Righteous Dopefiend

Most of the people in Edgewater have children, and this chapter delves into the experiences of several of the main interlocutors as parents facing 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 continues, as some interlocutors talk proudly about the patriarchal abuse they inflicted on their wives, girlfriends, and children. Exploring this violence, Bourgois and Schonberg determine that the cycle of abuse continues 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 safety 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.