Ghetto Community In Carol Stack's All Our Kin

All Our Kin is an ethnography about the ghetto community of The Flats in Jackson Harbor. Carol Stack stays with a black family the years 1968-1970, observing, studying, and learning their ways and how to fit in. Her study, later combined with John Lombardi, was to figure out how blacks cope with poverty. Throughout the book, she discovers vital ingredients on how to make kinship work. Everyone shares with each other in order to survive, and everyone who needs help, receives it, and later returns the favor. Stack traveled throughout many different families in the community, but her home base was with the Jackson Family. She later met the Waters family, where she spent a lot of time with Magnolia’s daughter, Ruby. She would follow Ruby around listening to her stories of how she lived. A typical day for her would be going back and forth from the market and different stores for her children. The men mostly bring home the money if they have a job. Jobs are hard labor, low wage jobs and are mostly seasonal. Women can be on aid from the government if not working. Stack had a hard time at first getting any result for her study because people around her were hostile towards her. She was not like them, so she had to learn how to act, speak, and dress like them. Then, she started to understand how close and dependent everyone was on each other. Chapter One is titled The Flats. Carol Stack is talking …show more content…
The different lifestyle and even the type of language is what anthropologists would find most interesting. For readers, insight on the black community can change the way they think about the ghetto’s, in a good way or possibly a bad way. From this ethnography, what hurts the most was the amount of racism whites have towards blacks in this book. Everyone, no matter way race, should have an equal shot at getting jobs, medical care and