Righteous Dopefiend

Each of the book’s main interlocutors illustrates the different types of families the two ethnographers learned about among the Edgewater unhoused population. Most grew up with poverty, violence, and alcohol addiction in the home. Black interlocutors maintained familial ties much more than white interlocutors. The book describes Sonny’s relationship with his family as forgiving and affectionate, while Tina’s was inclusive but abusive. Carter’s family was directly responsible for his socialization into drugs through the men in his family and the “working-class propriety upheld by the virtuous women in his household” (142).

For men of color, coming of age in the 1960s in San Francisco often meant joining a racially or ethnically organized gang and getting socialized into crime: Sonny and Carter started committing crime exactly in this way; more generally, all the Black interlocutors had been locked up for gang activities in their teens. In contrast, with the exception of Al, white interlocutors had never joined gangs or spent time in juvenile custody. This impacted (and continues to impact) Black families, who are most likely to have male family members in jail—the prison system mediates important milestones such as births and deaths.

The chapter’s section on gendered suffering looks at the experiences of Felix and Victor, two Latino men living in Edgewater who have tumultuous relationships with their mothers. Other men come from families with estrangement issues; for instance, Frank has a complicated relationship with his father that includes estrangement. Finally, there are families with abusive fathers: Hank and his sister Barbara, who also deals with substance addiction, describe an extraordinarily abusive father and extremely violent home life—instability so dangerous that they were safer living on the streets than at home.