Carol Stack

Carol Stack is the anthropologist Matthew Desmond cites in Evicted for her study All Our Kin and its account of kin-network survival among the urban poor. Desmond quotes Stack on how, in the 1960s and 1970s, destitute black families were “immersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they [could] count on,” swapping goods and services daily — enough to keep families afloat even if it did little to lift them out of poverty. He uses Stack as a baseline against which to mark loss: large-scale transformations (the crack epidemic, the rise of the black middle class, the prison boom) and state policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which sought to limit “kin dependence,” had frayed that family safety net in poor communities.

Context: Carol B. Stack is an American anthropologist best known for All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (1974), an ethnography of reciprocal exchange networks among low-income African American families.

Where this appears

• Evicted — cited (via All Our Kin) for the kin-network survival strategies of the poor, used by Desmond to mark how that safety net later frayed.