Growing up Poor

by Terry Williams, William Kornblum

This ethnographic study looks at teenagers trapped in poverty how some succeed in the struggle to get out and others finally give up trying. It is an outgrowth of interviews with some 900 teens in New York City, Cleveland, Louisville, and Meridian, Mississippi. The neighborhoods where they live are socially and racially diverse. Among them are white areas slding into poverty as traditional blue-collar jobs in smokestack industries fade away, and black and Hispanic neighborhoods where chronic unemployment has long been the prevailing tradition and fact of life. Based on the teenagers' own accounts, the book describes their experiences with working and seeking work, achievements in school and athletics, family life, and the positive influences of their peers and adult mentors. It also details the negative choices that tend to make poverty a life sentence: prostitution and street hustles, pregnancy and early parenthood, gang membership and criminal outlets, drugs and withdrawal into despair. Still, hope is an unquenchable attribute of youth, and it bubbles up in this book as the authors show how much these teenagers seek to do for themselves in exercising their limited options.

Genres: Sociology

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Terry Moses Williams, Ph.D. (City College of New York, 1978), is Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research who has received the MacArthur Foundation Award and the Russell Sage Foundation Fellowship, and was selected as Senior Fellow of the Yale University Urban Ethnography Project.

Professor Williams’ research has focused on a variety of distinct but related research topics in the field of social inequalities and subcultures, notably: poverty, homelessness, youth unemployment, teenage suicide, teen survival strategies in the illegal drug economy, drug abuse and drug culture, crews and gangs, sex work, and incarceration. For over four decades he has conducted a micro-sociological analysis of social inequalities and subcultures by systematically reconstructing and highlighting their voices and everyday practices while emphasizing the agency of these groups in social spaces such as after-hours clubs, crack houses and sex clubs. Notably, the five volume “Cosmopolitan Life Series,” created by Professor Williams and published by Columbia University Press under the rubric “Studies in Transgression” (2015–2024) is a manifestation of his efforts to integrate these different research topics both empirically and theoretically while exploring the transformation of NYC as an urban space.