Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood

by Jay MacLeod

 This classic text addresses one of the most important issues in modern social theory and how social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next. With the original 1987 publication of Ain’t No Makin’ It Jay MacLeod brought us to the Clarendon Heights housing project where we met the “Brothers” and the “Hallway Hangers.” Their story of poverty, race, and defeatism moved readers and challenged ethnic stereotypes. MacLeod’s return eight years later, and the resulting 1995 revision, revealed little improvement in the lives of these men as they struggled in the labor market and crime-ridden underground economy.   The third edition of this classic ethnography of social reproduction brings the story of inequality and social mobility into today’s dialogue. Now fully updated with thirteen new interviews from the original Hallway Hangers and Brothers, as well as new theoretical analysis and comparison to the original conclusions, Ain’t No Makin’ It remains an admired and invaluable text.   Contents   Part The Hallway Hangers and the Brothers as Teenagers
1. Social Immobility in the Land of Opportunity
2. Social Reproduction in Theoretical Perspective
3. Teenagers in Clarendon The Hallway Hangers and the Brothers
4. The Influence of the Family
5. The World of Aspirations of the Hangers and Brothers
6. Preparing for the Competition
7. Leveled Social Reproduction Takes Its Toll
8. Reproduction Theory Reconsidered Part Eight Years Low Income, Low Outcome
9. The Hallway Dealing in Despair
10. The Dreams Deferred
11. Outclassed and Outcast(e) Part Ain’t No Makin’ It?
12. The Hallway Fighting for a Foothold at Forty
13. The Barely Making It
14. Making Sense of the Stories, by Katherine McClelland and David Karen

Genres: Nonfiction, Read For School

552 pages, Paperback

Published July 29, 2008

About the author

A Rhodes scholar, Jay MacLeod holds degrees in social studies and theology. He and his wife, Sally Asher, spent four years in Mississippi, where their work with local teenagers led to the publication of Minds Stayed On Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle In The Rural South, An Oral History.

MacLeod is now an Anglican priest in Chesterfield, a declining mining and market town in Asher's native England. Combining Christian ministry with community work, MacLeod still plays streetball, or tries to. His working-class parish is one of the most ethnically diverse square miles in Britain, and MacLeod works closely with members of the local mosques to engage disaffected teenagers and to foster friendships across the lines of race and religion.

Reviews

[Eb · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It is a balancing act that can be hard to maintain—acknowledging both the past and present selves as legitimate, attempting thus to bridge a chasm for which there are few models…As with race, border-crossing by class is difficult”.

“I only live here; I’m not from here.” These words represent Slick’s solution to the struggle all of these men who have tried, successfully, or not, to cross class boundaries have experienced. Negotiating a bicultural persona is all the more complicated when the borders are not visibly marked (for class), as by race. You can be told to discard the past as harmful and wrong, and move into the present, having seen the light. However, as difficult as that is to implement, you can’t just claim that there is nothing of value in the dark past, and thus you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by turning your back and moving on. Class cultures are not so easily painted in black and white.

“He taught me that doing the right thing is okay, because doing the right thing definitely wasn’t okay back then. It was weakness. You let your guard down, you can open yourself to be hurt, and it’s just something you never did. You never accepted help…We had a reputation to uphold, and even though you came across fearless, there was a lotta fear involved. And stuff that I wouldn’ta did straight, with some booze and drugs in me, it very easily became sociopathic behavior. I was brought up with values, but in the game we were playing you couldn’t have those. There wasn’t room for caring…We were project kids. We were just always looked down on.”
***They have low status power and economic power, so exercise force as political power. Hence, you can’t look weak or not tough.

Grasping the complex interactions between structure and agency. Social structures not only set up the choices, but they also influence the choices made through their influence on habitus. Habitus is a dynamic entity—it changes to reflect current circumstances but continues to carry the past with it as well. It is a vehicle for reproduction and for change; but more the former than the latter.

“It should be obvious from this study that all three levels of analysis—the individual, the cultural, the structural—play their part in the reproduction of social inequality.

