In Search of Respect Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

In Search of Respect - Essay Example This situation led to the internalization of the Latino community, that demoralizing, impoverishing and inferiority structures cast upon them by the American social, political and economic systems, consequently blaming themselves and not these systems for their poverty. In his book titled â€Å"In Search of Respect†, author Philippe Bourgois details his experiences when residing in East Harlem, a region defined by racial inequality. This has led to the embodiment of a â€Å"street culture of resistance† phrase that uses the peddling of drugs as a lucrative, yet self-deteriorating means of acquiring income and the much publicized and certainly pseudo elusive respect so much desired. The culture of poverty and the street are wrongly cast upon to the families of East Harlem, in that it focuses on the secondary effect, which is self–deteriorating upshots, rather than the structural forces that these Latino communities have to combat every day that make them practice what they do. In unconscious intellectual disciplines, the phrase â€Å"culture of† becomes a code for race or stereotypical excuse projections that are quite useless for understanding how things materialize in various communities. This makes the â€Å"culture of the street† quite a dangerous phrase even though anthropologists that it is one of the physiognomies that set us apart from animals. Rather than that, it would be mu ch more subtle to use the phrase â€Å"risk environment† to help understand how poverty articulates more specifically and precisely with substandard educational institutions, infrastructure, and inaccessibility to decent food, sanitary food sources, decent employment and the public sector services that most middle–class clusters take for granted. Philippe Bourgois, while performing his research, had to develop a respectable rapport in order to try and