Abstract
This conversation took place in April of 2019. The year 2019 marked the 20th anniversary of the publication of Dr Mary Pattillo’s influential book Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class. We discussed this book, her larger body of work, her childhood, undergraduate and graduate school experiences, the mentorship she received—notably from Dr William Julius Wilson—and her more recent scholarship on monetary sanctions as well as Black joy. When I contacted Dr Pattillo requesting an interview, I assumed that if she said yes it would be conducted over the phone given the distance between Providence and Chicago. But Dr Pattillo invited me to meet with her nearby, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she would be in the city to deliver a presentation on monetary sanctions at Harvard University. Our conversation, then, occurred face to face and we worked together to edit the interview.
If you could start by sharing what it was like growing up in Milwaukee.
Where to start? Mostly positive memories. It’s hard to think about Milwaukee in retrospect because now, as a sociologist, I know how unequal Milwaukee is. . .but when you’re young, you’re in your bubble, so you’re not a sociologist, you’re just in your bubble, and my bubble was fabulous. I went to a Catholic school that was 95% Black. It was a couple of blocks from my house. I went there from daycare to eighth grade, and that place was such a powerful place.
High school was a little different because I got bused to a predominantly white school outside of my neighborhood. My neighborhood was all Black, and that’s where I became a sociologist, I really will say. It was that busing experience that I think exposed me to urban inequality, to the geography of inequality, to wealth inequality, to racial inequality, all that kind of stuff. . .
You’re part of this experiment of busing. Were you having conversations in your family about that?
My family is very well-educated. My father is an MD doctor, and my mother was in graduate school to get her PhD in mathematics before my father proposed to her, and then she said yes, and then she quit graduate school, so she started having kids. She had five kids, and it’s not one of these regretful stories, but nonetheless. She’s very highly educated, and then they had a lot of kids. They’re also very social justice-minded, so that’s why we lived in a working class, lower middle class Black neighborhood, and went to a Black church, and so on and so forth, and my mother, when I was graduating from eighth grade, made me go to the most elite private school in Milwaukee, called University School. Mostly white.
I went kicking and screaming, and she made me go; this was the family relationship, because, at my Black Catholic elementary school, she thought I was getting way too fast. What does fast mean? She thought I was going to be pregnant my first year in high school if I went to the local public high school, which was a good school. The school, four blocks from my house, was an excellent school. My older sister had gone, but she thought I was just way too sassy, and all that kind of stuff, and so she was like, you can’t go there, and she sent me to this all white private school that I hated, and cried probably the whole first year, and luckily then she let me go to this other, next place, which was the busing place, which at the very least had more Black students than the first place.
In terms of what me and my family talked about, it was kind of a tug at that point between what my mother, committed as she was to Black people, saw as me latching onto not the best parts of Blackness, but maybe the sassier parts of Blackness, and thinking I needed to step back a little bit, so I found that problematic, but I couldn’t say nothing. I couldn’t make the decision. Then the busing part felt like an improvement to me, so by this time, then, I was not complaining about having to go to this school where I bused, I was more just thrilled to be out of the other school, but on the experimental part, there’s no question. This school, it was in a place called Whitefish Bay that we all joked called White Folks Bay. . .there were no Black families who lived in Whitefish Bay, zero, so all of us who went there, all the Black kids in the school were bused in.
Did that create a basis for bonding together as Black students?
My response was not to bond with the Black students at the school, but rather to reject the school altogether, and basically, I had to go, so I went. I did well in classes, but it’s not like I was involved in the school much at all. I was involved in the social justice club, and that’s it, and then my whole social life was my church, and my Black friends from my neighborhood and from the school that was close to my house.
Applying to College and “Acting White”
I went to New York, and I said, “Mom, is there a good school in New York?” And she said Columbia, and I said, “That’s where I’m going.”
Wow. Okay.
Yeah. That’s the only place I applied.
Really?
