Preface to the 2021 Edition

Abstract

and to understand them. of two boys trying to survive in one of most dangerous public housing projects. I read the book a many years ago; the are grown up like my son. Lafeyette, age ten, said: I grow up, I to be a bus driver.” The suggests one of the Kotlowitz the book’s title by Lafeyette’s mother: you know, there are no children here. They’ve seen too much to be children.” This, too, is a social theory. The boy and his mother both put into plain words the social world of the uncounted thousands of urban children whose is gunfire. If not pleasure, there must at least be some satisfaction in knowing and being able to describe one’s place in a world. If you cannot say it, how can you deal with it? Between the experiences of the middle-class, White boy (my son) and a welfare-class, Black boy (Lafeyette), there is common ground. Both knew they knew something important about their social worlds, and they knew what they knew because they could put it into words. regularity of their course and contrast between them, consume, so to speak, less mental energy than the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli. To the extent that the metropolis creates these psychological conditions—with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational, and social life—it creates in the sensory foundations of mental life, and the degree of awareness necessitated by our organization as creatures dependent on differences, a deep contrast with these lower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythms of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existence. in of I I lived in a where all the inhabitants knew each other! If I had been on a remote plantation, or lost among the multitude of a crowded city, I should not be a living woman. this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in the view of all men, and follow [Mr. Moneybags] into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face “No admittance except on business.” Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making.