Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum by Michael Novak

Author:Michael Novak [Novak, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Social Services & Welfare, Social Science, Political Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351314268
Google: mKs0DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 36704873
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

Shame and Guilt

The observer is struck by how large shame looms in the control mechanisms and the feelings about self of adults and children in Pruitt-Igoe. Shaming is a common control technique in the project. Children are shamed for not doing the right thing, but they are also shamed by parents and peers for not being tough enough to cope with their problems. Finally, they may be shamed for unsuccessfully claiming to be what they are not, as in the frequent use of the phrase, ‘I know you shamed’, in situations where the individual arrogates to himself desirable attributes which are patently false. As the child grows up he increasingly acquires an awareness that nothing he can do will protect him from danger and attack, whether from his parents for failure to meet their standards, or from his peers for failure to meet their contradictory and manipulative orientations, or from caretakers (e.g. school teachers and police) who always seem to want from him something other than what he is doing.

The black child’s experience in the slums of the 1960s recapitulates the black man’s experience in the New World, which has been most centrally shaming in stripping him of his power to make autonomous decisions in his own culture and society and preventing him from reconstructing a new society in which he was other than a slave or servant. This historical experience gives the child hated models of shamed and impotent identity, and also some models of desperate escape from that identity. In his socialization he is forced continually to undergo experiences of being shamed, shamed by his own body which is hungry or hurts from the beatings he receives, shamed by those he loves who seem to want from him things he cannot possibly produce (and he cannot know they are simply not producible given his resources), and shamed by the caretakers of the community who are supposed to help him learn how to escape. His experience convinces him that he is too weak to meet the varying and conflicting demands made upon him by those who have the power to reward him with the things he values.

Alvin W. Gouldner has observed that most discussions of normative behaviour tend to be based on the assumption of guilt as the deviator’s response to norm violation, but that shame as much as guilty may be the source of moral anxiety. In his discussion of Greek culture, he observed that the ancient Greeks were particularly vulnerable to a sense of shame because of their view that norms were most importantly matters of achievement and competence rather than matters of good and evil. Deviance tended to generate shame rather than guilt, because it was perceived as a deficiency, a failure rather than as the transgression of a norm that represented an absolute good.11 This view is roughly consonant with that of Talcott Parsons, who sees guilt as arising from the perception that one is undeserving in terms of the standards of the internalized father

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