Mary Pattillo

Kin Effects on Black-White Account and Home Ownership

This article combines the literature on kin networks and racial disparities in asset ownership. Specifically, we examine the effects of kin characteristics—sibling poverty and parental poverty, education, and occupation—on financial account ownership and home ownership. We find that kin matter for these outcomes. Having a poor sibling and coming from a poor family are negatively associated with account and home ownership while mother’s education has a positive effect. Separate analyses by race suggest that kin characteristics matter for both Blacks and Whites for account ownership, but for home ownership they are significant for Whites only. Racial differences in kin characteristics account for over half of the racial gap in account ownership, but are not important for understanding the racial gap in home ownership. The significant effects of extended family characteristics on socioeconomic well-being make a case for the inclusion of kin variables in the growing literature on wealth disparities among Blacks and Whites.

Negotiating Blackness, for Richer or for Poorer

For decades, Chicagos South Side has provided the material for the iconic representation of black urban poverty in the USA. Today, the poorest (but best-located) parts of this vast homeland - where land and homes could be had for a pittance two decades ago - are being celebrated by the City, eyed by developers, and featured by the media for their rise from the dust. This article focuses on how they are also being reclaimed by affluent African Americans, and the resulting contests over the representations of blackness. Three years of ethnographic research in North Kenwood - Oakland, located near the heart of black Chicago, highlight the class and lifestyle fractures within black identity, while affirming the persistence of blackness as a collective experience and endeavor. Nonetheless, the distinctions made by affluent blacks, which marginalize the behaviors and interests of their poor black neighbors, have real consequences for the distribution of neighborhood resources.

Extending the boundaries and definition of the ghetto

While William Julius Wilson and I both write about ‘ghettos’, the places and people we study are not the same. Wilson’s ‘ghettos’ are places of concentrated poverty with high rates of joblessness. My definition includes such places and adds working- and middle-class black neighbourhoods as well. I argue that my usage of the term as the entirety of the spatially segregated and contiguous black community is more historically faithful and analytically powerful. Also, it is the configuration that Wilson employs when analysing ghettos of the past, but from which he departs when examining present-day ghettos. This shift obscures important facets of life in the ghetto of both historical periods: namely that 1) the World War II-era ghetto featured internal spatial stratification that divided poor from wealthier blacks, and 2) there remains socio-economic heterogeneity within contemporary segregated black communities as well as patterns of blocked mobility that perpetuate their ghetto status.

EVERYDAY POLITICS OF SCHOOL CHOICE IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY

School choice is promoted as one strategy to improve educational outcomes for African Americans. Key themes in Black school choice politics are empowerment, control, and agency. Using qualitative interviews with seventy-seven poor and working-class Black parents in Chicago, this article asks: How well do the themes of empowerment, agency, and control characterize the experiences of low-income African American parents tasked with putting their children in schools? Also, what kind of political positions emerge from parents’ everyday experiences given the ubiquitous language of school choice? I find that in their own recounting parents focused on finding a quality school while experiencing numerous barriers to accessing such schools; parents expressed experiential knowledge of being chosen, rather than choosing; and parents highlighted the opacity, uncertainty, and burden of choice, even when they participated in it quite heartily. I argue that their stories convey limited and weak empowerment, limited individual agency, and no control. Their perspectives conjure policy frameworks and political ideologies that require a discussion of entitlements and provision, rather than choice.

Organizational “Failure” and Institutional Pluralism A Case Study of an Urban School Closure

We use the framework of institutional pluralism to provide new insights into a controversial process of market-based reform—school closures. School closure is a shock that highlights the dynamics and definitions of failure and surfaces values and meanings that might otherwise be hidden from consideration. Using qualitative data from a closing urban school, we disaggregate stakeholders’ competing conceptions of legitimacy and argue that failure is an interpretive process. We find that this school was closed based on the evaluative criteria of district administrators, occasioning disruptions for teachers, parents, and students that ultimately run counter to some goals of district administration.

