The Boundaries of Class in Urban America: Street Gangs, Social Workers, and the Meaning of the Mean Streets

Eric C. Schneider. Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. 408 pp. Line illustrations, maps, halftones, notes, and index. $29.95.

Daniel J. Walkowitz. Working With Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 440 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).

Race and class have doubly determined how social difference in the United States is calculated and experienced, and thus can never be fully disentangled, but they have on occasion alternated as the principal valence in political culture and in wider discourses of inequality and opportunity. Tracing the contours of the American race/class relationship, and identifying these points of inflection, has now occupied a generation of new social and post-new social historians. In the twentieth century, World War II and the early Cold War have in recent work come to mark a divide between the unabashedly class politics and social language of the 1930s (which depended entirely on various forms of racial exclusion and silencing) and the equally dominant "race question" and civil rights/black power politics and social language of the postwar era. As the meanings and significance of race and class changed in relation to one another across midcentury, few dimensions of American life felt the shift more profoundly--or contributed more to it--than the social geography and welfare systems of major cities. A pair of new books, Eric C. Schneider's Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings and Daniel J. Walkowitz's Working With Class, engage this shift and its consequences to frame studies of two counterposed urban worlds: adolescent New York gangs in Schneider's case, professional social workers in Walkowitz's. Together, they offer a dual challenge to historians of the race/class dyad: to make gender more central to how we conceptualize recent urban transformations and to problematize the consensual nature of middle-class identity.

Twentieth-century urban history is increasingly dominated by a post-World War II narrative of contested racial neighborhood succession and deindustrialization. A quite impressive trove of recent and forthcoming work promises to elaborate this narrative even further. ¹ At the center of this revival of urban history is an emerging "spatial turn" and a concern with the reformulation of politics, neighborhoods, and civic institutions in the urban North in terms of a highly racialized, and increasingly segmented, geography and opportunity structure. The key moments and players in this narrative are familiar: the abandonment of nineteenth-century urban cores by both industry and middle-class whites, extensive migration of African Americans (and Puerto Ricans in the case of New York) to northern and western cities during and after World War II, and a resegregation of residential and occupational space (making of the "second ghetto") through a combination of disastrous federal urban policy, the neighborhood defensiveness of white homeowners, and continued employment discrimination and deindustrialization. We have, in short, a set of stories about postwar cities that have mostly to do with race. These stories are of crucial importance and stand to enrich our understanding of postwar America, but they remain largely uninformed, or at best superficially informed, by narratives of gender. Herein lies the promise of Schneider's study of postwar youth gangs in New York: a tale of urban transformation that places gender, in this case masculinity, at the center.

Schneider takes seriously that there is a gendered story to tell about how urban space was constituted, disputed, and given meaning by an important, but overlooked and ultimately terribly powerless, group of people: the sons of working-class New Yorkers who fell outside of the cultural and economic mainstream. As New York yielded in the postwar decades to the automobile- and property-centered logic of planning bureaucrats...