Quotes from Karl Alexander

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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,

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

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