Here is the synopsis of our sample research paper on WORKING CLASS HEROES AND BLACK PICKET FENCES:
A COMPARISON
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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This 4-page paper compares two books about life on Chicago's South Side: Working Class Heroes: Protecting Home, Community and Nation in a Chicago Neighborhood by Maria Kefalas and Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class by Mary Pattillo-McCoy.
Page Count:
4 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_MTworkfenc.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
not well-tended. By the same token, discussions of the typical "middle-class community" can bring to mind white families, living in well-tended homes, surrounded by white picket fences.
In comparing and contrasting two books that deal with two very different communities on Chicagos South Side, well pop a balloon in the above assumptions.
The books to be compared are Working Class Heroes: Protecting Home, Community and Nation in a Chicago Neighborhood by Maria Kefalas and Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the
Black Middle Class by Mary Pattillo-McCoy. Whie the former focuses on a white, lower-class neighborhood; the latter portrays a black, middle-class area.
The books are similar in that they both explore enclaves on Chicagos South side. Both explore familial relationships, generational relationships, and ties of families and residents to their communities. Both
explore the fact that there are very close ties between families and community. But in many cases, this is where the similarities end.
Working Class Heroes focuses on the white "working class" population on Chicagos South Side, better known to the locals as "Beltway." The book provides interviews of and insights on
the every day people who live, work and form the community, from stay-at-home moms who mold their families, to fire-fighters, who protect the local citizens.
The main gist of Kefalas treatise, and one she hammers constantly throughout her book, is that working class is not necessarily a matter of race, but rather,
of socio-economic status. From the very start of the book, she points out the definition of working class, defined by sociologist Michele Lamont as "blue-collar and lower middle-class workers with
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