At the Valois "See Your Food" cafeteria on Chicago's South Side, black and white men gather over cups of coffee and steam-table food. Mitchell Duneier, a sociologist, spent four years at the Valois writing this moving profile of the black men who congregate at "Slim's Table." Praised as "a marvelous study of those who should not be forgotten" by the "Wall Street Journal, ""Slim's Table" helps demolish the narrow sociological picture of black men and simple media-reinforced stereotypes. In between is a "respectable" citizenry, too often ignored and little understood.
""Slim's Table" is an astonishment. Duneier manages to fling open windows of perception into what it means to be working-class black, how a caring community can proceed from the most ordinary transactions, all the while smashing media-induced stereotypes of the races and race relations."--Citation for "Chicago Sun Times" Chicago Book of the Year Award
"An instant classic of ethnography that will provoke debate and provide insight for years to come."--Michael Eric Dyson, "Chicago Tribune"
"Mr. Duneier sees the subjects of his study as people and he sees the scale of their lives as fully human, rather than as diminished versions of grander lives lived elsewhere by people of another color. . . . A welcome antidote to trends in both journalism and sociology."--Roger Wilkins, "New York Times Book Review"

An exceptional ethnography marked by clarity and candor, Sidewalk takes us into the socio-cultural environment of those who, though often seen as threatening or unseemly, work day after day on “the blocks” of one of New York’s most diverse neighborhoods. Sociologist Duneier, author of Slim’s Table, offers an accessible and compelling group portrait of several poor black men who make their livelihoods on the sidewalks of Greenwich Village selling secondhand goods, panhandling, and scavenging books and magazines.

Duneier spent five years with these individuals, and in Sidewalk he argues that, contrary to the opinion of various city officials, they actually contribute significantly to the order and well-being of the Village. An important study of the heart and mind of the street, Sidewalk also features an insightful afterword by longtime book vendor Hakim Hasan. This fascinating study reveals today’s urban life in all its complexity: its vitality, its conflicts about class and race, and its surprising opportunities for empathy among strangers.

Sidewalk is an excellent supplementary text for a range of courses:

INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY: Shows how to make important links between micro and macro; how a research project works; how sociology can transform common sense.

RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS: Untangles race, class, and gender as they work together on the street.

URBAN STUDIES: Asks how public space is used and contested by men and women, blacks and whites, rich and poor, and how street life and political economy interact.

DEVIANCE: Looks at labeling processes in treatment of the homeless;
interrogates the “broken windows” theory of policing.

LAW AND SOCIETY: Closely examines the connections between formal and informal systems of social control.

METHODS: Shows how ethnography works; includes a detailed methodological appendix and an afterword by research subject Hakim Hasan.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: Sidewalk engages the rich terrain of recent developments regarding representation, writing, and authority; in the tradition of Elliot Liebow and Ulf Hannerz, it deals with age old problems of the social and cultural experience of inequality; this is a telling study of culture on the margins of American society.

CULTURAL STUDIES: Breaking down disciplinary boundaries, Sidewalk shows how books and magazines are received and interpreted in discussions among working-class people on the sidewalk; it shows how cultural knowledge is deployed by vendors and scavengers to generate subsistence in public space.

SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE: Sidewalk demonstrates the connections between culture and human agency and innovation; it interrogates distinctions between legitimate subcultures and deviant collectivities; it illustrates conflicts over cultural diversity in public space; and, ultimately, it shows how conflicts over meaning are central to social life.

A New York Times Notable Book of 2016 Winner of the Zocalo Public Square Book Prize On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto--a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck. In this sweeping and original account, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot comprehend the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without recalling the ghettos of Europe, as well as earlier efforts to understand the problems of the American city. Ghetto is the story of the scholars and activists who tried to achieve that understanding. As Duneier shows, their efforts to wrestle with race and poverty cannot be divorced from their individual biographies, which often included direct encounters with prejudice and discrimination in the academy and elsewhere. Using new and forgotten sources, Duneier introduces us to Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, graduate students whose conception of the South Side of Chicago established a new paradigm for thinking about Northern racism and poverty in the 1940s. We learn how the psychologist Kenneth Clark subsequently linked Harlem's slum conditions with the persistence of black powerlessness, and we follow the controversy over Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on the black family. We see how the sociologist William Julius Wilson redefined the debate about urban America as middle-class African Americans increasingly escaped the ghetto and the country retreated from racially specific remedies. And we trace the education reformer Geoffrey Canada's efforts to transform the lives of inner-city children with ambitious interventions, even as other reformers sought to help families escape their neighborhoods altogether. Duneier offers a clear-eyed assessment of the thinkers and doers who have shaped American ideas about urban poverty--and the ghetto. The result is a valuable new estimation of an age-old concept.

At the Valois "See Your Food" cafeteria on Chicago's South Side, black and white men gather around formica tables finding companionship over hot coffee and steam-table food. Mitchell Duneier spent four years at Valois writing this moving profile of the black men who congregate at "Slim's table". They take center stage in stories that illuminate a new image of black masculinity and respectability. Duneier introduces us to Slim, a car mechanic living in the ghetto, who shows his concern for Bart, a prejudiced white senior citizen. In this story of black masculinity and the possibilities of racial integration, Slim treats Bart with care and affection, which moves the old man to the limits of his own potential for tolerance and respect. We meet at Valois a group of men who are firm, resolute, sincere, and sensitive. There is Ted, retired from the army and working in a photo lab, whose pronouncements about American society and politics illustrate the standard of respectability in black America. And Jackson, a semi-retired crane operator and longshoreman who lives in a ramshackle apartment without a telephone. In his old age, he struggles lifting boxes at the docks to pay off overwhelming medical bills. Slim's Table helps demolish the narrow sociological picture of black men and the simple, media-reinforced stereotypes which restrict blacks to one of two groups - the ghetto underclass and the so-called middle-class role models. In between is a "respectable" citizenry, too often ignored and little understood. Duneier demonstrates that a proper understanding of the men at Slim's table calls into question fundamental assumptions that have long dominated discussions of urban poverty. This leadshim to fashion a new way of looking at role models and at the exodus of the black middle class from the inner city. In a pioneering, revisionist analysis of many classic works in black studies, he also argues that some of the most "enlightened" books ultimately confirm the basest stereotypes. We see the men at Slim's table living with pride and principle, respect for age and wisdom, and devotion to civility. They are a model, not only for other blacks, but for middle-class white manhood as well. They act and speak candidly in an impassioned book that has the power to change the way we talk to and think about one another, across the racial divide.