Class and race introduce objective structural constraints that individuals must face. The bricklayer’s child has barriers to overcome that the banker’s child need never negotiate. And blacks face limits on opportunity relative to whites. These are real difference rooted in material conditions. On the subjective side, individuals can make of these objective conditions what they will in forging their identities. The bricklayer’s son may look across his high school desk at the banker’s boy sitting in front of him, shake his head dismissively and silently wager that the other can’t change the oil in his Volvo. Or he may see in the banker’s son an effortless ease with girls, grades, and teachers and shake his head despairingly at his own oil-stained fingers. Or he may do both depending on the context. Both attitudes are subjective articulation of class identity that are ultimately rooted in objective economic inequality.

The biggest help to getting a job is social networks. Working class blacks don’t have access to those social networks like working class whites do: “union jobs, roofing, contracting, windows, etc”
The Hallway Hangers have relied almost exclusively on one means of landing their jobs: connections.

A manufacturing job on the floor used to involve distance front the client and supervisor so that the personality of the worker was not important. Now, working class service jobs involve close proximity to customers and bosses which constrain the employee’s personality.
Bourgeois behavior, constrained behavior and personality is favored in a service economy. The working class ethos can be a hindrance in this setting

Perhaps the Hallway Hangers fail to see class as a variable because they grew up so ensconced in their own class culture. Just as the Brothers do not consider race an issue, the Hallway Hangers fail to see class as constraining.

“…the “demoralizing effects” of life in intense poverty and permanent material insecurity. Living in places like Clarendon Heights tends to eat away at a person’s energy and insides over time.”

“But I’m still a project kid at heart, and my first thought’s still the project thought every single time.
Which is?
Not a good thought: whack him, stab him…[but someone] taught me that it was okay to do the right thing. It’s all right to be a good guy; it’s not being weak”

“How did you get these reputation for these attitudes?
I would tell people off.
You talked about how you had to cultivate a professional attitude at work versus a street attitude, how you had to hold that line. It sounds like that was a struggle for you
Absolutely not. The attitudes here don’t coincide with the street. If you put Frankie O’Sullivan at my job, he’d last 15 minutes. The minute they asked him to do something the wrong way, he’d tear their head off. And that was kinda my mentality.”

What tends to trigger your downward spirals? What makes you fall off the wagon?
I’m weak. It can be a simple thing, a little setback, and I end up drinking. Once I start drinking, then I want to get high: coke, heroin, whatever. Impatience too, I can’t seem to stick with something for long enough…I have trouble recovering from setbacks. I don’t bounce back the way I should.

I was very surprised by the open racism of the white working class 20 yr olds towards blacks during the 1980s. The 1980s in this area is a time of transition where the projects become increasingly poor black from being majority poor white. Black cultural supremacy in this area is completed by 2006. The Hallway Hangers’ virulent racism of the 80s is gone by 2006. More accurately, it is present but no longer center stage in their worldview by then…”Though racism is no longer as central a component of their worldviews, this seems more related to their general disengagement from the world than any genuine change of heart in their racial attitudes. They seem generally unconcerned with anything that doesn’t directly confront them day-to-day; they expect little from the larger world, and thus the energy that fueled their youthful racism is largely banked.”
The 60 year olds of 2025 (born in 1965) can remember racial animosity in a way that the 40 year olds of 2025 (born 1985) cannot. It is a true generational change in attitudes

[Kevin McAvoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Narrative of youth beginning in a housing project and their lives updated over about 25 years.
Chapter 2 almost made me stop reading. Far too much theory and philosophy for a typical "from the hood" reader.
If the book is re-issued seriously drop chapter 2.
The Brothers and The Hallway Hangers.
I was cheering for the Brothers, they seemed like the smarter group.
Listened to the audiobook from Audible.com
Very good job with the narration and different characters.
I understand this book is part of the high school curriculum in the very neighborhood where the study occurred, that's good.

[Ainslie-Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very insightful ethnographical study that keys us into how race + social status + belief in the American Dream can help or hinder your success.

Very good book. Read it for a college course and was pleasantly surprised.

[rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

simultaneously disheartening and enlightening—but bordieu comes up a lot so i’m happy