It was crazy stupid. I mean, part of it was laziness. I can literally remember myself, over Christmas break, starting the application to Northwestern, which is funny, because I was like, okay, I probably shouldn’t just apply to one place. . . I remember feeding it through the typewriter, and starting the application, and then thinking, I don’t want to do this. It’s Christmas vacation, so I was like, forget it. If I don’t get into Columbia, I literally said I was just going to be army.
So your father is a doctor and you have a mother who was working on her doctorate, and so what was that like in terms of the messaging you got about going to school and what type of schools to go to?
Yeah. There was just so many messages about the importance of education. My father was. . . he was a practicing doctor. He was an OBGYN, but he was also one of the faculty at The Medical College of Wisconsin. So I saw him less as a doctor and more as a scholar. Because what I would see him as was sitting at home at his desk reading and writing, and taking notes and so on. And yeah, he was very much an academic, published and so on. And my mother taught at Marquette University. She didn’t have her PhD, but you could teach at that time. She wasn’t a tenure-track faculty member. She taught math classes at Marquette, and then she also taught, at the Catholic elementary school, the most advanced math for the eighth graders. Some of my fondest memories is my mother grading papers, and her letting me help her.
I was very, very smart, even in math, despite becoming an ethnographer. I feel like I’ve let my math brain die, so I would grade the seventh and eighth grade math papers when I was in sixth grade or something. It was thrilling to be around words and numbers, and it was thrilling to be smart. There was just total praise for being smart and for, yeah, all of that. This is another sociology thing that I try to be sensitive to, but the whole thing in the social sciences about acting white, supposedly as a way to diminish academic aspirations among Black kids, or any kinds of ostracization of smart kids or so on. That literature has never resonated with me because I surely never got accused of acting white, and the fact of being smart did not ostracize me, did not make me unpopular, that kind of thing.
Because I study Asian Americans, and I look a lot at Asian American race discourse, so obviously, as you know, Asian Americans get juxtaposed to African Americans, and the whole model minority myth. . .you never see Asian Americans accused of acting white, because there’s all these racialized and racist assumptions about who supposedly works hard, and family value systems and so forth, and so you don’t see the same accusations.
Exactly. That would be a critique.
Columbia University
Were you a sociology major?
I was an urban studies major and a sociology minor, or a concentration.
Was Herbert Gans there when. . .
You know, it’s embarrassing that two people who, as an urban sociologist, Herbert Gans and Kenneth Jackson, the urban historian, I never took a class with either of them. . . Jonathan Rieder is somebody I took classes with. He wrote a book called Canarsie, which was about the Black/Jewish relations in Canarsie, Brooklyn, and Lynn Chancer, who’s now chair of the department at CUNY Graduate Center, and Elliott Sclar, who was an urban planner. I took classes with him.
What years were you at Columbia?
‘87 to ‘91. . . it was a fascinating time to be in New York, in that it was a racial cauldron. It was Bensonhurst, and Tawana Brawley, and these iconic incidents. The Central Park jogger case came I think a little later, but it just was on fire of . . .
And Crown Heights.
Crown Heights. It was just . . . and this was also the era of Spike Lee’s movie, Do the Right Thing, and New York seemed very racially tense.
What was that like as an undergrad, and to be in a discipline that is thinking about these issues?
As an undergrad, I feel like our politics were very campus-based, although, as a first year, that’s when . . . The Howard Beach case, basically a Black kid was getting chased by a group of white kids and he got hit by a car and died. We went to the trial. We took the train out to Queens and went to the trial as a group of undergraduates. It was like that’s what the seniors were paying attention to. We were first-year students, they were seniors, and so I remember that in my first year, but for the most part, our politics were very campus-based, and focused on things that, unfortunately, are still problems. The profiling of campus security of Black students, and our biggest intervention . . . Well, we probably had two.
