Ethnography’s tremendous potential for initiating contradictory dialogues that violate cross-class and interracial taboos in our home environments remains mostly untapped.

Academics of all ethnic background usually remain trapped in white public space; they flee the personal vulnerability and hideous, emotionally confusing brutality that engaging addicts, dealers, and petty criminals on their own turf requires.

In this attempt to convey through my conversations with drug dealers the cacophony of victims who victimize on the street, I worry about the inherent pornography of violence that automatically engulfs any presentation of the details of extreme social suffering in the United States.

Someone like Caesar does not need to be apologized for; he does not represent the Puerto Rican or Nuyorican communities; and his existence does not cast aspersions upon the “worthiness” of the poor in the inner city more broadly.

Caesar does, however, embody the social injustice of a nation that systemically chews up its most vulnerable citizens and spots them out onto inner-city streets where their desperate celebration of suffering terrorizes themselves, their neighbors, and their love ones. Worse yet, the agency of their internalized self-destructive rage convinces society to blame individual victims for social problems.

Understanding and representing these problems offers more than an intellectual exercise for ethnography: It is an urgent political challenge.