Hum Homework #8 and #9

Alice Goffman Elinor Carucci for The New York Times

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus Jan. 12, 2016

B efore the morning last September when I joined her atNewark Airport, I had met Alice Goffman only twice. But in the previous months, amid a widening controversy both

inside and outside the academy over her research, she and I had

developed a regular email correspondence, and she greeted me at

the gate as if I were an old friend. A 34-year-old untenured

professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,

Goffman had just begun a year of leave at the Institute for

Advanced Study in Princeton, which she hoped she might use to

escape her critics and get back to work. Now, though, she was

returning to Madison for a four-day visit, to deliver a lecture and

catch up with her graduate students.

The object of dispute was Goffman’s debut book, ‘‘On the Run,’’

which chronicles the social world of a group of young black men in

a mixed-income neighborhood in West Philadelphia, some of them

low-level drug dealers who live under constant threat of arrest and

cycle in and out of prison. She began the project as a 20-year-old

undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania; eventually she

moved to be closer to the neighborhood, which in the book she calls

‘‘Sixth Street,’’ and even took in two of her subjects as roommates.

While most ethnographic projects are completed over a year and a

half, Goffman spent more than six years working in the

neighborhood, which evolved from a field site into what she still

basically considers her home. Her field notes, which she kept with

obsessive fidelity — often transcribing hourslong conversations as

they happened in real time — ran to thousands of pages. She had to

spend more than a year chopping up and organizing these notes by

theme for her book: the rituals of court dates and bail hearings;

relationships with women and children; experiences of betrayal

and abandonment. All those records had now been burned: Even

before the controversy began, Goffman felt as though their ritual

incineration was the only way she could protect her friend--

informers from police scrutiny after her book was published.

At the gate in Newark, Goffman unshouldered a bulky zippered

tote bag. ‘‘I’m so happy,’’ she said with visible and somewhat

exaggerated relief, ‘‘that I didn’t give you this to take through

security yourself.’’ Over the course of our correspondence, I had

asked her from time to time if she had any book artifacts that

escaped destruction. In this tote was some material she had

forgotten about: unpaid bills, bail receipts, letters from prison and

a few extant fragments of hastily scrawled in situ field notes. But it

wasn’t until the security line that she remembered what the tote

probably once held, memorabilia from her time on Sixth Street:

bullets, spent casings, containers for drugs. She passed safely

through the scanner in a state of agitation, not about the risk she

took but by how blithely she was treated by T.S.A. agents.

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

‘‘And who did they stop?’’ she said. ‘‘Not me and my bag of

contrabandy stuff, but a young man with brown skin. I tried to

exchange a look of solidarity with him, but he wouldn’t look at me.

Compare that to the interactions I’ve had at this airport — people

smiling at me, holding the door for me. You don’t think, as a white

person, about how your whole day is boosted by people affirming

your dignity all day long. This isn’t news. But it is stuff that, for me,

at the beginning. ...’’ She didn’t finish the sentence.

When the University of Chicago Press published ‘‘On the Run’’ in

2014, it was met with a level of mainstream attention — profiles,

reviews, interviews — that many sociologists told me they had

never witnessed for a first book in their field. Malcolm Gladwell

called the work ‘‘extraordinary,’’ and in The New York Review of

Books, Christopher Jencks hailed it as an ‘‘ethnographic classic.’’

Despite the many years it took Goffman to finish the book, its

timing turned out to be propitious: The work of scholars like

Michelle Alexander had turned America’s staggering incarceration

rates, especially for black men, into one of the very few territories

of shared bipartisan concern. In the year after publication,

Goffman did 32 public speaking appearances, including a TED talk.

But by the time that TED talk received its millionth view, a

rancorous backlash to the book had begun.

Within her discipline, attitudes toward Goffman’s work were

conflicted from the beginning. The American Sociological

Association gave ‘‘On the Run’’ its Dissertation Award, and many

of Goffman’s peers came to feel as though she had been specially

anointed by the discipline’s power elite — that she had been

allowed, as the future public face of sociology, to operate by her

own set of rules. As a qualitative researcher, Goffman paid

relatively scant attention to the dominant mode of her data--

preoccupied field, instead opting to work in a hybrid fashion, as

something between a reporter and an academic. She has also

mostly refused to play the kinds of political games that can

constitute a large part of academic life, eschewing disciplinary

jargon and citing the work of other scholars only when she felt like

it.

Worse, perhaps, was Goffman’s fondness in her writing for what

could seem like lurid detail. Some of the flourishes in ‘‘On the Run’’

were harmless or even felicitous — one character’s ‘‘morning

routine of clothes ironing, hair care, body lotion and sneaker

buffing’’ — but others seemed to play up her own peril or pander to

audience expectations. In one scene, two white officers in SWAT

gear break down a house door, ‘‘with guns strapped to the sides of

their legs.’’ She continues, ‘‘The first officer in pointed a gun at me

and asked who was in the house; he continued to point the gun

toward me as he went up the stairs.’’ In another, Goffman writes

that the house of a family ‘‘smelled of piss and vomit and stale

cigarettes, and cockroaches roamed freely across the countertops

and soiled living-room furniture.’’