The first was the curriculum. We have a core curriculum at Columbia that are dead, white, European men, and so we were trying to diversify the core curriculum, and then second, more in my senior year, Columbia bought the Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X was assassinated, and was thinking about tearing it down and expanding the medical school, and, ultimately, all that’s left is a kind of memorial to Malcolm X, which is now within the medical school, but we were protesting that as well.
It seemed like most of your social relationships were still with African Americans, but did that change when you went to Columbia?
Nope. Well, all of my friends from college are Black. I was on the leadership team of a Black student organization, I was in the gospel choir. Yeah, I planned the Black graduation. The things that I worked on that were more interracial were the issues around the curriculum, that other students of color were interested in and white students were interested in, so those were the areas that I had the most interaction, and of course in classes and so on and so forth, but my friends were all Black.
We’re going to talk about Black Picket Fences in a moment, but I know that you also then . . . your second book was about gentrification, and thinking about that, and that’s obviously becoming a really big issue with Columbia University, and you mentioned the whole thing about concerns about them taking over the Audubon Ballroom, but what was the conversation about in terms of Columbia’s expansion when you were there as an undergrad?
That’s a great question. None of what has happened since was on the radar, that at least students knew then, so the Manhattanville campus was not under discussion that we knew of then, although it very well could have been. I would say what was more in our sights was the fact that Columbia called where it was Morningside Heights, so we all felt it was Harlem, and the nomenclature of Morningside Heights was a way to already . . . we wouldn’t have used the word gentrify. We would have said to carve out some supposed other identity, and as way to exclude Black folks.
Graduate School
In Black Picket Fences you open up your acknowledgments talking about William Julius Wilson, who we just saw in the room of your presentation, and you said that you made it a point to go to University of Chicago to work with him. When did you first get introduced to his work?
1987 is when I started undergrad, and that is the publication year of The Truly Disadvantaged, and he had already written The Declining Significance of Race. I feel like I read The Truly Disadvantaged in every sociology class I took, you know? I’m trying to think of an equivalent book now. If there’s some sociologist that, when their book comes out, it’s just the talk of at least that field. . .It made me feel like he’s the only Black sociologist, he’s the only sociologist working on Black people. Like, goodness. Given that exposure, it just felt like, well, that’s where I got to go, because there’s nothing else out there.
Did you visit Chicago before you-
I visited both, and Bill pulled out the stops. I mean, he took me to lunch in Chinatown. Just me and him. It was amazing. It’s funny, because now that I’m a faculty member, and I hear undergrads often, when they come, especially when they want me to sign their book or something, I’m just thinking, you’ve got to be kidding me. I’m not really famous. It just feels awkward, but I do understand what they felt, because I felt that way about Bill Wilson, but it just feels very awkward. . .The numbers of students of color in line for PhD programs was probably fewer then than it is now. . .but it’s not like I was the only, because, in my cohort, ultimately, we had nine Black students in my cohort.
Wow. That’s significant.
We were a huge cohort. We were something like 30 students. It was outrageous, but nine Black students, and I just think Bill was . . . The cohort before us, there were zero. The cohort before that, there was one. The cohort before that was zero. I think Bill was probably like, okay, I’m sick and tired of this. I’m going to make sure we get some Black students here, and so having lunch with us, and recruiting us that way, that did it for sure.
Black Picket Fences and Black on the Block
I want to switch to Black Picket Fences. You said in the introduction, “My sociological interests were quite personal in that I myself had lost friends and acquaintances, both literally in death and figuratively in that our paths drifted so far apart that there just wasn’t much to talk about anymore.” You’ve described in our interview just this wonderful experience of growing up and staying in touch, but yet your experience in Milwaukee played a big part in you wanting to think through some of these things, and so if you could talk about that.
Yeah, that’s a great point, because if having gone to the high school I went to [could have] frayed my ties with my neighborhood friends, it did not, but going away to college did. Not all of them, but that is when the divergences became more clear. Some friends had kids, and the first couple of years, I would say, when I would go home, I was Auntie Mary, and you try really hard, but sooner or later, when I’m 25 and in graduate school, and they’re 25 with two kids, it’s just hard to keep hanging out. The women would have kids, and then the guys were selling drugs or whatever, some went to jail, some were killed, and graduate school is, again, hard to be going home hanging out with your drug dealer friends, so that’s really . . . going away to college and going to grad school is really when I saw paths starting . . .
