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Abstract
This talk draws from a study based on interviews with 103 working class and low-income African Americans from Ypsilanti, Michigan, a city of approximately 30,000 residents (about 6,000 of them African American). It explores how they make sense of work and work opportunity in a city that decades ago was the site of considerable industrial opportunity. That city sits on the borders of a thriving post-industrial small city as well as in the vicinity of Detroit, perhaps one of America’s strongest urban examples of declining post-industrialism. Accordingly, these residents discuss work opportunity while being uniquely situated between geographic sites of opportunity and demise. A strong gender distinction emerged in how they discuss their vision of future employment opportunities and their perceived places within them. Consequently, the talk presents a case for how configurations of race, class, and gender surface for lower-income African Americans in their struggle to come to terms with post-industrialism.
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Alford A. Young Jr.'s primary area of research focuses on low-income African American men, particularly how they construct understandings of various aspects of social reality. Young has published The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances (Princeton University Press, 2004), Are Black Men Doomed? (Polity Press, 2018), and From the Edge of the Ghetto: African Americans and the World of Work (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2019). He coordinates the Scholars Network on Masculinity and the Well-Being of African American Men, an assembly of scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and professional fields who aspire to influence social policy and broader public understanding of the condition of African American men.
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This event is free and open to the public.If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact 510 642-0813 or issi@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.
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