Content Warning: Both the source material and this guide contain discussions of homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, domestic violence and child abuse, racism, and anti-gay bias.

Baller is a slang term for someone who sells drugs. Being a baller is a form of work that several family members among the Black interlocutors’ social networks hold. Some interlocutors were first introduced to drugs because family members were ballers, selling out of their own residence; some interlocutors’ children become ballers as a way to support their families in the de-industrialized economy.

Michel Foucault coined this term to describe how the locus of state power shifted in the West from sovereignty, or a state system that enforces its power with violence, to biopower, which ostensibly promotes citizens’ health and well-being. Biopower’s mechanism of control is not fear of being killed or tortured by the state, but “an internalized self-disciplinary gaze that responsible individuals impose on their bodies and psyches as a moral responsibility” (19). Biopower “is primarily organized around monitoring and regulating large population groups through broad interventions” (20); the book sees biopower at work when interlocutors are recruited to be tested for HIV or Hepatitis C and then are informed only how to avoid contracting either, rather than how to manage the disease once they have it.