Above all, what frustrated her critics was the fact that she was a

well-off, expensively educated white woman who wrote about the

lives of poor black men without expending a lot of time or energy

on what the field refers to as ‘‘positionality’’ — in this case, on an

accounting of her own privilege. Goffman identifies strongly and

explicitly with the confident social scientists of previous

generations, and if none of those figures felt as though they had to

apologize for doing straightforward, readable work on

marginalized or discredited populations, she didn’t see why she

should have to. As another young professor told me, with the air of

reverent exasperation that people use to talk about her, ‘‘Alice used

a writing style that today you can’t really use in the social

sciences.’’ He sighed and began to trail off. ‘‘In the past,’’ he said

with some astonishment, ‘‘they really did write that way.’’ The book

smacked, some sociologists argued, of a kind of swaggering

adventurism that the discipline had long gotten over. Goffman

became a proxy for old and unsettled arguments about

ethnography that extended far beyond her own particular case.

What is the continuing role of the qualitative in an era devoted to

data? When the politics of representation have become so fraught,

who gets to write about whom?

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

These criticisms, though heated, had been carried out in the public,

respectable, self-correcting way of any social-scientific debate.

Last spring, however, the discussion lost its academic gentility. In

May, an unsigned, 60-page, single-spaced document was emailed

from a throwaway address to hundreds of sociologists, detailing a

series of claims casting doubt on the veracity of events as Goffman

described them. The book, according to the anonymous accuser,

has her attending a juvenile criminal proceeding that must have

been closed to outsiders; it misrepresents the amount of time she

spent living in the neighborhood; it describes scenes containing

characters that by Goffman’s own account were by then dead. In

one place, the document notes, Goffman says she went to nine

funerals, while in another place she says 19. She claims that her

close friend ‘‘Chuck’’ — she uses pseudonyms for all her subjects

— was shot in the head but also describes him in his hospital bed as

covered in casts. The allegations, some of them trivial in isolation,

seemed in their profusion hard to write off.

At the recommendation of her trade publisher, Goffman prepared,

but did not distribute, an almost equally lengthy point-by-point

response to the charges, and her department investigated the

accusations and declared them without merit. But journalists and

legal scholars had seized on the anonymous critique, and over the

course of last spring and summer, critical pieces appeared in The

Chronicle of Higher Education and The New Republic. Her critics

compared her to fabricators like Stephen Glass and Jonah Lehrer,

who invented quotations or characters out of whole cloth. Some

went so far as to accuse her of a felony, based on a brief but vivid

account in the book’s appendix. Chuck, her friend and sometime

roommate, has been murdered by neighborhood rivals, and

Goffman describes driving her other roommate, Mike, on his

manhunt for the killer — a de facto and prosecutable confession,

her critics said, of conspiracy to commit homicide. Goffman

generally refused to respond to the allegations against her, but she

did come forward to recharacterize this episode, despite the stark

blood lust she originally described, as something akin to a mere

mourning ritual. This made for a considerably attenuated version

of the story, and her critics responded that she was thus either a

felon or a liar.

‘How much do we sacrifice to become public intellectuals? At the end of the day, we have to be careful about how much pandering we do to the masses.’

I reached out to Goffman last summer, at the height of the

controversy over her work. She responded to me in part, I think,

because despite the sleeplessness, depression and anxiety the

scandal provoked, she was unable to quiet her curiosity about the

norms and social structure of a discipline — i.e., journalism — that

is so similar to and yet so different from what she herself does. We

struck up a correspondence based on the comparison, about how

we each balance what we owe to our professional communities and

what we owe to our subjects, and about how to seduce subjects to

cooperate in the first place. She saw the ethical predicament of her

tribe as arguably worse than that of mine. ‘‘People aren’t letting

you in because they want to be seen,’’ she wrote, ‘‘because you’re

an academic and nobody’s gonna read what you write. They’re

letting you in because you’re friends by now, and they forget that

you’re writing a book at all, even when you keep bringing it up. So

it’s more like the betrayal of telling secrets about your own family

members, of selling out the people you care about most.’’

The discipline as a whole does not seem to know quite how to react

to Goffman’s case. Sociologists are proud that the work that comes

out of their departments is so heterodox and wide-ranging — and,

especially when it comes to issues like mass incarceration, so

influential in policy debates — but it is a fractured field, and many

sociologists worry that over the last few decades they have ceded

their great midcentury prestige and explanatory power to

economists on one side and social psychologists on the other. There

has been a lot of hand-wringing about Goffman, and even her

sympathizers mostly declined to speak to me on the record for fear

of contamination. ‘‘I’ve done nothing for months but talk to my

colleagues about Alice,’’ one sociologist told me, in the context of

how much he admires her and her work. ‘‘But we’re in uncharted

waters here. There have been a hundred years of debates about the

reliability of ethnography, but this is the first time the debate is

being carried out in the Twitter age.’’

It does not help that Goffman, when challenged about her book —

or about the privilege, defiance and sloppiness to which critics

attribute its weaknesses — tends to respond with willful naïveté or

near-grandiose self-possession. Once, when I asked her what she

made of a sustained series of attacks by one critic, a respected

quantitative sociologist, she said it was hard to pay proper

attention to him when other people were accusing her of felonies.

Besides, she said, in a world in which a majority of black men

without high-school degrees have been in prison, she had little

patience for internecine quarrels. ‘‘I can’t even muster that much

interest,” she wrote by way of conclusion. ‘‘Because there’s a big,

mysterious world out there, and I want to understand a little more

of it before I die. That and tear down the prisons.’’

