>I am going to arrange this post as a narrative followed by a discussion
>of several models.
I've told you before I'm a big fan, right?
>Okay, okay, now watch these two families bring in their disabled
>kids. Notice the upper middle class white family has their own
>modified van and has hired a private therapist. The mother, the
>therapist and the aid are all falling over each other to get the best
>they can for junior. They are from a good county CCS and we love them.
>
>Now watch this next little entourage with this little black kid. Same
>disability, what they call heavily involved cerebral palsy. Notice
>anything right away? The mother isn't with them. It's a CCS public
>school therapist and a home aid worker. That's because the mother is
>working and can't take off work.
Last night I was thinking of Wojtek's comments about choice. I thought what if you played with that some. You're talking about disability related stories, I was thinking of people caught up in the legal system. In your example here, let's say the white kids brother is caught holding drugs. He's over eighteen so he goes to jail, just like everybody else. Then what happens? He chooses to call his parents, who choose to come bail him out. The black kid's brother is caught holding drugs. He goes to jail like everybody else. It's his first arrest, but he's got a profile in the system because he was hanging out on the corner at 13 when the police rolled by and he got written up just in case he turns to gangbanging down the road. This happens every day. Anyway, what does he choose to do? His mom's working, so he can't call her and even if he could she can't bail him out. So he sits. How long he sits depends and he could be there until the case is resolved. But even if it's only a day or two it's already longer than the white kid's brother.
>It would make great empirical social science to merely guide academics
>through my world for a few months so they could watch the vastly
>complex net of psychology, sociology and anthropology work out their
>tenets in living flesh---well provided my tourists were mostly
>Marxists or had some form of latter day social democratic views of
>the political economy.
Any grant writers here who can help him out?
>I maintain almost all of them
>are formed from the history of US social policy and amplified or
>reduced by various economic policies negociated between the state and
>capital that form the political economy, i.e the landscape.
Have you read anything by Edward Soja? I think you'd like it. Here's some links:
>After starting his academic career as a specialist on Africa, Dr.
>Soja has focused his research and writing over the past 20 years on
>urban restructuring in Los Angeles and more broadly on the critical
>study of cities and regions. His wide-ranging studies of Los
>Angeles bring together traditional political economy approaches and
>recent trends in critical cultural studies. Of particular interest
>to him is the way issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality
>intersect with what he calls the spatiality of social life, and with
>the new cultural politics of difference and identity that this generates.
http://www.spa.ucla.edu/dept.cfm?d=up&s=faculty&f=faculty1.cfm&id=251