Yeah, and one of the things, too, is that, as you know, your book, it won several awards, and then it also got a lot of attention for, as different reviewers talked about, and also as Annette Lareau talked about in the foreword to the newer edition, just that you had brought this conversation about the Black middle class more into sociological focus, and that there is this way where a lot of scholarship had been about Black poverty or impoverished people. As you were working through this stuff, sociologically, where did you locate yourself or what literature did you find to even think about seeing yourself there?
Yeah. That’s a great question, because you’re right. I mean, there were some. Bart Landry had a book about the Black middle class, and Steven Gregory was working on the Black middle class in New York around the same time, in a book that later became Black Corona. Bruce Haynes [and his book Red Lines, Black Spaces]. I think there were a few of us at the time, similarly, basically seeing the landscape of the literature about Black folks, and seeing how skewed it was to, as you mentioned, Black poverty, and then I was working with a dissertation chair whose whole work had been about urban poverty and about Black poverty.
This was Dr Wilson, right?
Right, exactly. His project that he had just gotten a big grant to do was on working class Black, white, and Latino neighborhoods, and so the neighborhood that I studied for Black Picket Fences was the field site for that project. I was literally hired as the first person on this project, and then more graduate students came on and so on. But in terms of where I situated myself in sociology, I totally situated myself in the world of my adviser, which was the urban poverty world. Even after grad school, my first post-doc at Michigan was at the National Poverty Research and Training Center. . .all these urban poverty people, despite the fact that I wasn’t studying poverty, although I was studying these class relationships within the Black community. It is interesting that now folks who want to study the Black middle class have a whole literature to begin conversation with.
What you were doing with your research was also in conversation with these critiques of the Black bourgeoisie and so I’m thinking about E. Franklin Frazier, and the way people sometimes cite him to make these statements about the Black middle class in a critical way?
The folks in Black Picket Fences didn’t strike me as parallel to E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie, as did the folks in Black on the Block. The folks in Black Picket Fences were solidly lower middle class, upper working class, lower middle class, and there was so many familial, social networks across social class. Neither were they geographically distant nor were they socially distant. It wasn’t this kind of constant pulling away that I read in E. Franklin Frazier, whereas in Black on the Block, despite them moving back to a low-income Black neighborhood, there seemed to be more of this social separation.
William Julius Wilson’s Mentorship
When we look at even the poverty research and on urban poverty, and specifically on Black poverty, a lot of it has been primarily men who’ve wrote a lot of that work. If we think back to Du Bois, and then a lot of the Chicago school sociologists and so forth, and so what was it like being a woman, and specifically a Black woman, one, you’re working with these folks, but you’re also challenging them, in terms of saying, okay, I want to talk about these different kind of class relationships.
Yep. Yep. Again, I just think it’s a testament to Bill Wilson as a great adviser. His stance has always been he didn’t want to replicate himself, but rather that we would do our own things and critique him as much as we want. His farewell speech from the University of Chicago when he went to Harvard was, I want you to critique me, just get me right. He’d be like, don’t caricature me, or set me up as the straw man that then you have to . . . that the child had to kill the father, or something like that. Just characterize my work correctly, and if there are holes or if there are critiques, then that makes sense, and I think many of us have done that in that cohort of many students who worked with him at that time.
I would say the bigger way that my work has veered off from the way that Bill has thought about things is . . . well, in some respects, okay, is my greater rootedness in Blackness, and theories of Blackness, and partly this is perhaps being in an African-American Studies department, or my own preoccupations, and it’s not so much a veering off, given that Bill’s first book is called Power, Racism and Privilege. It is much more a study of white supremacy than The Declining Significance of Race or The Truly Disadvantaged, but nobody ever talks about, and I think he’s moved in a different direction. But I would say that’s more of the way that my work has gone in different directions, is that I’m interested . . . he’s interested in poverty and I’m interested in Black people.