A kind of benign self-neglect, along with a comprehensive absent--

mindedness, extends outward to everything in Goffman’s life that

isn’t fieldwork or her students. People who spend a lot of time with

her often arrange themselves to take care of her, lest she get lost. I

knew her for only two days before I found myself making sure, for

example, that her phone was plugged in. In our four days in

Madison, she could not remember that her room was a right turn

out of the elevator. Goffman is short, with big, round chestnut eyes,

dirty-blond hair that she rarely knows what to do with, a slightly

reedy quaver in her voice and a performatively childlike manner

that softens a relentlessly inquisitive and analytic intelligence. If

she ever stopped asking questions, you might notice her only as

someone’s tagalong little sister.

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

This mien helps her enlist everyone she meets as a cooperating

informer. In Madison, we were picked up between appointments by

an Uber driver in blue scrubs; he told us he was studying radiology

at a local community college but had taken the year off to earn

money as a transport coordinator in a hospital. He was from

Jackson, Miss., and had arrived in Madison via Milwaukee.

Goffman turned to the driver, who was black, to ask — in the

offhand way you might ask an Uber driver about his experiences

with the company — ‘‘What have your local experiences with

racism been like?’’

He thought for a moment. ‘‘It’s like, people smile at me, smile at

me, smile at me, and then BAM!’’ He paused.

‘‘Something happens, and you feel put in your place?’’ Goffman

said.

The driver nodded emphatically and asked Goffman what she did

for a living. When she answered, he told her he saw the social

forces that organized human behavior as if they were a school of

fish guiding each member.

‘‘Go on,’’ she said, taking notes on her phone.

‘‘You just can’t go from A to Z,’’ he continued. ‘‘You go from A to B

and then maybe to C, but then you’re back to B again, then to C and

back to B, and you never know why.’’

‘‘That’s so good,’’ Goffman said. She gave him her email address

and asked him if she could persuade him to switch over to

sociology, and he laughed. By the time we got out of the car, he

seemed a little dazed, unsure how he came to talk about this stuff

over the course of a five-minute ride.

Goffman was raised to be a sociologist, though she tends to prefer

the homelier designation of ‘‘fieldworker.’’ Her father, Erving, who

died at 60 of stomach cancer when she was an infant, was perhaps

the most important sociologist of the last 50 years — and easily the

most consequential sociologist in the public discourse. Though

Erving’s work was varied and deliberately unsystematic, he is best

known for his elaboration of the self as a series of performances.

His daughter has taken over his idea that static character is less

interesting or relevant than the dynamics of exchange. ‘‘I don’t

think,’’ she once told me — after calling herself ‘‘chameleonlike’’ —

‘‘that I have real preferences, just desires that emerge in social

interactions.’’

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

Her mother, Gillian Sankoff, and her adoptive father, William

Labov, are eminent sociolinguists themselves, and when Goffman

was a child, she was sent on the full-time, perpetual errand of

collecting noteworthy linguistic misunderstandings for her

parents’ collection. Goffman was partly raised by an Italian family

in South Philadelphia whom her mother found through a want ad

for child care; they were so different from her ‘‘professor parents’’

that she got in the habit of taking field notes on family

conversations. Goffman spent a gap year between high school and

college volunteering for U.S.A.I.D. in the Philippines, and her

parents remember that she sent home pages and pages of letters

that said little about her own life and quite a bit about, for example,

the local varieties of queue formation.

In her first semester as an undergraduate at the University of

Pennsylvania, she took a graduate-level class on urban sociology,

and within a few weeks it was clear to her professor, David

Grazian, that she was the most talented and committed person in

the class. ‘‘I sent her out on a fieldwork assignment to sit at a diner

and record what she saw, and she came back after an hour with 14

single-spaced pages.’’ Through a project for that class, on the lives

of the mostly black cafeteria employees at Penn, she came to tutor

a teenager named Aïsha, the granddaughter of a cafeteria

supervisor. Goffman grew close to Aïsha and her family, and it was

through them that she met the men whose lives she describes in

‘‘On the Run’’: an intermittent drug dealer she calls Mike, as well

as a family: three brothers, Chuck, Reggie and Tim, and their

mother, Miss Linda.

Even while Goffman was still an undergraduate, word of her

intensive fieldwork circulated among senior ethnographers, and

one recruited her to study under him in a Ph.D. program at

Princeton; she commuted to New Jersey from Philadelphia, and

the project she began at 20 ultimately became her dissertation. The

general impression was that, as a member of the Princeton

department told me, her work was brilliant but not all that

dissimilar from other contemporary works of ethnography, except

in the depth of her fieldwork. Recent years have seen comparable

projects on drug dealers in an unidentified city, by Waverly Duck of

the University of Pittsburgh; on drug robbers in the South Bronx,

by Randol Contreras of the University of Toronto; on reform-school

students in Pennsylvania, by Jamie Fader of Temple University;

and others. One member of that cohort described Goffman to me as

‘‘very humble, very down to earth,’’ and Goffman herself has

always categorized what she did as only an incremental

contribution to the cumulative work in the field.

But from the beginning, critics worried that her book, which

refused to contextualize itself with ‘‘positional’’ humility or some

powerful theory, would serve only to reinforce popular stereotypes.

The most glaring such stereotype was that young black men are

invariably involved in crime, and critics felt that she drastically

overstated the extent to which her characters were representative,

rather than anomalous, in their criminal activity.

Sociologists who distrust her strain of richly descriptive

ethnography saw this as an unfortunate consequence of the

ethnographer’s tendency to become ‘‘too close’’ to her subjects, to

forgo rigor and skepticism in favor of taking at face value the

accounts that subjects give of themselves. In Goffman’s case, this

extended both to discussions of criminality (her subjects, some

critics suggested, played up their exploits to impress her) and to

the various exigencies that shaped their lives. When her subjects

told her that they were afraid to go to the hospital to witness the

birth of their children because it was standard practice among

police officers to check visitors for arrest warrants, she was

deemed too quick to accept their beliefs and superstitions as

accurate representations of police practice. Too often she presented

events or descriptions without qualifying comment — a perfectly

valid approach for a journalist, who often tells a particular story

and leaves the reader to do the generalizing, but a more

problematic one for a sociologist, who is expected to do the

generalizing herself.

It was the media’s celebration of ‘‘On the Run’’ — and particularly

of its more sensational elements — that turned the response within

the discipline from contentious to personal. This ill will was made

explicit at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Sociological

Association in San Francisco, where it seemed as if Goffman had

become a celebrity: Some attendees remember seeing a poster--

size photo of her, hands in her jeans pockets, outside a prison.

Goffman had been chosen for an ‘‘Author Meets Critics’’ panel, an

honor rarely visited upon a book so soon after publication. The

event was, extraordinarily, standing room only; people in

neighboring panels reported that they could barely pay attention to

what was going in front of them because of the fanfare down the

hall. Two people told me they tried to get in, were turned away and

went to their hotel rooms to watch the drama unfold on Twitter.

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

By all accounts, the session felt unusually hostile. As Victor Rios,

one of the panelists and a sociologist at the University of California,

Santa Barbara, who studies similar communities, framed the

problem, she had engaged in the ‘‘Jungle Book trope’’: She visits

the jungle, sees the wild animals in their natural habitat, loses her

way and, thanks to the kindness of beasts, lives to tell the story.

Rios, a former gang member, told me later that he understood the

pressures on Goffman and that he was urged to write his story in a

way that would command broad attention — ‘‘My best friend was

killed in front of me; I ended up in juvie.’’ But he resisted it, out of

worry about his tenure prospects and also on principle. ‘‘How

much do we sacrifice to become public intellectuals?’’ he said. ‘‘At

the end of the day, we have to be careful about how much

pandering we do to the masses.’’

Sociology as a discipline emerged, in the late 19th century, from the

idea that things called ‘‘social facts’’ might be studied the way a

chemist studies compounds or a biologist studies organisms. While

political economists and psychologists studied the individual actor,

with his or her particular preferences and utility-maximizing

behavior, sociologists believed that the group was primary to its

members — that we are evolving products of contingent social

norms. What this insight has subsequently produced in practice is

a discipline that now encompasses everything from statistical

analyses of census data to accessible monographs about why

people shoplift or the social processes of divorce. Over the past few

decades, the field has gone through cycles of tribalism, rived by

arguments among quantitative analysts; theory-heavy scholars

working in the tradition of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu;

Give this article 384

FEATURE

Her first book, ‘On the Run' — about the lives of young black men in West Philadelphia — has fueled a fight within sociology over who gets to speak for whom.

The Trials of Alice Goffman

Account

critical race scholars, who have brought up important but tricky

points about who gets to study whom; and the urban ‘‘symbolic

interactionists’’ with whom Goffman identifies.

People in Goffman’s camp trace their work to Robert E. Park and

the so-called First Chicago School, which set itself to the project of

understanding the new vigor and clash of the American city, then

driven by the dynamism of industrialization and immigration. Park

had spent 10 years as a journalist and was working for Booker T.

Washington at the Tuskegee Institute when he was asked, in 1914,

to join the young sociology department at the University of

Chicago. This was a Chicago that would produce new sorts of

Americans, characters like Saul Bellow’s Augie March, and Park’s

team went on to put together canonical, sympathetic studies of the

city’s black, Jewish, Chinese and Polish neighborhoods. As Richard

Wright put it in his introduction to ‘‘Black Metropolis,’’ St. Clair

Drake and Horace Cayton’s classic study of Chicago’s ‘‘black belt,’’

the ethnographers of the First Chicago School ‘‘were not afraid to

urge their students to trust their feelings for a situation or an

event, were not afraid to stress the role of insight, and to warn

against a slavish devotion to figures, charts, graphs and sterile

scientific techniques.’’

Their painstaking empirical efforts, modeled on the anthropology

of Franz Boas, were carried out in the hope that they might refute

the reigning theoretical paradigm of the day, which looked to

eugenics and social Darwinism to explain racial inferiority and the

‘‘social problems’’ introduced by immigration. The project was

explicitly liberal and meliorative, of a piece with the work of

journalists like Jacob Riis and early social workers like Jane

Addams. The first step toward sensible policy-driven solutions, the

First Chicago School believed, was work that would convince the

broader public that these immigrant enclaves, which seemed so

foreign and inscrutable, actually represented ordered social worlds

structured by familiar norms.

This sort of detail required deep, sustained, participatory attention.

Some monographs produced by Park’s team were written by

‘‘native informants’’ — Louis Wirth on the Jewish ghetto, Paul Siu

on the Chinese laundryman, Drake and Cayton on the black belt —

and others by outsiders. These practitioners, especially when they

sought to examine and explain criminal behavior, faced many of

the same problems Goffman did as a participant-observer: William

Foote Whyte, in his 1943 study of Boston’s North End, admitted in

his methodological appendix that he had been an accessory to

election fraud. But it was understood that part of the

ethnographer’s project was a suspension of belief in conventional

assumptions about deviant behavior, and that if you wanted to

understand more fully how and why people broke the law, you had

to see their world from the inside.

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

Part of the problem for both native informants and outside

observers, Wright saw at the time, was that this sort of detail--

heavy, participatory intensity was always in danger of being taken

the wrong way. As Wright put it in his introduction to ‘‘Black

Metropolis’’: ‘‘This is no easy book. ... There is no attempt in ‘Black

Metropolis’ to understate, to gloss over, to doll up or to make harsh

facts pleasant for the tender-minded.’’ The work represented

important racial progress insofar as it treated black lives as worthy

of full, lavish, unblinkered description.

After World War II, immigration slowed and the university was

expanding, and what became known, under the leadership of  - Everett Hughes, as the Second Chicago School was less interested

in ethnic minorities than it was in the processes of

professionalization — how some people come to self-identify as

‘‘doctors’’ or ‘‘lawyers’’ — as well as the mechanics by which some

subcultures were labeled ‘‘deviant.’’ Though Erving Goffman did

only two stints as a fieldworker — once in the Shetland Islands, the

work that ultimately became his 1959 classic ‘‘The Presentation of

Self in Everyday Life,’’ and again for a year in a mental institution,

the experience that was the basis for his 1961 book ‘‘Asylums’’ — he

had a strong affinity with this school, especially with the work of

Howard S. Becker, who wrote widely read essays about the

socialization of marijuana users. These books, lucid and elegant in

their style and argumentation, were acclaimed far outside

sociology departments and often led their writers to positions of

influence on policy. (Goffman ended up on an important committee

to review the mental-health system.)

But by the 1970s, this style of qualitative work was threatened on

all sides. It became easier, in the context of the Cold War expansion

of the American university, to secure funding if you could point to

exactly the figures, charts and graphs that Wright considered

sterile. Universities were turning out a newly diverse array of

graduates, and the critical race studies movement arose to

question the methods and prejudices of ‘‘intrepid’’ white scholars

in pith helmets. As these young scholars pointed out, especially in

Joyce Ladner’s landmark 1973 anthology, ‘‘The Death of White

Sociology,’’ a number of the books produced by the First Chicago

School did, despite their best intentions, traffic in sensationalism

and stereotypes. At the same time, sociologists — keen to keep up

with their colleagues in economics departments — strove to put

themselves on the secure path of a science. The view was that

statistics were facts and everything else mere impressionism.

And, worse than impressionistic, ethnography had also come to

seem exploitative. The most glaring case was that of the

Washington University scholar Laud Humphreys, who wrote in

1970 about anonymous sex between men in public restrooms. As

part of his research, he took down the license plates of the

‘‘tearoom’’ visitors, and many months later went to interview

them, under false pretexts, at home and often in front of their

families. The press attacked the work as unethical, often in the

same language with which Goffman was criticized. The scandal

destroyed Humphreys’s entire department, and the moral was

clear: Ethnography was shady work.

On our flight back from Madison, Goffman came to find me in the

rear of the plane and silently handed me two black notebooks, both

marked 2003. She used them during her sophomore and junior

years of college, when she and Mike and Chuck were first getting

close. She had hesitated to show them to me because they were one

of the few sentimental things she had left from that time, and now,

she figured, she would have to destroy them just as she had

destroyed her field notes.

The notebooks are extraordinary records of a young scholar’s

intellectual and personal development. They present two parallel

processes of socialization. In the fall of 2003, she is about to turn

22; she is in her junior year at Penn, but she is already applying to

graduate school. Her life on Sixth Street has become much more

real to her than her life on campus, but still she remained

committed to sociology. The notebooks show her makeshift

attempts to reconcile what she is learning in class with what she is

seeing on the street. She is taking a course, with the eminent

sociologist Randall Collins, on the history of sociological theory;

another class on the history of the South; a third on African--

American literature; and a fourth, which she will drop, on

statistics. The only time either notebook mentions Erving Goffman

is on the first page, where she takes down what seems to be a

quote from a posthumously published talk on fieldwork: ‘‘The most

difficult thing about doing fieldwork is remembering who you are.’’

In class, Goffman is learning about the history of racial

discrimination, and on Sixth Street, she is witnessing Mike’s

inability to secure a job. ‘‘After months of limited involvement in

the drug trade,’’ she writes, ‘‘his man [Chuck] is home and he is

ready to stop being broke and get back in more seriously.’’ She

moves easily in and out of an academic register, writing in one

sentence about her attempts to ‘‘chart Mike’s socio-econ wave’’ and

elsewhere on the same page about the minor transactions of their

growing friendship: ‘‘I tell him to call PO [parole officer] — it’s the

15th — and ask if he’ll help me move my couch tomorrow and he

says I got you.’’

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

‘There have been a hundred years of debates about the reliability of ethnography, but this is the first time the debate is being carried out in the Twitter age.’

Mike and Chuck come to her house — they’re not living with her

yet — to do their laundry. They tease her, often for what she’s

wearing, and she teases them back. It’s clear in her mischievous

play, her ability to generate urgent affection and her speed on the

uptake that this is the same Goffman I have gotten to know. At a

certain point, the group returns to a waiting black Lincoln

Navigator, and her friend Steve has taken her seat: ‘‘I say Get the

[expletive] out of my seat [Steve]! And he and [Mike] think this is

the funniest thing they ever heard and [Mike] says proudly: Yo she

be gangster sometimes.’’ There are moments where she pauses to

reflect on the changes she has undergone since she started her

fieldwork — ‘‘I’m a vegetarian and used to be a gymnast’’ — but

for the most part she does nothing to indicate that she feels as

though she is being transformed or remade by the experience.

Threaded through her descriptions of these young-adult

encounters — in between her course notes on Richard Wright,

W.E.B. Du Bois, Ned Polsky and Emile Durkheim — is the sort of

sociological work that David Riesman described as a ‘‘conversation

between the classes.’’ Over the course of the final few weeks of that

notebook, jottings on the theories of Georg Simmel or an outline of

the history of the Scottsboro boys alternates with a comprehensive

lexicon she begins to assemble: ‘‘fall back: to cool it. fall back! said

to a boy trying to holla. ‘I’m falling back from hustlin’.’’ There are

entries for ‘‘cake/cakin’ ’’ and ‘‘to smash,’’ followed by pages with definitions of Weber’s concepts of ‘‘erklären’’ and ‘‘verstehen.’’

Critics have been quick to point out, implicitly and otherwise, that

the similar code-switching in ‘‘On the Run’’ looks a lot like what

Erving warned about: forgetting who you are. As one detractor

told me, it seemed to many people as if ‘‘Alice thought she was

turning black,’’ and Philadelphia magazine has compared her to

Rachel Dolezal, the N.A.A.C.P. president in Spokane, Wash., who

was revealed to have been passing as black. On occasion, this

discomfort has been crudely sexualized; when Goffman was an

undergraduate, professors in her department asked her advisers if

she was sleeping with her informers, and that insinuation makes

regular appearances in anonymous posts about her on sociology

message boards. The conversation between the classes had grown

so obviously intimate that a lot of people could understand it only

in terms of lust and fetish.

It’s true that ethnography has come somewhat back into fashion

since the 1970s and that no contemporary sociologist would agree

with the call, tweeted by a Buzzfeed writer and echoed elsewhere,

to ‘‘ban outsider ethnographies.’’ As one sociologist put it to me, ‘‘If

Alice Goffman isn’t allowed to write about poor black people, then

sociologists who come from poor communities of color, like Victor

Rios, aren’t allowed to write about elite institutions like banks or

hedge funds, and that, in the end, hurts Victor Rios much more

than it hurts Alice Goffman.’’

But even within sociology departments, there isn’t a lot of

agreement about how to go about the process of bridging social

distance in a way that is both respectful and rigorous — a

researcher is always in danger of being accused of having stayed

too far away or gotten too close. Ethnographers have always dealt

with questions about where their allegiances lie, and more than

one ethnographer has been accused of being too close to her

subjects to evaluate their self-reports. I asked Goffman’s

undergraduate adviser, Elijah Anderson, an august ethnographer

— mostly of urban black communities — now at Yale, about the

criticism of Goffman as an adventurer or tourist, or as a wide-eyed,

credulous observer. He said she had carried out her work just as

any ethnographer should. He elliptically handed me a copy of

‘‘Stigma’’ — one of Erving Goffman’s most famous books, from 1963

— and invited me to look up the part on ‘‘courtesy stigma.’’ Erving

anticipates exactly the sort of criticism brought to bear five

decades later on the work of his daughter:

The person with a courtesy stigma can in fact make both the

stigmatized and the normal uncomfortable: By always being

ready to carry a burden that is not ‘‘really’’ theirs, they can

confront everyone else with too much morality; by treating the

stigma as a neutral matter to be looked at in a direct, offhand

way, they open themselves and the stigmatized to

misunderstanding by normals who may read offensiveness into

this behavior.

Most of the problems ‘‘On the Run’’ has encountered, especially

outside the field, have to do with the fact that it falls between the

stools of journalism and ethnography. If the book was too

journalistic — too descriptive, too irresponsible, too

sensationalistic, too taken with its own first-person involvement —

to count as properly rigorous sociology, it was too sociological to

count, for many journalists, as proper reporting. Most journalists

believe that true stories are necessarily personal, about the ways

particular people choose to act in the world; the language of

journalism, like the language of law, is almost always the language

of individual moral responsibility. For a sociologist, whose

profession since the turn of the century has taken it as axiomatic

that society is primary to the individual, the language of individual

moral responsibility is often a way of avoiding talk about structural

conditions that favor the powerful.

Many of the things for which journalists and legal scholars have

berated Goffman are considered standard practice for sociologists,

and most sociologists have found the mainstream criticisms of the

book to be baseless. Procedurally, journalists object to the

pseudonymity of sources and the destruction of her field notes;

sociologists point out that institutional review boards mandate that

identities be obscured and that they often require the destruction

of field notes that could be subject to subpoena in a criminal

investigation. Regarding most of the book’s internal

inconsistencies, virtually every single ethnographer I talked to

described the enormously difficult logistical problem of how to

keep track of pseudonymous notes over years and admitted that if

you subjected almost any work in the field to that kind of punitive

audit, you would almost certainly come up with similar trivial

confusions. This is true of even the most organizationally

composed people, of which Goffman is not. She cannot off the top of

her head remember which year she finished high school, which

year she finished college or which year she spent three months in

the hospital after almost being killed on her bike by a bus.

