Carol B. Stack's All Our Kin

Carol B. Stack’s book, All Our Kin, reiterates Stack’s personal experience in The Flats, an African-American poverty-stricken community. Stack observes the black urban poor and how they try to survive while living in poverty. Stack believes that when other researchers study black communities, their findings have a tendency to reinforce and perpetuates stereotypes such as they are deviant, matriarchal, and broken. Stack’s findings, however does reinforce and perpetuates the stereotypes among the black community. Stack provides numerous of evidences that show that the urban black poor are in such a situation due their environment, but in the end she is also reinforcing the “deviant, matriarchal, and broken” stereotypes amongst black communities. …show more content…
If they are “deviant, matriarchal, and broken,” it’s not because of the family themselves but because of the treatment of the larger members of the society made them become so. For example, many of the blacks in poverty in The Flats are evicted by their landlord from their houses due to extraneous reasons. Stack recounted that Yvonne Diamond, a forty-year old who moved into The Flats, was soon afterwards evicted by her landlord. Diamond’s landlord evicted her because apparently a parking lot was going to be built, but it never happened (Stack). Most landlords evict people due to the complaints of the tenants. However, the tenants due have a right to complain because majority of the houses in The Flats are in terrible conditions (Stack). Stack’s finding shows that it is not the black community, themselves that is deviant, but it’s actually the landlords and the condition of the houses that make such situations deviant. Unlike most researchers, Stack is not perpetuating stereotype through her finding, but instead showing how they become deviant and it is due to the treatment of the members of the larger