“Before I even was able to establish my first relationship with a crack dealer I had to confront the overwhelming reality of racial and class-based apartheid in America.” 

Bourgois’s first challenge was the fact that he was white and middle class, traits that automatically coded him as different than his Puerto Rican subjects.

“Violence cannot be reduced to its statistical expression.” 

Bourgois repeatedly states that even though East Harlem is rife with violence, looking solely at numbers or statistics doesn’t paint a comprehensive picture of society’s problems.

“The intimate details of the lives of the crack dealers and their families revealed in this book cannot be understood in a historical vacuum

The plight of the author’s subjects shouldn’t be viewed without understanding the history that their problems have been born from.