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

Goffman has declined to make public the long, point-by-point

rebuttal of her anonymous attacker, but after we got to know each

other well, she shared it with me. It is blunt and forceful and, in

comparison with the placidity of her public deportment, almost

impatient and aggrieved in tone, and it is difficult to put the

document down without wondering why she has remained

unwilling to publicize some of its explanations. She acknowledges a

variety of errors and inconsistencies, mostly the results of a

belabored anonymization process, but otherwise persuasively

explains many of the lingering issues. There is, for example, a

convincing defense of her presence in the supposedly closed

juvenile court and a quite reasonable clarification of the mild

confusion over what she witnessed firsthand and what she

reconstructed from interviews — along with explanations for even

the most peculiar and deranged claims of her anonymous attacker,

including why Mike does his laundry at home in one scene and at a

laundromat in another.

Many claims against her are also easy to rebut independently.

Some critics called far-fetched, for example, her claim that an F.B.I.

agent in Philadelphia drew up a new computer surveillance system

after watching a TV broadcast about the East German Stasi. If you

search the Internet for ‘‘Philadelphia cop Stasi documentary,’’ a

substantiating item from The Philadelphia Inquirer from 2007 is

the second hit. When it comes to Goffman’s assertion that officers

run IDs in maternity wards to arrest wanted fathers, another short

Internet search produces corroborating examples in Dallas, New

Orleans and Brockton, Mass., and a Philadelphia public defender

and a deputy mayor told me that the practice does not at all seem

beyond plausibility. The most interesting question might not be

whether Goffman was telling the truth but why she has continued

to let people believe that she might not be.

The hardest elements of her story to confirm are the ones that feel

like cinematic exaggerations, especially with respect to police

practices; several officers challenged as outlandish her claim that

she was personally interrogated with guns on the table. To

Goffman, however, the fact that a journalist or a legal scholar

would turn to the police to confirm accusations against them is

representative of the broader failure of American society to take

seriously the complaints of disempowered minority communities.

It’s the definition of institutional racism. When I reminded her that

it was my job to try to find independent confirmation of some of her

claims, she understood my own disciplinary needs and was

forthcoming, if slightly begrudging, in helping me out. But at one

point, when I pressed her on one of these issues, she wrote back

that I seemed to be saying, ‘‘The way to validate the claims in the

book is by getting officials who are white men in power to

corroborate them.’’ She went on: ‘‘The point of the book is for

people who are written off and delegitimated to describe their own

lives and to speak for themselves about the reality they face, and

this is a reality that goes absolutely against the narratives of

officials or middle-class people. So finding ‘legitimate’ people to

validate the claims — it feels wrong to me on just about every

level.’’

In this her discipline stands behind her, over and against

journalistic or legal practice. As Randall Collins, whose course she

was taking when she was writing in the black notebooks, put it:

‘‘She got in deep enough so that not only does she understand

things from their point of view, she doesn’t give priority to laws,

official morals, all the things that conventional people take for

granted. I not only am not going to play the shock game, but I don’t

have much respect for people who can’t see that their being

shocked is part of the way their social world is constructed around

them.’’

‘She got in deep enough so that not only does she understand things from their point of view, she doesn’t give priority to laws, official morals, all the things that conventional people take for granted.’

What has united her critics, academic and otherwise, is the

accusation that in going ‘‘deep enough’’ to disregard laws, she did

in fact lose herself in the process and confuse her own

ethnographic standing with actual membership in the community

she studied. This comes to the fore in the book’s final scene, the

nighttime drive to find Chuck’s killer. The legal and journalistic

position would stipulate that either the last scene occurred as it

was initially written, as a manhunt, or it occurred as she later

described it — as a mourning ritual and face-saving ceremony.

But what her critics can’t imagine is that perhaps both of the

accounts she has given are true at the same time — that this

represents exactly the bridging of the social gap that so many

observers find unbridgeable. From the immediate view of a

participant, this was a manhunt; from the detached view of an

observer, this was a ritual. The account in the book was that of

Goffman the participant, who had become so enmeshed in this

community that she felt the need for vengeance ‘‘in my bones.’’ The

account Goffman provided in response to the felony accusation

(which read as if dictated by a lawyer, which it might well have

been) was written by Goffman the observer, the stranger to the

community who can see that the reason these actors give for their

behavior — revenge — is given by the powerless as an attempt to

save face; that though this talk was important, it was talk all the

same.

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

The problem of either-or is one that is made perhaps inevitable by

the metaphor of ‘‘immersion.’’ The anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom,

who studies economic relationships, explained to me that it’s a

metaphor her own field has long given up on. The metaphor asks

us to imagine a researcher underwater — that is, imperiled,

unreachable from above — who then returns to the sun and air,

newly qualified to report on the darkness below because the

experience has put a chill in her bones. This narrative of

transformation is what strikes critics like Rios as so patronizing

and self-congratulatory. But Goffman herself never understood her

work to be ‘‘immersive’’ in that way. The almost impossible

challenge Goffman thus set before herself is the representation of

both these views — of drive as manhunt and drive as ritual — in all

their simultaneity.

