Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black, and Male

Chapter 10. Fighting like a Ballplayer: Basketball as a Strategy Against Social Disorganizatio

Chapter 10 Fighting like a Ballplayer: Basketball as a Strategy Against Social Disorganization Scott N. Brooks Many inner-city black neighborhoods in South Philadelphia are variations of the ’hood—places with high rates of poverty, violence, singleheaded households, drug dealing, and premature death. Here and in similar urban American neighborhoods, people are indirectly monitored and supervised through physical boundaries, fraternal and compound policing,1 and limited access to mainstream social services. These conditions are symptomatic of social disorganization. Children are raised under tenuous conditions where relationships and trust are strained early on and adult efforts must be combined. Parents and guardians seek to keep young males from the street, hoping that they will resist the allure of the corner—both a metaphor for street culture and a real place in the poorest communities—and avoid the inevitable violence, incarceration, or death that is associated with the street. In South Philadelphia, basketball is used to combat social disorganization and give young men some tools to counter the draw of the corner. Elijah Anderson (1990) theorizes about the place of the black, poor, urban, young male in public. He describes what it means to be at this intersection : a young black man is stereotyped and has a negative history based upon the social position of his group; he is considered dangerous, criminal, and guilty. Black men’s understanding of this presumption operates as part of their double consciousness; to be successful, they must understand that this stereotype operates and use it to inform them when dealing with others, black and non-black, in most public and formal institutional settings. This stereotype is a direct function of growing social disorganization: poor people who are increasingly impoverished and socially isolated offer displays of “ghetto-specific behavior” and get characterized as having a “culture of poverty.” This viewpoint ignores the larger systemic and institutionalized framework of racism. Behavior is an adaptive response to the ongoing assault of macro- and microlevel 10Anderson_Ch10 147-164.qxd 2/20/08 12:20 PM Page 147 processes, including cuts in federal, state, and city social spending, racialized policing, and historic and continuing segregation, that has adverse racial and class effects. The black poor get poorer and become more isolated from any possibility of geographic and economic mobility. Social organization at micro-levels can work to mitigate these effects, although with limited microlevel results. In this context, basketball is a critically important activity. The sport is organized in many different ways that bring adults and youth together, and serious participation and integration into basketball activities build and bridge networks, providing additional resources and opportunities for young men. Young men are encouraged to maintain or regain positive senses of self through being given an opportunity to show that they can succeed at something positive and should not be presumed criminal , guilty, and inherently bad. According to numerous articles, academic and journalistic, black men, particularly from the inner city, have an athleticized identity. This identity is not developed spontaneously through peer groups; it is passed down from older black men and propagated via media images and the racialization of such sports as basketball and football. Black youth are likely to learn about and develop an intense passion for sports at early ages and come to see athletic achievement as a significant measure of their masculinity and peer group status.2 Athletic performance is a vehicle through which young black men may express their masculinity. Moreover, the importance of athletic achievement for perceptions of masculinity and status extends into adulthood, particularly for black men who earn high basketball status in their youth but work in bluecollar or low-level white-collar professions where their work rarely provides high occupational prestige or economic returns. For these men, basketball identity becomes their preferred “master status”; it represents the peak of their social career, at the same time that it highlights their skewed life course and low-status position in adulthood. This chapter demonstrates the importance of basketball as an effective social organization of men, young men, and their families against social disorganization.3 Basketball seen from this vantage point is not simply a “hoop dream”—young men’s unrealistic hope and fixation on basketball and other athletic endeavors as a ticket out of the ghetto. Rather, basketball is an institution and way of life that enables young men to cope in the current context and reduces the social-psychological impact of being negatively stereotyped and marginalized. I learned about the significance of basketball in young...