The Minds of Marginalized Black Men - Chapter 2 - Time, Space, and Everyday Living

Time, Space, and Everyday Living

Chapter 2 looks at the everyday lives of these men. Uncertainty is a common feeling for these men because each day they must worry about if they will have a job or if they will even make it through the day. One thing in this chapter that really surprised Young was the men's inability to manage time. People would show up late, extremely early, or even on the wrong days to interviews. These men do not have to deal with appointments on an everyday basis so they did not know how to handle it because the majority of their days they have nothing to do.

Young brings up the concept of Habitus, which is a "system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them." The basically means that the way people think and act is related to the social constraints and structures around them.

Young gives the example of how the use of violence in order to defend yourself is a justifiable in certain situations. Young was surprised by how much these people have to deal with violence. He talks about how in most communities violence is a rare assurance but in the Near West Side it has become part of the daily lives of the people. Most people only feel unsafe when they go out late at night but people in the Near West Side feel like that all day, even in their own homes.