Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country

Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country

by William Finnegan
Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country

Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country

by William Finnegan

eBook

$14.99 

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Barbarian Days, this narrative nonfiction classic documents the rising inequality and cultural alienation that presaged the crises of today.
 
“A status report on the American Dream [that] gets its power [from] the unpredictable, rich specifics of people’s lives.”—Time
 
“[William] Finnegan’s real achievement is to attach identities to the steady stream of faceless statistics that tell us America’s social problems are more serious than we want to believe.”—The Washington Post
 
A fifteen-year-old drug dealer in blighted New Haven, Connecticut; a sleepy Texas town transformed by crack; Mexican American teenagers in Washington State, unable to relate to their immigrant parents and trying to find an identity in gangs; jobless young white supremacists in a downwardly mobile L.A. suburb. William Finnegan spent years embedded with families in four communities across the country to become an intimate observer of the lives he reveals in Cold New World. What emerges from these beautifully rendered portraits is a prescient and compassionate book that never loses sight of its subjects’ humanity.
 
NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST NONFICTION SELECTION

Praise for Cold New World
 
“Unlike most journalists who drop in for a quick interview and fly back out again, Finnegan spent many weeks with families in each community over a period of several years, enough time to distinguish between the kind of short-term problems that can beset anyone and the longer-term systemic poverty and social disintegration that can pound an entire generation into a groove of despair.”Los Angeles Times Book Review
 
“The most remarkable of William Finnegan’s many literary gifts is his compassion. Not the fact of it, which we have a right to expect from any personal reporting about the oppressed, but its coolness, its clarity, its ductile strength. . . . Finnegan writes like a dream. His prose is unfailingly lucid, graceful, and specific, his characterization effortless, and the pull of his narrative pure seduction.”The Village Voice

“Four astonishingly intimate and evocative portraits. . . . All of these stories are vividly, honestly and compassionately told. . . . While Cold New World may make us look in new ways at our young people, perhaps its real goal is to make us look at ourselves.”The Philadelphia Inquirer

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307766144
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 09/29/2010
Series: Modern Library Paperbacks
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 448
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

William Finnegan is the author of Cold New WorldA Complicated WarDateline SowetoCrossing the Line, and Barbarian Days. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist and has won numerous journalism awards, including two Overseas Press Club awards since 2009. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography. A staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987, he lives in Manhattan.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
 
“It’s all about working-class.” This was the earnest and curious refrain I heard from the Antelope Valley Sharps—a group of young antiracist skinheads in an outer suburb of Los Angeles—each time I asked why they were skins. By the time I got to the Antelope Valley, in late 1995, I had spent the better part of six years knocking around the United States, immersed in the stories you are about to read. The experience had left me something of a specialist in the unexpected. My previous work as a reporter had been mostly in other countries, which may be why I started out with a set of relatively neat, received ideas about what I would find in this country under headings like race, class, poverty, and the drug trade. My tidy ideas were upended, in any case, at every turn. American real life is rowdier, more disturbing, more charming than anything dreamt of in your or my philosophy.
 
This country was (and is) in a strange, even an unprecedented, condition. While the national economy has been growing, the economic prospects of most Americans have been dimming. For young people and males and those without advanced degrees—for, that is, the large majority of working Americans—real hourly wages have fallen significantly over the past twenty-four years. Even during the time since I began this book, a period marked economically by low inflation, one of the great bull markets in Wall Street history, and an unemployment rate that has reached, as I write, its lowest level in twenty-four years, the median household income has fallen and the national poverty rate has risen. What the triumphalism of most American business writing ignores is a frightening growth in the number of low-wage jobs. This growth has left 30 percent of the country’s workers earning too little to lift a family out of poverty. A new American class structure is being born—one that is harsher, in many ways, than the one it is replacing. Some people are thriving in it, of course. This book is about some families who are not. More particularly, it’s about their children who are teenagers and young adults, about their lives and times, how they speak and act as they try to find their way in this cold new world.
 
I spent time with families in four communities: New Haven, Connecticut; San Augustine County, Texas; the Yakima Valley, in Washington State; and the Antelope Valley, in northern Los Angeles County. A rough logic drove this sequence. New Haven is a poor Northern city, ravaged by deindustrialization and middle-class flight, with a large black ghetto that can stand for the many stricken inner cities that have come, collectively, to represent “poverty” in our national imagination and political debate—despite the fact that most poverty in America is, as many researchers have pointed out, neither Northern nor urban nor black. Terry Jackson’s family has been in New Haven since his great-grandparents moved there after the Second World War. The family’s experience with downward mobility has been unequivocal: each generation has been poorer than the one before it.
 
San Augustine County is in the rural Deep South (never mind that it’s in Texas). It is, figuratively speaking, the home place where most African Americans, even those who have lived for many years in cities like New Haven, have or locate their roots. Although social change tends to occur more slowly and subtly in poor rural communities, I found San Augustine racked by distinctly contemporary struggles. Crack addiction, AIDS, and the federal government’s war on drugs had each dealt heavy blows to Lanee Mitchell’s family before we met. To a poor black family in the South, new troubles inevitably appear in a context of traditional oppression. And yet the shutdown of emigration to the cities as a hopeful option for ambitious young people seemed to have given things a newly apocalyptic cast.
 
The Yakima Valley is a rich farming region whose economy depends entirely on cheap Mexican labor. Getting there from the South was less of a stretch than it might seem. Black people in San Augustine complain about job competition from Mexicans—in the local pea and watermelon fields and timber mills as well as in the cities, such as Houston and Los Angeles, where union jobs that they or their relatives once held are increasingly filled by undocumented immigrants working nonunion. Rafael and Rosa Guerrero, a couple from the Mexican state of Zacatecas who have “settled out” in the Yakima Valley (and who happen to be militants in the local farmworkers’ union), came to this country in search of una vida mejor for themselves and their children. My story is about what they—and, especially, what their oldest son, Juan—found instead.
 
Finally, I went to Los Angeles. Jacqueline Jones, a historian of American poverty, has written about how the “postmodern poverty” of the late twentieth century is creating “a multitude of ‘underclasses,’ ” many of them white. I went to L.A. to see how vulnerable white people were dealing with recent upheavals in the Southern California economy. Some of the kids I met there declared, as I say, that their lives were “all about working-class.” Karl Marx might have said that they were, more precisely, about being forced down into the lumpen proletariat—into what is popularly known nowadays as the underclass. Mindy Turner and her friends, while clearly desperate to avoid that fate, often seemed to be doing everything in their power to bring it on: bagging school, getting pregnant as teenagers, abusing dangerous drugs, forming violent gangs, doing time in jail. Even when one of them killed another one—this happened in the midst of my reporting—it seemed to give almost nobody pause. At times the downward momentum in their suburban world felt all-consuming.
 
My reporting method was unscientific. In the communities that interested me, I tried to find hard-pressed people whom I liked enough to spend months with. They also had to be willing, of course, to let me hang around. Because I’m particularly interested in how people understand their own situations, I tried to let them show me, when possible, where their story was and what it might mean. Some of the most eloquent commentary I found came, therefore, not from interviews or as straightforward analysis, but in jokes, asides, quarrels, incidents, display. I can’t think of a more nuanced expression, for instance, of the “double truth,” as Benjamin DeMott calls it, “that within our borders an opportunity society and a caste society coexist” than Terry Jackson’s decision to “go Yale” in the New Haven black community’s spring-cleaning parade, which passes through the Yale University campus. Terry was a fifteen-year-old school dropout and street cocaine dealer at the time, and he used his drug earnings to outfit himself for the parade in Yale sweatpants, a blue Yale sweatshirt, and a Yale baseball cap. The costume was a hit with the crowd. “It was dope,” Terry said afterward. Indelibly, I thought.
 
I did not go looking for “types.” Some readers of an earlier version of Terry Jackson’s story, which appeared in The New Yorker, complained that by writing about him I was reinforcing a stereotype: the young black inner-city drug dealer. I think the point is valid, although the further complaint, made by a few antidrug crusaders, that I should not be writing sympathetically about such a person, is, I think, not. I am sympathetic to Terry, and to the many other kids in his situation. The fact is that the illegal drug trade offers more economic opportunity to more young men than anything else going in the inner city. Depicting this reality may indeed play into the powerful (and politically destructive) association, in the public mind, of poor blacks with crime. I make a sharp distinction, however (one that the law does not always make), between violent criminals and people merely involved in the drug trade. Terry’s story is both common and, I think, commonly misunderstood.
 
I generally failed to keep my journalistic distance. The sheer amount of time we spent together tended to erode the lines between me and my subjects. Often, their ideas about me became elements of my story about them. People usually took me at first for a “news reporter,” a notion that invariably wilted as the months passed and nothing I wrote appeared in print. I was sometimes suspected, even accused to my face, of being a cop. At other times my bluff was “called more shrewdly. Laverne Clark, Lanee Mitchell’s mother and the materfamilias of the all-black village in San Augustine County where I landed up, liked to probe my racial views, hoping to find out “what it is about you and black people, Bill.” She seemed to have me down, at least initially, as what Zora Neale Hurston used to call, during the Harlem Renaissance, a Negrotarian—a de haut en bas patron of black aspiration. Although Laverne’s view of me seemed to soften with time, we often argued—about local history, the causes of poverty, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. I found our debates, some of them conducted in the school bus Laverne drives for a living, both rewarding and upsetting. They were also remarkable for how unhampered she seemed by the fact that she had never finished the ninth grade.
 
There is, just as fashionable cultural theory has it, no privileged place to stand. I never found such a place while writing this book, anyway. The moral authority of the social order that once might have allowed me to pass unambivalent judgments on the lives of poor Americans—an authority packed tight, at the best of times, with unexamined assumptions about power and virtue—has, in my view, simply grown too weak to support such exertions. A white middle-class reporter inspecting the souls of poor African Americans is, given our history, an especially dubious proposition. So I’ve tried to keep one eye on my limitations as observer and analyst, and to reflect, where possible, the densely freighted power relations between me and some of my subjects.
 

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTIONxiii
NEW HAVEN1
DEEP EAST TEXAS93
THE YAKIMA VALLEY209
THE ANTELOPE VALLEY269
EPILOGUE341
NOTES353
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS397
INDEX401

What People are Saying About This

Nicholas Lemann

The standard to which this kind of book is usually held is James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but the truth is, Cold New World is better, more researched, more vivid, more empathetic.

David Remnick

Bill Finnegan is a masterful reporter. Cold New World is chilling and dark, but it also vibrates with life.

Alex Shoumatoff

As a journalist Bill Finnegan has the moral equivalent of perfect pitch.

Reading Group Guide

About the Book:

This discussion guide will assist readers in exploring Cold New World. Hopefully, it will help create a bond not only between the book and the reader, but also between the members of the group. In your support of this book, please feel free to copy and distribute this guide to best facilitate the program. Thank you.Discussion Questions:

Question: Cold New World is about kids, families, and communities "caught in social and economic downdrafts." The book cites evidence that the great American middle class has been shrinking since the 1970s, and offers various examples of a generation-long decline in economic opportunity for nonaffluent young people. (See, for instance, the lawyer Nancy Kelso's speech on p. 323.) Meanwhile, many of our politicians and pundits extol the current health of the American economy. So, is Finnegan simply pointing out the empty fraction of a mostly full glass? What factors do you think account for these sharply different descriptions of the state of the American Dream?

Question: The Sunday Times of London called Cold New World "a landmark account of teenage alienation in America." After reading the book, do you feel any closer to understanding the more bizarre and frightening attitudes and behavior sometimes manifested by young Americans?

Question: What does Finnegan mean when, after taking readers on his national tour of sometimes-alarming youth subcultures, he writes, "They connect private and public life" (p. 349)?