As you know, he’s a controversial figure, and so when you said that he said just get me right, it suggests that he was aware of this way he was being talked about. Bill Clinton said something like, William Julius Wilson is the most influential person, and as we know, there’s all these critiques of Clinton’s welfare reform and so forth, and stuff that William Julius Wilson was also critical. You have his move to Harvard, he becomes part of this Harvard dream team, and I was just rereading something the other day, an interview with Henry Louis Gates, who, as we know, has said some controversial stuff regarding class differences and what he sees as some moral differences, and he’s talking about Cornel West and William Julius Wilson influencing his thinking about class.
Right. Right.
You’re being mentored by somebody, and also engaging his work critically, and he’s welcoming that, but there’s also this whole conversation building around him, in terms of this debate about, quote, unquote “race versus class” and some very strong criticism of him and some of these tendencies.
Yeah. I don’t think I quite understood the depths of the politics of it when I was in my earlier years of graduate school. I missed by one year. If there was anything I wish I could have seen as a scholar, period, in life, and that I missed, it is there was a debate between Bill Wilson and Doug Massey, apparently, a year or two before I got into graduate school. Doug Massey was on the faculty at Chicago, and he ultimately left, because they apparently had some, big ugly thing, because here was this white man, Doug Massey, saying, “No, it’s race, race, race,” and this Black man saying, “No, it’s class, class, class,” and that just didn’t go over well, and it was ugly. . .
I don’t think I quite understood how ugly it was until when I . . . because, yeah, when I started writing Black Picket Fences, and then became a professor myself, and started reading more, and so on, especially the response to The Declining Significance of Race, which was published in 1978, became more clear to me, and how Black sociology in particular had critiqued so strongly The Declining Significance of Race, and how that made Wilson a somewhat strange person in the field of Black sociology, and this is this point that I’m saying about I’m concerned about Black people and he’s concerned about poor people.
Because my world started to get more . . . you know, like I’m on the executive board of the Association of Black Sociologists, and I had been on that executive board before, and I go to the meetings, so learning that there were many Black sociologists . . . Well, this point that when I was in college, it felt like he was the only Black sociologist, and that just goes to show how dominant his work was. And you can imagine how frustrated that would have made any other Black sociologist. And how not just frustrated, I don’t mean just professionally, but how if they had strong critiques of his work, and they weren’t being entertained in the academy, that’s frustrating as well. That’s when I became more aware of especially the critiques about The Declining Significance of Race, that I kind of understood him as a figure more.
I remember, when I read Massey and Denton’s American Apartheid, and the way it got talked about as like, “thank goodness someone’s bringing race back into the picture” and to me it was like, that was such a white supremacist statement, because it’s like, are you trying to tell me that white scholars are the ones doing this. You were saying that even some of the critics, right, of William Julius Wilson, including those who might be Black scholars, right, or Black analysts from policy, or whatever, there’s a way where it just became this kind of battle, and it was very strange because you have then a Black scholar, like William Julius Wilson, being seen as the against race position, and then you have this perspective like Doug Massey and Nancy Denton, but really it was just talked about as Doug Massey. Nancy Denton hardly ever got talked about on her own, right, as bringing race back in, and I actually didn’t see American Apartheid that innovative, because, in the end, to me, they actually agreed that there were these so-called behavioral problems among poor Black people and so forth. They were just disagreeing about what the source was, right?
Right, right, right. I thought the innovation of American Apartheid was the data, and it’s not like folks weren’t doing demography on segregation before, so Ren Farley, and Bill Frey, and even a zillion papers that Massey and Denton alone and together had written, so there was a big demography on racial segregation before, but I thought bringing it into a volume that was accessible beyond the journal articles and had a narrative is what . . . and a narrative that was historically grounded, I thought was what made it so powerful.
