She did so not for the money but for the experience, which she used in a paper she wrote for a sociology class. The only thing more extraordinary than Goffman’s book is my utter ignorance (likely shared by most of the book’s probably audience) of the circumstances it describes.Īs an undergraduate at Penn Goffman took a job in a local cafeteria that was frequented by mostly white students but staffed by mostly Black middle-aged women. Everyone should be talking about this book. It’s an analysis of the way police surveillance structures so many aspects of life in places like the pseudonymous 6 th Street. DuBois’s unassailable reasoning about his capitalization of Negro: “I believe eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.”) Her book is indirectly a record of that time, but it’s not primarily a memoir. (Goffman always capitalizes Black, citing W. (Of course I discovered it thanks to Jenny Davidson.) Goffman, a sociologist-it runs in the family: her father was Erving Goffman-lived for many years in an overwhelmingly Black neighbourhood in west Philadelphia where she befriended a group of young men she calls the 6 th Street Boys. On the Run is the most extraordinary book I’ve read this year.
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