The Minds of Marginalized Black Men by Alford Young

Author:Alford Young [Young, Alford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691127002
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2006-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Endorsing the Language of the American Dream: A Note on Method

Like many Americans, all of the men professed a belief in individual initiative as essential for successful upward mobility.1 Like Tito, all of the men appeared to subscribe to the traditional American creed— the notion inherent in the “Protestant Ethic”—that hard work begets positive results for getting ahead. In this respect the men underscored the centrality of hard work, education, and social ties to explain how people move up the American hierarchy.2

I employed rank-order questions to help to unearth the men’s views on these topics. My intent was to discover whether the men maintained any rank ordering of factors concerning mobility. The scale-format questioning involved ranking on a scale of 1 (extremely important) to 5 (not important) the following attributes concerning getting ahead in life: education, money in the family, racial heritage, hard work, knowing the right people, luck, neighborhood, gender, commitment to religion, and intellectual ability. Each factor was ranked independently; any or all of them conceivably could be ranked as very important or not important. The men were also asked if there was anything missing from this list that should be included. Few added anything new; the remarks they did make included things like discipline, belief in oneself, or other factors associated with hard work. Education, hard work, knowing the right people, and intellectual ability were rated 1 or 2 by virtually all of the men.

Ultimately, the rank-order questions yielded no clear patterns. In the course of our discussions, the men often said things that were not consistent with the numeric rankings they had given, or else said things that provided more clarity than did their straightforward ranking of the factors. They would also invoke some of these attributes during our open-ended discussions as being of critical importance, only to later modify, and still later re-modify, those remarks. Thus, a cautionary note must be offered about any attempt to measure precisely how committed any man was to a specific order or ranking of attributes critical for upward mobility.

Tito’s remarks provide a case in point. His comments outlined at the outset of the chapter, which were made during the open-ended part of our discussion, reveal one side of his thinking on personal mobility. His answers to the closed questions, however, tell another story. Here, Tito ranked the factor “plain hard work” as a 3, whereas earlier he had placed hard work as the central factor for getting ahead. When asked to explain this inconsistency, he said, “Yeah because it can be like the most important that you’re working hard. Then, on another day it ain’t got to mean nothing [just] ‘cause you’re working hard, you know. It can go both ways.”

It is important to recognize that although he ranked hard work as 3, Tito was not asserting that it was less important than the other factors. Rather, his point was that other people do not always realize how hard one is working. Thus, working hard may not generate the benefits that other, more clearly visible factors might.

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