happen in Pittsburgh but never in Albuquerque, in Memphis but never in Dubuque? The weight of the evidence is in the other direction, especially when it comes to problems as big and as widespread as urban poverty and unaffordable housing. This study took place in the heart of a major American city, not in an isolated Polish village or a brambly Montana town or on the moon.15 The number of evictions in Milwaukee is equivalent to the number in other cities, and the people summoned to housing court in Milwaukee look a lot like those summoned in Charleston and Brooklyn. Maybe what we are really asking when we ask if a study is “generalizable” is: Can it really be this bad everywhere? Or maybe we’re asking: Do I really have to pay attention to this problem?
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Ethnography recently has come to be written almost exclusively in the first person. It is a straightforward way of writing and an effective one. If ethnographers want people to take what they say seriously, the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz once observed, they have to convince readers that they have “been there.” “And that,” Geertz said, “persuading us that this offstage miracle has occurred, is where the writing comes in.”16 The first person has become the chosen mule for this task. I was there. I saw it happen. And because I saw it happen, you can believe it happened. Ethnographers shrink themselves in the field but enlarge themselves on the page because first-person accounts convey experience—and experience, authority.
But first-person narration is not the only technique available to us.17 In fact, it may be the least well-suited vehicle for capturing the essence of a social world because the “I” filters all. With first-person narration, the subjects and the author are each always held in view, resulting in every observation being trailed by a reaction to the observer. No matter how much care the author takes, the first-person ethnography becomes just as much about the fieldworker as about anything she or he saw. I have sat through countless conversations about a work of ethnography or reportage that have nothing to do with the book’s subject matter and everything to do with its author’s decisions or mistakes or “ethical character.” And after almost every academic talk I have given on the material in this book, I have been asked questions like: “How did you feel when you saw that?” “How did you gain this sort of access?” These are fine questions, but there is bigger game afoot. There is an enormous amount of pain and poverty in this rich land. At a time of rampant inequality and widespread hardship, when hunger and homelessness are found throughout America, I am interested in a different, more urgent conversation. “I” don’t matter. I hope that when you talk about this book, you talk first about Sherrena and Tobin, Arleen and Jori, Larraine and Scott and Pam, Crystal and Vanetta—and the fact that somewhere in your city, a family has just been evicted from their home, their things piled high on the sidewalk.
There are costs to abandoning the first person. In the context of this study, it meant disguising when I intervened in nontrivial ways. There are two such instances in this book. When a “friend” rented Arleen a U-Haul truck to move from Thirteenth Street and when Vanetta borrowed money from a “friend” to buy a stove and refrigerator in anticipation of a visit from Child Protective Services, that was me. It is also important to recognize that none of the tenants in this book had a car. I did, and I sometimes drove people around when they were looking for housing. When I didn’t, people relied on Milwaukee’s irregular bus system or set off on foot. It would have taken families much longer to find subsequent housing if they hadn’t had access to my car (or phone).
I didn’t pay people for interviews or for their time. People asked me for money because they asked everyone for money. I stopped carrying a wallet and learned how to say no like everyone around me did. If I had a few dollars on me, I’d sometimes give it. But as a rule I didn’t give out large sums.
In Milwaukee, people bought me food, and I bought them food. People bought me gifts, and I bought them gifts. The Hinkstons once sent me into their basement to see if I couldn’t bang the furnace back to life. When I emerged unsuccessful, I found a birthday
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