Black Placemaking: Celebration, Play, and Poetry

Using Chicago as our case, this article puts forth a notion of black placemaking that privileges the creative, celebratory, playful, pleasurable, and poetic experiences of being black and being around other black people in the city. Black placemaking refers to the ways that urban black Americans create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance through social interaction. Our framework offers a corrective to existing accounts that depict urban blacks as bounded, plagued by violence, victims and perpetrators, unproductive, and isolated from one another and the city writ large. While ignoring neither the external assaults on black spaces nor the internal dangers that can make everyday life difficult, we highlight how black people make places in spite of those realities. Our four cases – the black digital commons, black public housing reunions, black lesbian and gay nightlife, and black Little League baseball – elucidate the matter of black lives across genders, sexualities, ages, classes, and politics.

Intergenerational assets and the black/white test score gap

1. How Do Parents Matter 2. Family Background, Education Determination and Policy Implications 3. Young Childrens Achievement in School and Socioeconomic Background 4. Macro Causes, Micro Effects 5. Fathers: An Overlooked Resource for Childrens Educational Success 6. Intergenerational Assets and the Black/White Test Score Gap 7. Teenage Employment and High School Completion 8. School-Community Relationships...

Review symposium on There Goes the Gayborhood

Gays come to the city; this is an old story. But how they come and what happens next, that is a newer story and one that informs Amin Ghaziani’s There Goes the Gayborhood? For urban scholars, those schooled in the classics of urban sociology in particular, the case of the gayborhood goes against the inherited analytic grain—in ways taken up with wide-ranging intelligence by a group of critics whose remarks follow this introduction. The distinctive demographic and cultural texture of a particular group has transformed the meaning of places and their occupants. Before there were gay people, there were “homosexuals” relegated to the “zone of transition”—the city’s social dumping ground where investments ceased while awaiting the higher and better uses to come. Granted some degree of refuge through this neglect, gay people’s beings could not be discussed much less be featured in urban analysis. The muck of deviance was residual. What a flip! In the new model of urban dynamism, gays come to be branded as creative heart. The ethnic groups and remaining subalterns may continue the trudge across the concentric rings and into the suburban sectors, but their distinctive potential dissipates as inter-mating and cordiality take their toll. There is, of course replenishment through the new migrants from around the world, sometimes celebrated for their “energies” (or at least cheap labor). But settlements of the other Americans—the great white washed—have become dynamically useless. The opinion surveys reveal that for no other group has public attitude so shifted as toward gays and lesbians—in an overwhelmingly positive direction. Indeed, the stigma system has almost been turned on its head: gays (the men in particular) are where it is happening. Good economic and networking cred comes from associating with their lifestyle, whether as gayborhood resident, once resident, or just part of the alliance. Of course, as Ghaziani notes, the US is not free of gay oppression, and some of it is systemic and violent. But the gayborhood, as it exists and is widely interpreted, sits as shining beacon: the ghetto on the hill not only for those whose sexuality makes them dream of such a place, but for anyone who dreams that powerful shifts in social and political life are possible.

Ghetto: the invention of a place, the history of an idea

The title lettering on the front cover of sociologist Mitchell Duneier’s book is oversized, precisely centred, and in all capitals: GHETTO. You cannot read it in public without your neighbour immed...

The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology, by Aldon Morris. University of California Press, 2015. ISBN: 978-0-52027-635-2; 320 pp. (

I am a double agent, an interloper, an infiltrator, between and within the Chicago School of Robert Park and the Atlanta School of W.E.B. Du Bois. What do I mean? In The Scholar Denied, Aldon Morris argues clearly and persuasively that “Du Bois’s sociology of race was developed two decades before that of [Robert] Park and the Chicago School” (p. 129) . . . “[yet] Park and the Chicago School locked Du Bois out of the intellectual fraternity of sociology by systematically ignoring his scholarship” (p. 141). This is the major intervention of The Scholar Denied: to prove beyond dispute that Du Bois’s Atlanta School was where sociology began, not Robert Park’s Chicago School. Yet I must expose myself as a child of that imposturous Chicago School. I did my PhD at the University of Chicago and worked in the research areas that Robert Park was famous for. And I drank the Kool-Aid. In the Methods section of my first book, Black Picket Fences (2013), I gave nearly full homage to Park and the Chicago School for the methods and content of everything ever written about black folks. I wrote: