THE BLUEPRINT II: THE MAINTAINING OF THE GHETTO Some say life is a game. For those raised within the confines of the ghetto, life is the Game.  Here, the invisible hand of capitalism plays Game God with the authority to prescribe  conditions that invoke feelings of hope and desperation. With its enormous and tutelary  power it becomes puppeteer to the fate of those who reside here. It assures the conditions  vital to transforming humanity into the androids that we become. 

 —Ivan Kilgore 

It was once said of E.V. Walter: “The masses are not ephemeral but durable and that  they need not be spontaneous; but be constructed by design.”8 That said, I do not believe it can be stressed enough that America’s ghettoes are the creation of design  and not happenstance; that they are the product of a web of complex political and  economic factors that give way to the ghetto’s subpar infrastructure. It’s a social and  economic structure that manifests consequently to institutions designed with the  intent of controlling people, exploiting people, oppressing people, and destroying  those who do not fall in suit with the rest. It is a design (i.e., a Blueprint) that aims to  reduce human beings to mere objects; pawns in a grandeur scheme to capitalize upon  the struggles created within them. 

When reflecting on the social structures in the ghetto and the political and  economic factors that go into creating them, we must remain mindful of the fact that  they define boundaries, making it likely that those located within them will or will  not have relations with particular kinds of resources. As we have observed, social  structures affect the likelihood that people will or will not develop particular kinds of  selves, learn particular kinds of motivations, and have particular symbolic resources  for defining situations they enter.9 

Social structures, or the environment to say, result from institutional forces that  affect people in both positive and negative ways. Take for example, America’s penal  institution (Chapter 8—The Zo). Arguably, the positive aspect of prisons in American  society has been said to remove presumably criminal elements from the community. The down side, however, is that mass incarceration of Black males, for example,  destabilizes family and other social networks in the community. 

Here, I borrow from Professor Todd Clear’s Imprisoning Communities: How  Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse.10 Clear provides a  “coercive mobility theory” that states: “… high rates of incarceration, concentrated  in poor communities, destabilizes social networks in these communities, thereby  undermining informal social controls,11 economic prosperity, and stability.”12 

It is important that we observe that social networks are composed of “human” and “social” capital. Both human and social capital are the building blocks of a community’s social and economic progress. Human Capital refers to the personal resources an individual brings to the social and economic marketplace. A typical example of human capital is education or a particular skill-set like experience in sales and marketing. Others include the ability to pickup on things fast (intellect) and ease in social situations.13 For the most part, many of those who wind up in prison do not possess these qualities. However, there are exceptions. 

“Social Capital,” as defined by Clear, “is the capacity of a person to call upon personal ties (usually within social networks) in order to advance some personal  interest. Social capital and social networks are related. Social networks define the  underlying structure of interpersonal relationships that hold the capacity for providing  social capital; social capital is the capacity of networks to provide goods for people  within these networks.”14 What Clears has put to us to absorb can simply be summed  up as “networking.”