SOC421H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Polka, B-Boying
Hagedorn “What happened to the beer that made Milwaukee famous”
• Though a few new buildings show that downtown is moving into the ghetto, they cannot
hide the signs of economic depression
• Even schiltz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous, has moved its jobs lost and now is
replaced by the county social service offices
• Shows the transition in Milwaukee of an expanding welfare bureaucracy
• Class ethnicity, and local community are all key variables in understanding contemporary
gang developments
• A good method of investigation would combine direct observation of gangs with a
rexamination of factors that have been historically associated with gang development
Demographics: from polka to breakdance
• Gangs in the 1920’s were youthful European immigrant gangs, jammed into crowded
cities
• This influx of poor youthful newcomers is one condition that led to youth ganging and
milling about
• Frederick Thrasher came up with a definition for gangs
o An interstitial group, originally formed spontaneously then integrated through
conflict
• Gangs were located in the crowded slims surrounding the central business district
• The ethnicity of gangs might change but their location didn’t
• By the 1960’s the ethnicity of gangs had changed
• There were fewer European gangs and more black and Hispanic gangs
• A majoriy of black children in Milwaukee now live in poverty
• One one level all that had really change for the young people who formed gangs was
ethnicity
Economics; From White Working Class to Black Underclass
• Gangs have been seen by theorists as consisting of the working class or the lower class
• And it was suggested that the youthful delinquent would eventually mature out of his
gang behavior and getting on with his adult life of work and family
• Gangs were associated in the areas of the city that contained the foreign born and black
migrants
• Immigrant gang boys were able to mature out of delinquency in part due to an industrial
based economy that continually needed a larger supply of low skilled labour
• In miwaukee and other northern cities, discrimination and segregation restricted black
entrance into basic industry in varying degrees until WW2 when the largest growth in the
black population occurred
• The black community was always relatively small in Milwaukee compared to other
Midwestern cities
• The eighties brought a deepening depression to the black community
• The industrial ladder was suddenly snatched away
• Between 1980 and 1985, the Milwaukee area lost 35,900 manufacturing jobs
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