Compare DuBois’ findings from the Philadelphia Negro (1899) to Anderson’s in his chapter “Drugs, Violence, and Street Crime.” Explain Anderson’s claim that the “social dislocation” of the inner-city poor must be understood from a structural and cultural standpoint.
W. E. B. Du Bois’s, the Philadelphia Negro (1899), contributes to our greater understanding of the social dislocation of inner-city poor communities around the United States today. His conclusions, including both the study of the inner-city poor, but also for the study of race, are extremely formative and actually quite alarming considering they were established over a century ago now. Dubois was commissioned by Susan P. Wharton in 1896 to conduct a social scientific study analyzing Philadelphia’s seventh ward’s social conditions. Wharton was interested in details behinds the Philadelphia’s poor lack of participation in society at normal functional levels and contributions to the city. As a progressivist, Wharton saw poverty as a demoralized facet of society that, in order to prevent further contamination and growth, it ought to be quarantined from the rest of society. Upon first glance, the objective of such an investigation of Philadelphia’s seventh ward slum was loosely disguised as being concerned with the elevating the societal norms of the slum’s members, but it was really just a means of establishing the parameters of the quarantine the city notables intended to impose on the seventh ward, where the city’s black population was concentrated. Philadelphians believed that they their renowned and affluent city would likely to fail because of the black community’s delinquency of its black community of the seventh ward. Given the nature and design of this experiment, W.E. B DuBois was chosen based solely on his skin color to conduct the investigation that actually was aiming to aiming to quarantine his own.
Despite what Wharton was hoping to do once completing the social study and in light of her true biases and intentions, W.E.B DuBois saw it as an opening to educate the city’s powerful residents about the difficulties of Philadelphia’s Negros experience in trying to live a normal life, in a neutral, methodical manner. He hoped that by educating them, society’s powerful members would be able to help them improve their situations themselves. He emphasized that the world was thinking wrong about race simply because they knew no better, and that’s what was wrong with the Philadelphia Negro.
The traditional eugenic theorist view of the time that encouraged the belief African Americans pass on undesirable detrimental genes, enforced the one-drop rule, and ultimately kept the white population “pure” and lumped anyone with black blood into one category and regulated miscegenation. This view attributes the causes of the challenges the Philadelphia Negro faced in finding a niche in society was in their genes, and it gets passed along generation to generation. DuBois maintained the notion t...
