Righteous Dopefiend

Each of the book’s main interlocutors illustrates the different types of families the two ethnographers learned about among the Edgewater homeless population. Most grew up with poverty, violence, and alcoholism in the home. Black folks maintained familial ties much more than white folks. The book describes Sonny’s relationship with his family as forgiving and affectionate, while Tina’s was inclusive but abusive. Carter’s family was directly responsible for his socialization into drugs through the men in his family and the “working-class propriety upheld by the virtuous women in his household” (142).

For non-white men, coming of age in the sixties in San Francisco often meant joining a racially or ethnically organized gang and getting socialized into crime: Sonny and Carter started committing crime exactly in this way; more generally, all the Black interlocutors had been locked up for gang activities in their teens. In contrast, with the exception of Al, white interlocutors had never joined gangs or spent time in juvenile custody. This impacted (and continues to impact) Black families, who are most likely to have male family members in jail—the prison system mediates important milestones such as births and deaths.

The chapter’s section on gendered suffering looks at the experiences of

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