[URBAN NOTE] New York Magazine on fact-checking sociologist Alice Goffman

[rfmcdonald]

New York Magazine's Jesse Singal has an excellent article looking at the controversy surrounding sociologist Alice Goffman's work analyzing a Philadelphia neighbourhood. He concludes that while she did good work, it is still going to be hard for her.

“This is what anonymous did to my elbow.” It was 10 p.m. last Friday night in Philadelphia, and I was sitting outside at a restaurant with the sociologist and author Alice Goffman. Goffman, a small woman with a drink and a plate of chicken wings sitting mostly untouched in front of her, swiped back and forth on her phone, showing me photos from last month in which one of her elbows looked normal and the other one, the site of an old injury, appeared red and inflamed. Her elbow got inflamed because she is now a controversial figure.

This is a bit of a strange turn for the 33-year-old Goffman. When her book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, was released in May of last year, the reception was almost universally positive. The book chronicles the six years Goffman spent hanging out in a black poor-to-working-class neighborhood of West Philadelphia she called 6th Street (a made-up name referring to both the main commercial strip and the surrounding blocks — Goffman protected the identities of all her subjects). She befriended a group of local young men, as well as their girlfriends and family members, and saw things privileged white women usually don’t: She was caught up in violent late-night police raids; she watched her 6th Street friends cycle in and out of prison; her close friend and onetime roommate Chuck, a main character in the book, was shot in the head and killed. On the Run’s primary argument is that the constant specter of surveillance, arrest, and imprisonment — the legacy of a failed war on drugs — did great harm to 6th Street, turning many of its residents into fugitives and exacerbating the myriad challenges they already faced. The book did so well it migrated from the University of Chicago Press to Picador, which published it in paperback in April, and earned Goffman a March Ted Talk that is creeping up on a million views.

[. . .]

[I]t had been a rough month and a half for Goffman, and I felt sheepish as she explained everything to me. I’d read the anonymous document, start to finish — it was actually sitting in my backpack, telltale-heart style, as we spoke — and felt that while there was more than a whiff of tinfoil-hat to it, the author had at least raised some fair questions. In fact, just seven hours prior I’d wondered whether I was on the verge of unmasking the next James Frey. There’s no delicate way to put this: I’d been wandering around the neighborhood I was pretty sure was “6th Street,” handing out photos of Goffman, asking anyone willing to talk to me if they remembered this small white girl who used to hang out with Chuck. (Also, I may or may not have been carrying a box of Dunkin’ Donuts Munchkins that I offered to people in an attempt to appear more friendly.)

I hadn’t even known Goffman was in town at the time. And now, after an hour-long chat with “Miss Linda,” Chuck’s mom, in her home near 6th Street, and several beers with “Josh,” one of Chuck’s best friends and another character from the book, in an Irish sports bar in a different part of Philly, I was sitting across from Goffman herself, convinced that the basics of her book were legitimate, but plagued by remaining questions. These loose ends never got resolved, and over the next few days they led to further calls and texts and emails with Goffman, which in turn led me to two conclusions:

Alice Goffman conducted some amazing ethnographic research, and her book is almost entirely true, not to mention quite important.

Alice Goffman is going to have a really hard time defending herself from her fiercest critics.