As a young, White, upper-middle class woman from an academic family, Alice Goffman moved into a low-income African American neighborhood and began researching the way the police state shapes the lives of young Black men. Her book, On the Run, has received much critical acclaim, and I think some of that is well-deserved. The book is beautifully written and she paints a nuanced picture of how policing practices work to criminalize young Black men and their families. She makes a strong argument that the policing serves to perpetuate the criminality, not vice versa.
Her book has also been criticized, especially for pathologizing the community where she did her research. I agree with Betts’s argument that she seems to dwell on drugs, guns, and cockroaches, saving for very late in the book the lives of neighborhood residents who are not involved in criminal activities. She relies on what Victor Rios calls the “jungle-book trope” of urban ethnography (2011: 174).
My biggest concern about the book is Goffman’s lack of attention to her White privilege. She has a section in her appendix where she discusses her privilege, but she focuses on the privileges that accrued to her from growing up in a family of social scientists (2014: 228-229). When she talks about race, she describes how out of place she felt at first in the community and the time it took to establish herself and gain residents’ trust. I can relate to this, since as a young, White, upper-middle class woman from an academic family, I too did research in a predominantly African American neighborhood. But I think her lived experience of race as a problem that she had to overcome in her fieldwork blinded her to the privilege that she carried.
As she did become accepted by the group of young men, she joined them in running from the police; she was interrogated by the police; she had a gun pointed at her by the police; she was roughly pushed to the ground and hand-cuffed by the police; and she came to fear them in a deeply embodied way. But what she never talks about is that the stakes were so different for her; the police do not kill white women. Unlike the young man strangled by the police whose death she witnessed, unlike Michael Brown, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Ezell Ford, and Dante Parker, and so many many others, she never had to fear being killed by the police.
The lack of attention to her White privilege mirrors her lack of engagement with race as a structuring principle of the US. Her book is about people who live in a specific racial category, but it is not about race. In fact, in the conclusion, she implies that class matters more than race in shaping the outcomes and processes she observed. While I don’t think it is productive to argue over whether race or class matters more, her choice to emphasize class over race suggests to me that unlike the Black boys and men who do face death from the police, she has not yet reckoned with the terrible power of race in the US today.
Her book has also been criticized, especially for pathologizing the community where she did her research. I agree with Betts’s argument that she seems to dwell on drugs, guns, and cockroaches, saving for very late in the book the lives of neighborhood residents who are not involved in criminal activities. She relies on what Victor Rios calls the “jungle-book trope” of urban ethnography (2011: 174).
My biggest concern about the book is Goffman’s lack of attention to her White privilege. She has a section in her appendix where she discusses her privilege, but she focuses on the privileges that accrued to her from growing up in a family of social scientists (2014: 228-229). When she talks about race, she describes how out of place she felt at first in the community and the time it took to establish herself and gain residents’ trust. I can relate to this, since as a young, White, upper-middle class woman from an academic family, I too did research in a predominantly African American neighborhood. But I think her lived experience of race as a problem that she had to overcome in her fieldwork blinded her to the privilege that she carried.
As she did become accepted by the group of young men, she joined them in running from the police; she was interrogated by the police; she had a gun pointed at her by the police; she was roughly pushed to the ground and hand-cuffed by the police; and she came to fear them in a deeply embodied way. But what she never talks about is that the stakes were so different for her; the police do not kill white women. Unlike the young man strangled by the police whose death she witnessed, unlike Michael Brown, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Ezell Ford, and Dante Parker, and so many many others, she never had to fear being killed by the police.
The lack of attention to her White privilege mirrors her lack of engagement with race as a structuring principle of the US. Her book is about people who live in a specific racial category, but it is not about race. In fact, in the conclusion, she implies that class matters more than race in shaping the outcomes and processes she observed. While I don’t think it is productive to argue over whether race or class matters more, her choice to emphasize class over race suggests to me that unlike the Black boys and men who do face death from the police, she has not yet reckoned with the terrible power of race in the US today.
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