Abstract
Baltimore entered the national spotlight in April 2015 with the death of Freddie Gray and the ensuing citywide protests. While The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood does not deal specifically with issues of police brutality, its focus on the urban disadvantaged in Baltimore feels particularly important given these recent events.
This book is the culmination of over two decades of research by some of sociology’s most respected scholars. Utilizing a life course developmental perspective, the authors examine the long-term outcomes of the Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP), a representative sample of Baltimore public school first-graders selected in the fall of 1982 and followed through 2006. A particular strength of the sample is the oversampling of poor whites. The existence and inclusion of poor and lower SES whites allows the researchers to examine racial differences within, and not simply across, socioeconomic strata, a strategy that is often missing from studies of urban poverty. While the BSSYP study followed the children through high school, the authors fielded additional surveys after high school when the sample averaged age 22 (the Young Adult Survey, YAS) and 28 (the Mature Adult Survey, MAS). Sprinkled throughout the text are also short qualitative quotes used to illustrate some statistical points.
The first chapter of the book introduces the reader to Baltimore, discusses the challenges facing the urban poor, and describes the study’s sampling and methods. The second chapter provides a relatively brief synopsis of Baltimore’s movement from “industrial boom” to “industrial bust.” While this narrative will be familiar to those with knowledge of the deindustrialization of Northeastern and Midwestern cities through the twentieth century, the authors do a particularly nice job of reminding readers that while these events might now seem to be in the distant past, they were crucial events in the life course of their sample’s parents.
Chapters Three and Four focus on the early life of the BSSYP, paying specific attention to how family (Chapter 3) and neighborhood and school (Chapter 4) influence young people. Given that the research looks at these young people and their families in the early 1980s, much of what is discussed in these chapters should be familiar to readers. In Chapter Five, the authors move beyond the BSSYP and examine their sample’s transition into adulthood. The authors analyze four demographic markers: gaining employment, marrying (or partnering), moving out of the parental home, and becoming parents. They then identify the most common patterns of completion (or lack thereof) of these markers and the family background most often attached to these patterns.
Those still reading this review carefully will notice educational completion is not included in the patterns discussed above. This is unique, as education has generally been treated as one of the “traditional” markers of the transition to adulthood by scholars. The authors argue that while the other transitions are clear-cut (that is, one clearly becomes a parent or does not), education does not have as finite an end and therefore is not included in these analyses. Instead, levels of education and employment (occupational status and earnings) are the socioeconomic destinations of the sample the authors focus on in Chapters Six through Eight. The authors find that baccalaureate completion by age 28 is particularly difficult for those from the lowest socioeconomic strata in the sample.
There are also differences in employment by race and gender, a topic examined extensively in Chapter Eight. The authors find great economic disparity in their sample among white men and all other groups. White men consistently earn more than white women with the same socioeconomic background and educational attainment. Further, lower class white men with relatively low educational attainment earn significantly more than their African American male counterparts with similar profiles. The authors highlight this finding throughout the book and attribute this difference to the remaining power of Baltimore’s working-class white population to continue providing jobs for itself, primarily through both familial and weak ties.
Chapter Seven is the book’s densest. In this chapter, the authors provide background on status attainment research and the various ways socioeconomic immobility and mobility across generations has been measured. The authors find a great deal of socioeconomic immobility in their sample (hence, The Long Shadow). The depth of their data make a compelling case for the accumulation of advantage and disadvantage across the life course, which has been previously theorized but often without the rich data of the BSSYP as confirming evidence. Chapter Nine is a summative examination of the book’s findings with some comments on how best to move public policy forward in light of the research.
The Long Shadow is an impressive summation of decades of research on disadvantaged urban youth in Baltimore. It showcases the importance of solid sampling and methodology and would provide an ideal case study for methodology students. It also nicely highlights the diversity among the urban poor. However, there were some areas that I felt could have been improved upon. The authors set up their argument in Chapter One by stating that previous portraits of the urban poor, such as those depicted in David Simon and Edward Burn’s The Corner, depict the urban ghetto as a monolith where all inhabitants are drug addicted and poor. This seems an odd choice of comparison by the authors, particularly given the prominence of the same authors’ later television series The Wire, which, though a fictional account, has been hailed by both academic and mainstream critics for its nuanced portrayal of life in the inner city. The use of The Corner as a piece of comparison seems to date the study.
A similar feeling arises when the authors discuss the economic power of the lower class whites in the sample. In particular, I found myself wondering how the economic downturn of 2008 might have impacted those members of the sample. While their data was collected before the recent recession, it still felt odd that the authors never address its potential impact on their sample as they continue to age, particularly given their use of life course theory.
Additionally, though the authors are careful early in the book to make clear that any comparisons to individuals from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are relative to the sample, and not the nation, I worry it is a point that may get lost by some readers as the chapters unfold. While Chapter Seven will likely be useful for researchers and graduate students in the status attainment field, for the more general reader the chapter is an unwelcome departure from the previous ones. The dive into the early status attainment literature felt a bit jarring, and the explanation of models utilized was a bit repetitive. Finally, though the authors highlight some qualitative data early in the book, its usage tapers off throughout the book, and it never feels adequately integrated.
Overall, this book showcases meticulous longitudinal research, and its findings regarding socioeconomic immobility over the life course are compelling. The book is particularly appropriate for graduate students and researchers studying urban poverty and the transition to adulthood. Relatively little (if any) of the current transition-to-adulthood literature has studies with similar depth and data. The ability to examine and connect early life transitions and transitions into adulthood is a true contribution of the book.