Righteous Dopefiend

Most of the Edgewater folks have children, and this chapter delves into the experiences of several of the main interlocutors as parents with homelessness and addiction. As we learned in the fourth chapter, “Childhood,” the families and children of white interlocutors shun them, while Black interlocutors are likely to have intermittent contact with their families and children. The cycle of abuse detailed in Chapter 4 continue, as interlocutors talk proudly about the patriarchal abuse they inflicted on their wives, girlfriends, and children. Through exploring this violence, Bourgois and Schonberg demonstrate that the cycle of abuse is perpetrated not “as blind, imitative behavior, but rather as a resource for making order in the world. It is rewarded by prevailing cultural values that pass for common sense and for universal ethics,” (218-219).

Through Tina, the ethnographic team explores themes of motherhood in the context of addiction. This close, personal journey through Tina’s experiences of motherhood while struggling against wider structural and institutional forces, such as a rapidly decreasing social net leading up to and during the Reagan era, gives the reader an intimate understanding of the ways American socio-cultural values are still alive and well in the Edgewater community.