Current Research on Monetary Sanctions
You said that in the presentation on monetary sanctions that you just gave, that you’re working with this new set of literature for you, that Alexes Harris had contacted you about being part of this big, multi-city project. But I know that you had addressed criminal justice stuff with your work before, and so one of the things that, when I think about . . . you’re thinking sociologically and being trained sociologically as we’re seeing the expansion of mass incarceration, right? How did your thinking about the criminal justice system or needing to pay more attention to it from a scholarly point of view, how did that evolve over the years?
Yeah, so if I had to characterize myself, it would be I’m an urban sociologist whose main concern is Black people, and with those two things, it’s never possible to not study schools, and not study the criminal justice system. . . .For me, it’s been, as a result, I studied neighborhoods. That’s the urban part, and Black people, that’s the Black part, but then where do I study it? Schools and the criminal justice system.
In each of the books, there’s something about education and something about criminal justice, but always from a different perspective, and maybe it’s just an artifact of method, so in Black Picket Fences, where I was hanging out with young people, that makes gangs pretty salient, and so it was more from the perspective of young people. For Black on the Block, I was more going to community policing meetings, so you’re getting more of the perspective of folks who were trying to get rid of crime, and so there it’s about this relationship between public housing, crime, and getting rid of all of these young “gang bangers” in a gentrifying neighborhood.
In between there, I had this volume I did in 2004 called Imprisoning America, did grow out of exactly what you were saying, being trained at the moment of this, of ratcheting up a mass incarceration. And basically I just put together a conference out of my own interest, and that became a volume, but I would never call myself a scholar of mass incarceration. I was kind of just a catalyst for that volume. And this project, literally, how I narrated this, how it happened, is really all Alexes. I would not be doing this work if she had not called.
I find it depressing, and it is depressing, and I would have probably been going in a different direction, which is hopefully a direction I’ll finally get to at some point, which is I want to study more Black joy, and this is not Black joy. This criminal justice stuff is not Black joy.
Black Joy
Black Metropolis, its big intervention is there’s the Black ghetto and there’s Black Metropolis. The Black ghetto is this place of disease, and discrimination, and despair, and Black metropolis is what Black folks create. It is the Black joy that I’m talking about. It is family, and politics, and the numbers, and churches, and all the Black newspapers, and so on, and sociologists are always studying the Black ghetto and never studying Black metropolis, and as we were sitting there talking about how we have to [have] desegregation and dismantle segregation, it just kept making me think, but if we dismantle segregation, if no Black folks can live around Black folks, then we get rid of Black metropolis also, and that seems to be a problem.
In the preface to the new Black Metropolis, I talk about this, and then this paper on Black placemaking that Marcus Hunter, Zandria Robinson, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and I worked on together was a way to try to rebalance the sociology, to try to think about the other things that happen in Black communities. We wrote that piece, but Zandria and Marcus now have a whole book called Chocolate Cities, where they do more of it, and I just want to follow their lead now as well.
When you were talking, I was thinking that article you wrote, where you . . . I mean, you just come right out at the beginning and say William Julius Wilson thinks of the ghetto this way, and I don’t. Because I think some of the ways people have read Black Picket Fences was like, oh, she’s describing the class diversity in the community, but you’re also talking about these aspects of social life and joy.
I have a whole chapter on sneakers. . .Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. . .Eve Tuck is a scholar in education, and she’s an Indigenous scholar, studies Indigenous communities, and also has this critique of the deficits-based approach, and in education, I feel like there’s a similar conversation going on, so I feel like this intervention we’re making is in the urban sociology world, where Black urban spaces are always thought of as problematic. . .One of the biggest journalistic books that we’ve read in sociology . . . I think I might have read this as an undergrad, too, is There Are No Children Here, who Alex Kotlowitz is a colleague at Northwestern now, and I respect him a lot, and I think that’s important work, but there are children there.