Analysis. Sometimes a book takes on an unexpected meaning, foreign to the author’s intentions. This is what happened to the work of American ethnographer and sociologist Alice Goffman The Art of Fleeing. Investigation of a youth in the ghetto (Threshold, 366 p., 24 €). This fascinating and breathtaking investigation into police hypersurveillance of black neighborhoods in the United States arrives in France six years after its publication. The delay may seem excessive, but it has the advantage that it allows us to better appreciate certain developments in the American social sciences.
Sociological explanation for anger
Let's start with the book itself. It highlights the effect of so-called harsh American crime policies that have led to the massive and utterly disproportionate incarceration of black men. However, Alice Goffman is not interested in the prison itself, but in what precedes it and, in a way, prepares it: the incessant control of descendants of slaves in deprived neighborhoods. It shows how this crazy mechanism works by a field survey conducted in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania). Her immersion on Sixth Street, the name she gives to the neighborhood visited to preserve the anonymity of its sources, spans six years. We follow with her a gang of young black men, intermittent dealers, unemployed and salaried in turn, in their troubles with the police and the justice system.
She comes to describe a system that settles black men from the neighborhoods into a "Judicial insecurity" and "Transforms the basic institutions of work, friendship and family into a net that traps them". No place is safe for them, they are constantly on the run. The ethnographer relates, for example, how one of the young men she follows was arrested at the maternity ward where his wife was giving birth. An arrest warrant was pending against him for violation of the conditions of his parole.
Alice Goffman recounts her investigation and adopts an almost journalistic tone. The work, which was originally his doctoral thesis, is all the more striking. When it was released in 2014, it was immediately noticed, in particular because it seemed to provide a sociological explanation for the anger which then expressed itself in the street. The Black Lives Matter movement, against police violence against black people, is in full swing and places the racial issue at the heart of the debate.
