Ok. The Fryer meme has been going around and hitting up some of my boys. Bomani emailed me about my thoughts after reading Cobb's take...and I've already weighed in on Prometheus' ideas on him. In as much as the number of black social scientists with blogs is currently at two (Melissa Harris-Lacewell has one but doesn't really claim it as such) I thought I'd weigh in.
Here's the deal. I don't know Fryer personally, but I heard of him around the same time I heard of Steven Levitt. I don't think Levitt's conclusions are all that deep. Those who are in the know have always known that drug dealing doesn't REALLY pay more than McDonalds. If it really did, then the ghettoes wouldn't all look...well, like GHETTOES. Hell, one of the reasons that the drug of choice in urban areas shifted from crack to heroin was because the supply was so great that the profit margins on the product were so slim that fools couldn't really make loot off of it.
So they shifted.
When I hung out with Cobb (and as an aside the moment was just as he captured it. If I didn't have writing deadlines up the wazoo I'd write more. Suffice it to say that it was one of the best times I've ever had in my life.) I said as much. For Levitt this question was interesting enough to ask...whereas for us (that is, black social scientists with access to drug dealers and even some intimate knowledge about dealing) these questions weren't as interesting.
I mentioned this to Prometheus. I know a couple of mid level drug dealers well enough that if I wanted to I could've gotten this information from them. I NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT DOING SO. And I'm decent at what I do. This in and of itself separates Levitt from me. And this in and of itself qualifies him as a talent.
So even though Levitt is simply a riff off of the Dalton Conley story (I don't feel like linking, do a google search if you're so inclined) I admire his chops.
Now where does Fryer come in?
Fryer co-authored the naming paper with Levitt, so that in and of itself identifies him as having skills. The article though doesn't focus on his work half as much as it focuses on the hurdles he overcame on the way to Harvard.
Here's a dirty secret--while there ARE actually a number of second and third generation black PhDs floating around, most of us come from hard knock environments and had to work our asses off to get to where we are. There is a reason why you can count the number of black professors at Washington University on a couple of hands sans some fingers. My best friend in the discipline grew up in Mississippi when it was Mississippi. Segregation isn't an academic concept for him--he was there.
Hard knock stories and a few dimes will still leave you a buck short if you're trying to get from Union Station to Dupont Circle on the Metro. You can't convince me that someone is the next Dubois (a title I do aspire to) based on a hard knock life.
It also isn't clear that Fryer really wants to tackle the hard questions about black behavior. Throw a rock blindly in the prominent black blogging cirlces and you're bound to hit someone who believes that black culture is inferior to white, and that Affirmative Action hurts more than it helps. You want to go against the grain in the most conservative of all social sciences? Tackle white supremacy, jack. So whereas Levitt is asking interesting questions (granted, coming up with non-interesting answers but still...) with innovative datasets, the best that Fryer can come up is a salt narrative???
With with that said, I'm willing to bet that Fryer is as cool as the other side of the pillow as far as a running buddy. He'd probably fit in well with me, Bomani, and at least SOME of our boys. But I'm not going to hold my breath. As far as I'm concerned the best social scientists of my generation are: Claudine Gay, Mark Sawyer, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Vincent Hutchings [political science], Stephanie Rowley, Rob Sellers [psychology], Dalton Conley, Tyrone Forman, Mary Patillo [sociology]. And Bomani has a much better shot at being a Dubois-style economist (that is, one who publishes in high quality journals AND in public fora) than Fryer does. Now if he just gets that diss finished....
Posted by at March 22, 2005 02:10 AM | TrackBackI thought the article about Fryer in the March 20 NY Times Magazine by Stephen Dubner was very interesting. I was especially interested in the finding about salt, slave ships, hypertension, etc. attributed to a paper by Fryer, Glaeser and Cutler.
It seems to me that Stephen Dubner completely missed the point of this finding. If it's true that the six year black-white life expectancy differential is a side effect of slavery, it's a strong argument for reparations, etc. If it's true, it's a very radical finding. But Dubner sort of downplayed it.
I have tried to find a copy of the Fryer, Cutler and Glaeser article but I can't. None of the three authors has a link to it on their web site. Any advice on how to track down this potentially revolutionary article?
DAMN! Now you got me thinking about Fryer, DuBois, ghettos when I'm trying to right about police brutality. Thanks bruh! :-)
On the real, this is all interesting. I'm getting more and more into the social sciences so I'm going to look up Fryer.
And by the way, drug dealing has always been more profitable than McDonald's in the 'hood IF you are willing to GO THERE. And it's the process of "going there" that makes the ghetto more ghetto. I'll blog about that soon.
Posted by: Solomon Mason at March 22, 2005 10:20 AM