worth reading if you live in Chicago & social issues are important to you.

[Kit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating read - I have guesses for the neighborhoods, but since all of these studies took place when I was in elementary school, I'm not quite sure. Fellow Chicagoans - read it and confirm!

[Erica · Rating 2 out of 5]

It skimmed the major generalities but didn't really dive deep. It all boils down to this... people want to be around like minded people.

[Rebecca Ackerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quick to read and somewhat superficial. But still good.

[Kyle Smucker · Rating 3 out of 5]

An easily digestible and timeless account of white flight and ethnic enclaves. Nothing particularly "shocking" or new though, as the summary suggests.