Question: Terry Jackson's decision to become a drug dealer is first described in terms of a powerful economic opportunity that suddenly presents itself to a child of grinding poverty (p. 9-16). Terry himself describes the excitement of the dealer's life, including the girls who come with it. The author, meanwhile, analyzes the consumerist values that dominate the young dealer's world (p. 58-59). Then Virginia Henry, an older anti-drug activist, offers her very different view of these matters (p. 59-60). Whose description of the illegal drug trade—its morality, its allure—seems most persuasive?

Question: The "Deep East Texas" section of Cold New World is, in part, about a disappearing way of life, represented here by Nathan Tindall. The sheriff's election becomes a kind of referendum on this way of life. Who did you find yourself rooting for as San Augustine County went to the polls? Why?

Question: Laverne Clark has a sharp, specific sense of local history and black dispossession in the rural South (p. 112). Her daughter Lanee Mitchell has a radically different view of the past and its significance (p. 125-131). What factors account for this philosophical difference? Finnegan clashes with both women at points. Whose arguments did you find stronger when the topic was unwed motherhood (p. 132-136) or Anita Hill (p. 184)? And where did your sympathies lie when Finnegan refused to corroborate Lanee's story about beating her son (p. 194)?

Question: Why do you think the commanders of Operation White Tornado decided to pounce when they did (p. 156-157)?

Question: In the Yakima Valley, Rafael and Rosa Guerrero pursue the immigrants' dream of una vida mejor with great determination. Why does Juan not share his parents' faith in the farmworkers' union as a vehicle for their hopes? And what does it mean when Finnegan writes, "Juan's anomie was not Third World but thoroughly American" (p. 246)?

Question: Is Don Vlieger's lecture on youth gangs (p. 220-224) persuasive? Does Juan's experience with gangs—or Mary Ann Ramirez's experience (p. 240-243; p. 259-261)—tend to confirm or contradict Vlieger's analysis?

Question: Juan and Mary Ann break up after he feels he has to make a choice between her and his (male) friends. When they get back together in Texas, Juan seems to appreciate his own good fortune. But then their story ends on an ominous note. What do you think happened next? And what model of the family and of communal responsibility is Juan substituting for his parents' traditional campesino sense of village solidarity?

Question: The Los Angeles suburbs of the Antelope Valley have suffered a long string of hate crimes. Finnegan observes (p. 273) that the downward social and economic mobility of many of the valley's white residents, combined with upward mobility among the area's blacks and Latinos, has provided the spark, the charged atmosphere, for many of these crimes—some white youths, in particular, cannot abide this reversal of standard race-caste roles. Do you find this a persuasive explanation of the strange popularity of white supremacism among kids in the Antelope Valley? What other forces might lead young people to join a gang such as the Nazi Low Riders?

Question: Mindy Turner has been through an extraordinary number of "phases" by the time she turns fourteen—hippie, hesher, would-be Jew, Mormon convert, neo-Nazi. What do you think drives her? And why does she continue to be attracted—even after many bad experiences—to racist, violent men?

Question: The damage that crystal methamphetamine does to both individuals and communities becomes obvious in "The Unwanted" section of Cold New World. Is the drug itself the problem? Or do you see it as primarily a symptom of social malaise? Is criminalization the best policy response? Or would treating crystal meth (and other dangerous drugs) as a public-health problem ultimately yield better results?

Question: Do you agree with the district attorney's decision not to prosecute Darius Houston for killing Jeff Malone (p. 334)?

Question: Are you persuaded by Finnegan's arguments against the existence of a "culture of poverty" (p. xxi, 135, 361, 378-379)? Does Dr. James Comer's description (pp. 44-45) of the early realization among poor children that they are not being prepared to compete in the mainstream economy ring true? What social policies might help stem the loss of so many young Americans to drugs, prison, and poverty?

Question: Finnegan clearly got quite close to many of the people he writes about in Cold New World. Do you think that, on the whole, this improved his understanding or undermined his objectivity?

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews