Word: ghettoes
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...book doesn't claim to have solutions to the problems of growing up Black and poor in the ghetto, and doesn't join the current debate over whether the rising Black underclass is the product of cultural pathology in the Black community, or the lack of economic opportunity for Blacks. Instead it proceeds on the worthwhile premise that not enough people on the outside even know that these problems exist, or, more significantly, know that people exist behind the problems, and behind the traditional stereotypes...
Brothers gives the invisible Black man a voice. Monroe, of all his friends, made it the furthest out of the ghetto. Through a government program called "A Better Chance" that sent inner-city Black kids away to school, Monroe went to a prep school in Rhode Island, on to Harvard, and was able to fulfill his dream of writing for Newsweek. Some of his childhood friends made careers out of the gang activities and drug pushing that all of them were involved with as teenagers. Others continue to struggle daily...
...take as the writing often employs a strange mixture of slang and cliche, stream-of-consciousness and narration that strains to mimic on-the-street realism. Goldman was way over his head in trying to reproduce the voices of Black men. "Basketball is both pastime and narcotic in the ghetto, the cheapest high on the street," or "James Bonner wasn't no fictional bad-ass like Stackolee or Sudden Death. James Bonner was the real thing," are but some of the most glaring examples. The writing improves as the story develops, and fortunately, the power of each man's personal...
...many ghetto kids, gaining self-esteem as a basketball player has been one way to escape the snare of drugs. But New York City police say that may no longer be a local option. The reason: drug lords are recruiting promising neighborhood players, offering them such inducements as cash and $80 sneakers to play in sandlot tournaments on which the dealers place big bets...
...final paradox of the current welfare system is what he terms the assistance-family structure conundrum. Much has been written about the break-up of the American family in the ghetto, and Ellwood argues that one of the structural problems inherent in the welfare system is that it may provide incentives for the dissolution of the nuclear family. Yet Ellwood in Poor Support is a sensitive critic, and he dismisses most of the conservative rhetoric about women "marrying" the welfare system instead of husbands...