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Sociology 101: The Cocaine Kids Book Review 1. It is a poignant but inescapable fact that the urban poor in America are their own worst enemies and advocates. Beset by forces that threaten their survival and their dignity, many manage to survive with dignity. Others succumb, however, to criminal behavior that endangers not only society at large but their own families and communities. It is worth recalling that when Bernhard Goetz shot four black youths on the subway, countless black people, including many neighbors of the victims, cheered the action. Unconstrained by visions of political correctness, by the embarrassment of seeming racist, or by sentimentality, they understood the long-standing truth that crack and automatic weapons have only amplified: that crime, no less than economic inequality, threatens civil liberties.
Formal rights without the substantive ability to enjoy them are fictions. Criminals deprive us of the public spaces that give meaning to urban life, of our basic rights of movement, assembly, and speech. And now more than ever criminals rob children of any semblance of childhood. In this report we are going to talk about these issues as they have been presented in the book The Cocaine Kids by Terry Williams.
It is probably a mistake to burden the individual with too much or too little responsibility in these matters. The elusive character of crime defies the twin simplifications of moralist and mechanism. What we need instead are clear-eyed depictions of criminals that can illuminate their experience in all its subtlety and density. For a while, such gritty reportage was hard to come by. The tradition of naturalistic urban ethnography that culminated in the 1960 s went into eclipse at precisely the moment when a new devastation of the ghetto family and community was gathering force.
But now there are signs of a renaissance of the impulse to encounter the urban poor, and the criminals among them, close up. 2. Terry Williams The Cocaine Kids is part of this development. His spare, matter-of-fact style and his gentle, street-wise presence make for deft portraiture of the Dominican crack crew with whom he logged some five years in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. The teenagers who man the lower levels of crack distribution inhabit an exotic world, with its own mysteries and lingo; but Squib, Chilly, and Kitty are really not so exotic after all. They aspire to the good life, and the wages of dishwashers, fast-food cashiers, and messengers cannot compete with the crazy dollars of drug peddling. How else is Master rap going to raise the capital to launch his recording career?
And in the milieu in which they are making career decisions, hustling comes naturally; All the kids out here be scrambling. Its a way of life. If you need some money, you start scrambling. Whatever our febrile images of crack addicts, the kids who minister to their demand have a goodly amount of the bourgeois virtues. Max, the crews leader, would not settle for handouts. As in any business, Max worked his way by impressing a superior.
He showed up one day not in a baby Benz, but in the big Benz. I had to convince people I could do it. I didnt have my hand out for no charity. I worked hard to get established. The kids draw a sharp moral boundary between cocaine users and crack-heads.
They disdain the latter's lack of self-control, their immersion in compulsive pleasure. Adorned in gold chains, Master rap rejects the Dionysian ethos of his crime, or partner: I know better. I think making money is OK, but not making it just by dealing. You gotta go legit, at least for a minute. You gotta go state of fresh, all the way live, if you wanna do anything worthwhile out here.
Everybody thinks they can make crazy dollars, but they confused. It aint like that. Ive seen cocaine bust many a healthy get fucked up and be clocking out after they find out they cannot find the key to understanding the mystery of skied [being stoned]. I say skied. But you know what? But-but-but you know what?
They dont have a clue. Word. The requirements of selling crack impose their own discipline on the sellers. To get repeat business, street dealers must establish a reputation for good product, retain access to consignments, develop a strategy to avoid arrests and robberies. These tasks require an extended time horizon, and the boys are encouraged by a job ladder that holds out the promise of mobility: with enough business acumen, a kid can move up and get behind the scale.
As Williams notes, A kid who can routinely handle money, control personal use of cocaine, deal with buyers, and control a weapon, may make it out of the street and into the elite world of the super dealer. Dealing, in other words, mimics and mirrors respectable life in countless ways. In Williams telling, the merchants of crack are essentially merchants. Still, it is hard not to wonder if this portrait owes something to Williams sympathetic personality as well as to the kids actual normality. At every point, he hastens to reassure us that the kids are like us that the kids live in flux, with the day-to-day troubles, the sorrows and expectations, of any adolescents. The diminutive phrase the kids is itself a sly, if unwitting, argument; proclaiming the innocence of youth, it seeks to minimize distance.
This impulse follows from a moral desire to consecrate the kids, to make us feel for the vulnerability beneath their surface hardness, but it also draws force from a sociological view of crime as an adaptive response to blocked opportunity in a culture that enshrines material success. 3. These two impulses, the moral and the sociological, have always been entangled in liberal scholarship and politics. They have helped to parry the pernicious influence of social Darwinism and atomistic individualism, the founts of the tendency to blame the victim. This fusion of optimism and naturalism remains an enduring contribution to American political culture.
By insisting that immigrant criminals shared the American commitment to the value of achievement, but merely lacked the opportunity to realize it, sociologists like Robert Merton reclaimed the criminals as members, perhaps misguided, of the civic community. As Robert Warshow put it, the gangster suffered not from too little Americanism but from too much. His silk shirts, like the gold ornamentation of todays dealers, do not transgress what we hold dear, they perversely flaunt it. In the hands of the less conceptually agile, however, this sensible emphasis on the power of circumstance to tempt even the most virtuous to transgress has long posed certain problems. At its most maudlin, say, when invoked by insufficiently savvy do-goods and social workers, the theory tends to encourage a gullibility that juvenile delinquents are quick to exploit. (Officer Krupke, Ive got a social disease. ) Indiscriminate cries of racism have become a variation on this basic plea for moral immunity. Therapeutic ideology and sociological jurisprudence can easily mask moral irresponsibility. 4.
Arguments that highlight the social determinants of crime have another problem: they fail to discriminate very finely. Most poor people do not become criminals. Only a small percentage of those who do take that route engage in the truly predatory conduct that threaten civilized life. Historically, some people whose mobility is blocked have been willing to work long hours at low wages, others have not.
A lot of kids even in stable working-class ethnic neighborhoods do a lot of drugs and head-busting, and plenty of upper-middle-and upper-class people have decadent values. Finally, the theory doesnt account for the fluctuating nature of criminal careers, for the predominance of adolescents in street crime, for the way poor people shift about among legitimate, illicit, and underground economies in response to opportunities and their lack. Personally I liked this book because it is very informative about the issues of life on the streets and how younger people can get involved in it. The book highlights many social problems that need to be solved for a long period of time and still exist. It is a kind of a challenge to government officials for improvement. Bibliography: Terry Williams.
The Cocaine Kids: The Inside Story of a Teenage Drug Ring. Addison-Wesley.
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