> Alan Wolfe recounts his de-radicalization in, "Reassessing
>the sixties, "ed. by S. Macedo. Published by W.W. Norton in
>'97.
> Few more ethnographies to add to Kelley's cites. Red-diaper
>therapist, Lillian Rubin, Worlds of Pain, "Basic Books.
>Ned Polsky, "Beats, Hustlers and Others." Martin Jankowski book
>on gangs from UC Press. And another I can't dig out of my brain,
>also from UC Press, about 5 yrs. ago. On Brooklyn or Bronx crack
>cocaine gangbangers. Clockers by Richard Price.
>Michael Pugliese
yeah, and that's how i came to grill him on this, b/c of his rel. with Steve M. wolfe had been the organizer for the Habermas session at the ASA and had accepted my paper. so, when Steve had him come to give a special lecture on what he'd been doing and to talk about his contribution to Macedo's book, Wolfe took pains to look me up, make sure i was invited to special luncheon and then took time out to talk with me and other collegial things. Steve Macedo wouldn't have invited me. He'd heard of me be/c i was lucky enough to get a coveted fellowship. but otherwise he wouldn't have invited a lowly grad student to a fac only function. i dont' think i am THAT much of a hotshot that it was be/c i was so ace. i think it was, rather, that Wolfe recognized a collegial obligation he owed to junior members of the profession. i see that in Doug, who has done similar things for me. Someone who doesn't have to do anything for me because there are plenty of people he could ask who are more important than i am.
i like Wolfe, obviously, as a person. i think he's an ethical scholar, despite deep disagreements. perhaps my view is too biased. i happen to think that this was a gesture of the most incredibly generous collegiality. Wolfe owed me nothing. He read a paper, selected it for the American Soc Conferences. He wasn't even there for my presentation, but had someone else show up in his stead. And because of that, he felt he had an obligation to look me up. I was the only grad student at the Hab session and it turns out that he thinks we should do our best to mentor junior members of the profession.
he had a hostile audience the day he spoke to a small group of faculty. the chair of my dept sat there, after the lunch while wolfe spoke, and played with his PDA the whole time, fidgeting and sighing deeply. and, i had to laugh be/c one of the things wolfe said was that feminism had made some in roads with affirmative action. surely not enough but it had made in roads. consistent with his claims regarding how our tendency to use the state to fulfill obligations saps our ability to recognize mutual dependencies, he made the observation that, while it was a good thing that the ole boys network got pissed on, something was missing now, something was broken and this was a sad thing for graduate students: we get very little mentoring.
well, thus far, in my experience, this is quite true. i get good emotional and scholarly mentoring from feminists. BUT when it comes to other mentoring--networking--I get that from men, and from men who often only know me by reputation from the people who do know my work more intimately. not always, of course. the chair who sighed the whole time...oh nevermind. this is public record. i don't want to go there... HA!
anyway, it is true that men have more power and were socialized via the old boys network. but the point was that by relinquishing "mentoring" to the state via aff. action policies, we think that we don't have to be responsible for giving people a hand who are still marginalized, despite AA.