The Long Shadow Quotes

“counterparts. Although the lower-SES average is higher overall, higher-SES white men have the highest reported levels of binge drinking, of any drug use, and of drug use other than marijuana, followed in each instance by lower-SES white men. In fact, within SES levels, white averages exceed the African American: 3.8 versus 2.9 for those of lower-SES origins; 3.0 versus 1.6 for those of higher origins. This pattern hardly squares with the popular perception of lower-SES African Americans as the face of urban disadvantage, fueled by the media's racialized portrayal of inner-city drug abuse, dealing, and violence (see, for example, Alexander 2010). The”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“The quarter century following World War II was a ‘golden age’ for most workers and their families…, even for men with a high school education or less…. Well-paying manufacturing jobs allowed many men to support a family on a single income” (Danziger and Ratner 2010, 134). This working-class success story characterized black diaspora labor as well (Gregory 2005, chapter 3; Sugrue 2004), though not in equal measure. African Americans working on the docks, in the steel mills, and on the auto-assembly shop floor were excluded from the skilled unions and relegated to the “dirtiest and least desirable jobs” (Durr 2003,”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“Baltimore's decades-long economic decline was well under way in the early 1980s when the children at issue in this volume set out on their journey through the city's public schools. Beginning in 1970, and continuing through the five years they were in elementary school (1982–1987), half the city's jobs in primary metals, shipbuilding repair, and transportation assembly disappeared (Levine 1987, 107). The historic core of Baltimore's industrial might had relocated offshore, to the region's rapidly expanding suburbs and low-wage parts of the country, or simply faded away in favor of the new postindustrial economy. This new economy provides lucrative”
― Karl L. Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“The exclusion of blacks from high-skill, high-wage employment is rooted in Jim Crow and resistance to integration and is sustained through tradition, word-of-mouth network hiring, and employer attitudes. Also, although disinvestment and job loss have affected neighborhoods throughout the city, Baltimore's black neighborhoods have suffered more”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“Problem behaviors potentially are obstacles in both school and labor market, especially for the African American urban disadvantaged. White men, of both lower and higher SES, evidence problem behavior profiles much like those of African Americans, but less often suffer adverse consequences.”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“By contrast, lower-SES children labor under the burden of cumulative disadvantage imposed by their location in the SES hierarchy. Their parents want them to succeed in school and after, but most lack the means to help them do so.”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“THIS BOOK is about the reproduction of social advantage and disadvantage across generations in the experience of typical Baltimore youth, anchored in their childhood and extending into their late twenties. For most, their socioeconomic status as adults is about what it was when they were children, but their sense of their lives today is not simply a matter of how far they have gone through school or their workplace success. For disadvantaged youth growing up in a city with one of the nation's highest homicide rates (The Atlantic 2011), the clichéd “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” is not to be taken for granted.”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“Parenthood, it turns out, is common to all the negative transition sequences (that is, those that depress socioeconomic prospects) and delayed parenthood is common to the positive transition sequences.”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“It is useful to be reminded that in even the most distressed black neighborhoods, the majority of residents are “decent folk” who live by the rules and strive to lead respectable lives (Anderson 2000), yet crime and the fear of it weakens conventional social capital in these communities. Strong role models may be in short supply, the institutional infrastructure is weak, and, of most immediate relevance, bridges to good job opportunities in the wider world are in short supply.”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“It is noteworthy that socioceconomics—that is, poor neighborhoods and poor schools—are prominent in both settings. Long ago, the Coleman report (1966) concluded that family socioeconomic level plays a greater role in children's academic achievement than features of the schools children attend, but also that the socioeconomic makeup of a school's enrollment is the most consequential school quality factor. Research since reinforces the second point, with stronger school-SES effects than in Coleman's early research (Borman and Dowling 2010; Rumberger and Palardy 2005). As regards neighborhood, Tama”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“Differences across social lines in schooling aspirations—initially those of parents and later those of children—are one of the ways the long shadow imprints itself on children's academic and personal development. This is one way stratification by family background is socially constructed: it is reinforced daily through life's experience and”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“optimism absent feedback from school suggests world view differences across social lines in the nature of Pierre Bourdieu's habitus (1990; Swartz 1977). Here it is the sense that “schooling is not for the likes of us.”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“It is important that this first assessment of parent expectations, having been elicited before the first report card in first grade, is properly considered part of the family backdrop to schooling.”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“Other resources located within the family also weigh on children's development. In figure 7.1, they are represented by parents' psychological support for their children's schooling, which preliminary analyses identified to be the key component of functional social capital as measured here.”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“Middle-class parents are more verbal generally, their vocabulary is richer and more expressive, and they are more supportive and less controlling in conversation with their children (see Hart and Risley 1995).”