Gen X Is More Than the Middle Class

It has always been cool to be in Generation X. Wearing black Gap turtlenecks and sipping lattes, the archetypal Gen Xers project an image that is hip and urbane. Disaffected with politics, cynical of pop culture, they are eager to catalogue the offenses of the baby boomers who inflated the debt and pitted the ozone layer. Their angst for the future is contagious. Until you see its paradox.

Many Gen Xers hail from middle class suburbia; many have college degrees, and many are financially aided by their parents. With the retirement of the baby boomers, some predict that these twentysomethings will ease out of Gen X with the same grace that the hippies assimilated into corporate America. Yet this demographic dominates every stereotype of Gen X. And it leaves us to wonder what about the rest of the generation? What about the segment that does not have Mom, Dad or a college degree to fall back on?

The Unknown City: The Lives of Poor and Working Class Young Adults explores the twentysomethings who occupy the lowest economic stratum. The book does not pose a singular argument or present one over-arching thesis. Rather, by chronicling the lives of the young working class, it attempts to locate patterns and questions. But the questions that The Unknown City poses extend to more awesome issues than the future of economics and jobs. Instead, it documents the strain of poverty and race relations as inner cities turn from melting pots into pressure cookers, ready to explode.

The co-authors, Michelle Fine and Lois Weis, document hundreds of interviews of young adults in the age range of the twenties to early thirties. The interviews occur in Jersey City and Buffalo, cities chosen because of the de-industrialization that has displaced large segments of the working class since the 1970s. For these Gen Xers, the problems of the inner city go far deeper than a slim section of jobs in the want ads. Interviewees consistently say that the sense of community, the thread that once held urban cities together, has frayed and, in some cases, split altogether. They talk about neighborhoods polarized by racism, gang violence, drug proliferation, loss of cultural identity and domestic violence. The candor is stark; the level of detail often horrifying.

These first hand interviews give The Unknown City an edge that you do not often see in sociological texts. Gen Xers who talk about the urban decay that trails de-industrialization let readers into the most intimate crevices of their lives, with a despair that lingers long after you have put down the book. There is the girl who sleeps in her clothes in case she hears her father beating her siblings and has to run to get help in the middle of the night. We read about the teenage drug dealer who tells us how he was confronted with the option of making $100 a week at Burger King--or $6,000 a week peddling heroin. There is the mother who is too phobic to sit at the table with her children to eat a meal because this was always where domestic violence began with her ex-husband. And woman after woman chronicles the hallmark of a good relationship in a similar manner to one Buffalo woman who muses, "I guess I got all the conveniences of a nice relationship...I don't get beat up."

Forget about the lamentations of the middle class segment of Generation X. The struggles of these interviewees go deeper than political or cultural disaffection. Their struggle is one to survive. Fine and Weis document it with language that is less dense than the typical sociological study. As a result, The Unknown City is easy to interpret. But not easy to read. There is a flavor of dejection and hopelessness that leaves a bitter aftertaste, rendering some of the stories painful to get through. While the heavy reliance on interviews give The Unknown City a realistic outlook, it presents astonishing racial and sexist stereotypes in the process. As Buffalo experienced a 21 percent jump in blue collar unemployment from 1960 to 1990, interviewees search for someone to blame and inevitably point their fingers at the wrong sources. We hear people attribute their own unemployment to minorities, welfare recipients, women entering the workforce--almost anything but de-industrialization. And it sometimes seems as though the authors intentionally put an asymetric focus on more ignorant, sensationalized interviewees. What is distressing is the litany of men who especially blame women for economic hardship. As one Buffalo resident named Larry reflects, "I still think that the meaning of maleness is go out, earn a living, support a family." His friend, Mike, also chimes, "Exactly...like it was in `Leave it to Beaver' times when the man went out and the woman stayed home." Incredibly, the book is rife with similar interviews. And while the first few are amusing, it soon becomes disheartening to come across so many and realize that they were not said in jest.

Although Fine and Weis are careful to point out the flaws of scapegoating, they too jump on the blame band wagon. Ostensibly, a cause for this economic hardship is required in their analysis; they attribute it as "demonic" legislation passed by congress. But an egregious analytical flaw creeps in. The authors never explicitly detail the legislation or explore how it splintered the inner city. As a result, it becomes unsatisfying to read hundreds of pages of inner city problems and receive only casual reference to what caused them.

The Unknown City is a cogent and at times, exhausting read. The impact of the book lies in the unmerciless truth of its subject matter. This is not a movie or TV miniseries of the week. In The Unknown City the screenplay is that of life; the script that of experience. The interviewees are not fictional characters, but real people divulging the most intimate and, oftimes, humiliating details of their lives. And this is why, unless you are using it for a research paper, The Unknown City can be hard to get through. Perhaps it is a function of a culture that looks too much to happy endings, but as you read The Unknown City you find yourself waiting for an auspicious sign or thread of hope. None comes. Perhaps this is expected in a novel, but, in a sociological analysis documenting the lives of men and women only slightly older than ourselves, it is an absence that leaves you altogether unsettled.