Goffman could have covered herself by adding another paragraph

of analysis, one that would have contextualized but also undercut

the scene as the participants experienced it. Almost all of her early

readers thought she should do that. It would have made her life

easier. But she didn’t. This was a book about men whose entire

lives — whose whole network of relationships — had been

criminalized, and she did not hesitate to criminalize her own. She

threw in her lot.

For the last five years, Goffman hadn’t had the opportunity to

spend much time in Philadelphia: after finishing her dissertation in

2010, she spent two years on a postdoctoral fellowship in Michigan

(she threw away the two years of field notes she took there, fearing

an even worse version of the criticisms she got for ‘‘On the Run’’)

and then moved to Madison for her new job there. But now that she

was in Princeton for the year, she had told her Sixth Street friends

that she would be back on the block again.

It had been at least a year since she visited Miss Linda, and when

we went to see her in October, she engulfed Goffman until her tiny

person almost disappeared into the embrace. Reggie, himself a

man of considerable bulk, stood there on the sidewalk, his phone

ringing unanswered, for two minutes until Goffman was put down

and it was his turn. Goffman had come down in part to catch up

with the family and in part to distribute the royalty checks she

shares evenly with the book’s central characters. (She did the math

The media’s celebration of ‘‘On the Run’’ turned the academic community’s response from contentious to personal. The University of Chicago Press

Sign up for The New York Times Magazine Newsletter  The best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week, including

exclusive feature stories, photography, columns and more. Get it sent to

your inbox.

© 2022 The New York Times Company

NYTCo Contact Us Accessibility Work with us Advertise T Brand Studio Your Ad Choices Privacy Policy Terms of Service Terms of Sale Site Map Help Subscriptions

Do Not Sell My Personal Information California Notices

shares evenly with the book’s central characters. (She did the math

last year without setting aside money to cover taxes, so she had to

pay them out of pocket.) She chose that Friday because it was

Reggie’s birthday and because Mike had called to tell her that he

might be getting out of prison that day, though he had been

thinking that for a few weeks.

The Sixth Street neighborhood, four or five square blocks in all, is

bounded by some geographical features that make it feel mostly

self-contained; it’s not an area one would be likely to pass through

en route to anywhere else, so it was, Goffman explained, not a

place for strangers. She wasn’t sure how they would receive

another outsider, but it was clear from our arrival that Goffman

was family, so anyone she brought along was family, too. Reggie

wore a black T-shirt over the contours of a black tank top and fitted

gray sweatpants; he had a short fauxhawk and a wide, pointy

beard, which gave his large head the shape of a big, dark diamond.

He removed his headphones from his ears and put his sunglasses

— large and round and stylishly effeminate in an early-1980s way,

like the sunglasses Mia Farrow wears in ‘‘Broadway Danny Rose’’

— atop his mohawk, then smiled broadly and extended his hand to

introduce himself.

‘‘You write books, too? Like Alice?’’

‘‘I do, yeah.’’

‘‘I write books, too.’’ He explained that he had done a lot of writing

in prison, but that being back at home was too distracting to get

much done. Alice fished in her wallet and handed him a check.

‘‘This for our book?’’ She nodded. He asked me if I had read their

book. I said that I had and that I really liked it. He was pleased. He

said ‘‘our book’’ a few more times. Goffman was clearly happy that

he was so proud of it.

After a while, Goffman, who eats an astonishing amount of junk

food, was hungry and wanted to go to a Jamaican place nearby. She

asked Reggie and Miss Linda if they wanted to come, but Miss

Linda was happy sitting in the sun, and she told us that as long as

Reggie’s phone was ringing off the hook, he wasn’t going

anywhere. We went to get food and bring it back, and Reggie came

over to the car to make sure we would be joining him for his

birthday party that night. Goffman got out and gave him a hug and

said she would be in touch. As she got back into the car, she called

out, ‘‘I love you.’’

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

I had spent a lot of time with her, and I had never seen her in such

high spirits as she seemed in the car that day, crisscrossing

Philadelphia to see everyone she was close to. We were off to meet

some of her other friends from the book, one group in what she

described as a poorer neighborhood nearby, then a quick visit to a

friend of hers in the hospital, and finally to a more middle-class,

mixed-ethnicity neighborhood in another part of the city. Before we

arrived at each stop, Goffman gave me a demographic and

historical rundown of the block and the community it hosted, with

the sort of fine-grained understanding of the class differences in

the community that she was accused of lacking in the book. She

seemed entirely herself: an observer upon whom nothing is lost, an

irremediable sociologist and the prodigal baby sister of Sixth Street

home at last.

Many of the people we met knew that Goffman hadn’t had the

easiest year, and they greeted her like an infantryman on leave

from a traumatic campaign — though each seemed to have a

slightly different idea of what it was Goffman actually did. Most of

them knew she wrote books, and some thought she was a teacher.

She told some of her friends that she was thinking about quitting

her job, and she asked them what they thought she could do if she

moved back to town. They said that she would be a great

schoolteacher, but that unfortunately she was a little too small to be

a home health aide. By the end of the night, Goffman was

beginning to drag, and she told Mike’s mom, with whom she is

particularly close, that she didn’t know what to do.

Mike’s mom smoothed Goffman’s knotty hair, then gave her a stern

lecture about persistence. ‘‘You just got to pull your pants up,’’ she

said, ‘‘and keep going.’’

A DV E R T I S E M E N T