Prisons of Debt: The Afterlives of Incarcerated Fathers

Abstract

engagement with how her respondents’ upbringings shaped the connections they drew to their professional and marital ideals—well prior to setting foot on the Morehouse campus. Demography is of course not destiny, and how Morehouse reaffirmed or foreclosed the range of respectable or responsible masculinities is part of the story of the making of race men that cannot be divorced from a larger societal context similarly immersed in ‘‘Moynihanian’’ projects (p. 109). Yet I suspect that with or without the Morehouse Brand the Moynihanian imaginary would have been central to the men’s framings of respectable and responsible manhood. Grundy might have provided valuable insight by engaging the (perhaps mutually reinforcing) dynamic between personal troubles and public issues from within the Black male experience. Describing her methods, Grundy sets the parameters of her investigation as consisting of 33 phone interviews (p. 24). Confining her wide-ranging study to its strictly sociological interrogation does not do it justice. What Grundy achieved is in fact much more: in part, it is a memoir of her SpelHouse experience—with the privileged perspective of a former Miss Maroon and White, deeply informed by the scholarly literature and complemented by retrospective interviews. Her frequent breaks into firstperson recollections and the laughs she shares with her respondents indicate how her findings derive from a methodological novelty in which the boundaries between her research project and her adult life and friendships blur. This was a study to a large extent facilitated by Grundy’s exceptional positionality. Her identity as ‘‘sister-outsider’’ (p. 30), beyond facilitating access, was integral to her entire project, from theory and site selection to insight and analysis. Not only did this result in a highly accessible narrative, but it also, in the emergent decolonial, Du Boisian tradition, provides a concrete instance of what standpoint theory and methodological expansiveness offer sociological research—the discipline would be richer to name it. Social scientists with personal stakes in their questions, sympathetic to their subjects, and biographically immersed in their sites do more than add diverse perspectives. As Respectable shows, they can produce deeper, more nuanced research. And so Grundy concludes hers with this powerful reflection: ‘‘It is the story I went to graduate school for, in order to master a scientific discipline just to get the story right, with the one clear objective that I had some truth on this institution that would benefit our people to know’’ (p. 277).