In Detroit, African Americans constitute over eighty percent of the population, and the black community has a firm grip on municipal political power in the city. But among African Americans there is still a pervasive sense of disenfranchisement at the hands of large corporate, as well as suburban white and Arab owned small-business interests. Historically, tensions between senses of belonging and displacement in Detroit have been negotiated through struggles over access to and dominion over the physical geography of the city. Through periods of explosive growth, "racial covenants" and protracted white flight, social struggle in Detroit has been a struggle for space.; Based on three years of participant observational fieldwork, qualitative interviews and archival analysis, this dissertation is an ethnographic inquiry into the significance of social spaces and spatial categories to the illicit drug trade among young African Americans in Detroit. Going beyond examinations of "values and norms," or well-worn structural analyses of poverty, this dissertation examines the moral, cultural and political significance of various spaces inhabited by young drug dealers in Detroit---domestic, commercial and punitive. Oriented by a particular interest in the significance of local history and informed by the prominence of social spatial concerns in Detroit, this dissertation examines the significance of drug dealing to a wider constellation of issues and social categories in the city. Concomitantly, I argue that the sentiments and practices of young African American drug hustlers in Detroit do not simply represent a misguided "search for respect" through the accrual of localized cultural capital, or a means of last resort for underemployed people, but should be understood as a negotiation of tensions in the larger African American community between spatial domain and disenfranchisement. Thus, I suggest that it is through the drug trade that thousands of young people in Detroit participate in broader social struggles (between corporations and neighborhoods, blacks and whites, [etc.]) and that they come to understand key cultural categories in Detroit, including childhood, family and community.
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