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“For example, parent support could be most important in the early grades, when children's academic self-image is just beginning to coalesce, but over time, as children become more self-directive, the immediate influence of parent support might wane.”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“From a stratification perspective, we want to understand both immobility and mobility. For immobility, the issue is how status is inherited across generations. Not inheritance in the sense of offices or titles passing directly from parent”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“those African Americans who did manage to penetrate the skilled trades mostly were consigned to low-wage work. According to Social Security Administration data, the black graduates of Carver High's auto mechanics program from 1956 to 1969 earned barely half that of the white graduates of Mergenthaler High,2 taking four and a half years to reach the earnings levels that Mergenthaler alums realized “after a few months” (Levenson and”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“This volume aims to identify the resources and personal qualities that help disadvantaged youth, but also the barriers they face. It is a book about social stratification in the urban context, informed by the experience of the panel of Baltimore children whose life trajectories we tracked for nearly a quarter century from 1982 to 2006. They are an internally diverse group—black and white, mostly low income at the outset, but also some who began life in more favorable circumstances. The next section provides background on the project. The chapter concludes with an overview of the book.”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“Family conditions early in life cast a long shadow. That principle holds broadly, but with exceptions, and in this context they are numerous. The literature on so-called resilient youth shows that many who grow up in disadvantaged circumstances succeed in overcoming often daunting challenges (for example, Furstenberg, Brooks-Gunn, and Morgan 1987; Masten,”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“In 1960, never-married mothers accounted for fewer than 5 percent of the children of single mothers; by 2006, they accounted for 43 percent (Thibos, Lavin-Loucks, and Martin 2007, 6). African American women find themselves especially challenged by the burdens associated with single parenting: today more than 70 percent of black children are born outside marriage, against 29 percent”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“only 1 of every 3 young black male high school dropouts was able to obtain any type of employment during the average month in 2005” and just 23 percent worked full time. That so few African American dropouts find any kind of work explains how their annual earnings can be so low—an excess of zero earnings drives down the average. Wilson (2008, 58, figure 4.1) adds that the black-white employment gap widens as one descends the education ladder, from 86 percent versus 88 percent among male college graduates in 2005, to 57 percent versus 73 percent among high school graduates, to 33 percent versus 54 percent among high school dropouts.12”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“The Long Shadow implicates family resources and early constraints with regard to socioeconomic standing in young adulthood. The internal environment of the family is one source of influence; the larger world to which children are exposed is another. The external environments most relevant for children's development are the neighborhood and the school. In the early years, family is decisive for both: by deciding where to live, parents determine the neighborhood and school contexts to which their children are exposed.4”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“Family life during the early elementary years is our point of departure. Lower socioeconomic status (SES) and disadvantaged minority youth begin school already behind on all criteria commonly used to gauge school readiness”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“In 1963, Ebony magazine reported that “there [was] not one Negro in building trades apprenticeship training programs in Fort Wayne Indiana, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Baltimore, or Atlanta. Only two of 3,500 apprentices in all trades in Newark are Negro and in Chicago, where a quarter of the population is Negro, the apprentice figure is less than one percent.”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“It is commonly thought that high-poverty neighborhoods are socially fragmented and suffer a weak sense of community, but that is mistaken (see, for example, Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002). Apropos of the point, we see in chapter 3 that these”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“Nationally in 2011, poor whites exceeded the poor African American total by roughly eight million: 19,171,000 versus 10,929,000.”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“Partly, it is because we tend to think of black and white poverty differently. Sandra Barnes (2005, 17), citing census data from 2000, notes that “75 percent of all impoverished are white,” but also that (taken from Flanagan 1999): “poverty among whites appears to be less expected, less recognized, less stigmatized, and less often the focus of research and commentary.” Andrew Hacker (1995, 100) adds that:”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“For almost twenty-five years, we tracked the life progress of 790 children who began first grade in the fall of 1982 in twenty Baltimore public elementary schools. This book is about their journey from childhood into young adulthood. It happens that one of these schools, the poorest of the twenty, is located in a neighborhood that borders the two depicted in The Corner. To characterize that school as high need would be an”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

“these communities are not just drug dens; they also are home to many “decent folk” (Anderson 2000), the poor, near-poor, and nonpoor who struggle mightily to forge respectable lives free of fear. The Long Shadow also is about those living in “inner cities across the country,” but our experience offers a different view of these neighborhoods. To correct the distortions perpetrated in popular accounts”
― Karl Alexander, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood