Review Still in Progress...        

 

            In the book Code of the Street:Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City, Professor Elijah Anderson attempts to use a qualitative method to dissect an urban landscape and give the reader a bird’s eye view of the organized inner workings and cultural norms which take place within America impoverished cities. By his firsthand observational account and in-person interviews along a single street, called Germantown Avenue in Philadelphia, Anderson unveils for the reader the individual motivations and invisible organization of people and of a community often forgotten in the United States. His complete immersion into this community results in the reader not just seeing this underclass as more than victims to be pitied or vicious animals to be feared. Refreshingly, Anderson is able to elucidate and investigate their internal structures and worldview and then express them to the reader in an effectively gripping manner.

             While Code of the Street is loaded with insightful information about the lives and circumstances of America’s underclass, my review will evaluate two major subcultures in the neighborhood along with an analysis of both the macroeconomic and societal forces which create and maintain America’s impoverished underclass. Additionally, I will explore Anderson’s failure to grapple with the effects of the communities’ interracial and inter-ethnic dynamics and it might affect this low-income, mostly African American, community along Germantown Avenue.  

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Decent & Street People

The two main classifications Anderson uses throughout the book are the so-called ‘decent and ‘street’ residents. He plainly, and in my opinion accurately, shows both groups’ identities within urban poor communities as well as the different schema and peer pressures which act upon these individuals in making life choices and navigating their world. Anderson argues these two social types, while both alienated by the larger society, have distinctly different ways of processing and attempting to overcome this alienation. Their different interpretations impact how they see the world, their role and power within it to affect change, and what actions are necessary to achieve their view of a ‘successful’ life (pg. 35). Anderson succinctly shows the tensions between these groups and their distinct methods of surviving through feelings of intense societal alienation and abandonment by the rest of American society.

          

For the ‘decent’ family, Anderson’s interviews and observations painstakingly reveal, specifically in the chapters on the importance of respect, the prevalence of violence, and on sexual relations, the pressures and tensions faced every day by the so-called decent individuals. He argues that the decent families exist in a sort of netherworld. They are neither wholly accepted in the larger middle and upper-class society because of their financial, racial, and racial differences, nor are they fully accepted within the ‘street’ subculture because of their perceived attachment to white middle-class mores like educational achievement, speech, and various other issues. Consequently, Anderson successfully illustrates to the reader how the ‘decent’ individual or family must know how to deftly code-switch between the cultural mores of the larger society and those of the urban street. He also shows how subsequently the aggregation of this bifurcated existence creates a sort of schizophrenically scattered identity over time. Anderson’s one-on-one interviews and in-depth personal observations perfectly show how this moral and social schism impacts the decent individuals in the neighborhood. For example, he clearly and accurately illustrates how, “… [p]eople who project decently and generally not giving much respect on the streets. In self-defense, otherwise decent youths will, “… Adopt of the ‘street look’, wearing the street uniform, but also swaggering, using foul language, and generally trying to go for bad” (pg.100). Likewise, Anderson precisely shows the effect of this power defensive identification with the street and relations between the decent family or person and a large society. “The knowledge that the wider system and the person of cops, teachers, and store managers downtown are instantly ready to lump them with the street element takes a psychological toll…” (pg.104). However, he fails to distinctly show, despite these seemingly insurmountable pressures acting on the decent family or individual, what motivates them through it to succeed and what differentiates for from the ones that fail by getting swept up into the street culture. Andersen does mention, in fairness, the devotion to religion, relatively stable financial situation, and somewhat intact family structure which is often present in the decent family. The Anderson does not probe the deeper question of how if these components proliferate all decent families, why do some individuals escaped the prison of the underclass while others do not.

 

Additionally, Anderson’s impressive access to the more vilified street people and families garnered him a genuine and refreshingly new insight into not just the antisocial and often violent manifestations of their schema, but also an appreciation for the dearth of familial, financial, the eye and institutional support which contributes to its creation. In his writings the reader begins to see that, “they may love their children but frequently find it difficult to… cope with the physical and emotional demands of parenthood…” (pg.45). Then the Anderson effortlessly connects for the reader how this, along with destructive and antisocial behavior is like drug sales, dominate and endanger the lives of street people, strain the morals of decent people, and stigmatize the entire community. “… The facts of race relations, unemployment, dislocation, destitution create alienation, and alienation allows for a certain receptivity to overtures made by people seeking youthful recruits for the drug trade” (pg. 120). Thus, in his explanation and analysis of these two societal types, Anderson wisely and successfully uses a qualitative ethnographic approach based on communal immersion, interviews, and informants to flush out these kinds of forces and pressures acting on both the decent and the street. A wholly or mainly quantitative study of this community would miss these subtle but important aspects of life among the urban poor.

 

External Components of Poverty and Crime

A second successfully executed aspect of Code of the Street is the theme which runs throughout the book and argues the dire conditions and daily reality of the urban poor are not solely a result of a lack of personal responsibility, but rather in large part a resultant byproduct of macroeconomic societal forces like the deindustrialization of American cities, economic competition from globalization, racial discrimination. The usual arguments against policies which help the inner-city poor center primarily around their personal choices such as teen pregnancy, educational underperformance, and drug and alcohol use. The endogenous forces that produce the circumstances in which the urban poor are either ignored or minimized. Anderson shows, more accurately throughout his book with compelling individual narratives, the reader how the lack of working-class industrial jobs due to the deindustrialization of American cities and growth of suburbs has largely created the poverty which envelops the urban core. “Deindustrialization and the growth of the global economy have led to a steady loss of the unskilled and semi-skilled manufacturing jobs, with mixed results, that have sustained the urban working class since the start of the industrial revolution” (pg. 108). Anderson displays without a doubt for the reader how the resultant importance of advanced education in order to survive financially coupled with the poor state of urban schools produces an uneducated population trapped in low-paying jobs, if employed at all, with very low incomes like fast food and private security. By creatively and clearly showing how “…urban areas have experienced profound structural economic changes as deindustrialization… [has] created new economic conditions…[and] left many inner-city people unable to earn a living” (pg. 314), Anderson subtly and beautifully forces the reader to widen his or her outlook about the causes and solutions of crime and violence among the urban poor and attempt to see the larger picture.

           

            Another example of this broader view of the causes and components of urban poverty and violence is Anderson’s refreshing and successful attempt to illuminate to the reader how prevalent race prejudice in the larger society towards African Americans significantly contributes to their inability to progress economically and their hostility towards the morals and values of the larger society. He argues uniquely and brilliantly that the oppositional attitude and alienation among African American urban poor often produces antisocial behavior like crime and violence, whether decent or street, is substantially a result of their frustration with the persistent rejection from the larger society due to racial prejudice and discrimination. “[A] great many black boys and girls… are feared by employers. Inner-city boys and girls tend to get stuck in entry-level jobs and are rarely promoted. Their resulting bitterness and alienation then nurture the oppositional culture” (pg. 113). This insight and its effects are sorely lacking from many political and social commentators and policymakers. Anderson, however, intertwines this theme throughout the book and, in doing so, again forces the reader to see the current urban reality in terms of the effect of endogenous forces and not solely personal individual choices.

 

Likewise, he brings a new and much-needed outlook that the resultant unwillingness of governmental institutions to serve and protect the urban poor acts to maintain the sense among its residents that they must fend for themselves and rely on the ‘code’ to prevent and settle disputes.  This is succinctly summed up when Anderson asserts early on in the book that the, “…[c]ode of the street is actually a cultural adaptation to the profound lack of faith in the police and the judicial system – and in others who would champion one’s personal security” (pg. 34). He shows the reader consistently how the violence, lack of education, and crime is in a large degree an effort to protect one’s own security and a strong sense that educational, political, and judicial institutions exist to punish the neighborhoods’ residents and not to assist them.

             

While Anderson does use some quantitative statistics to show the degree of deindustrialization and racial prejudice among outside institutions, he leans heavily on his interviews and observations to show its resultant perception and worldview among the inner-city poor. This method engrosses the reader in personal stories to which he or she can relate rather than a litany of facts and figures that would depersonalize these people and their plight. Unfortunately, Anderson fails, both in his quantitative and qualitative resources, to show the reader how the civil and housing rights’ gains of the 1960’s, which established anti-discrimination laws and promoted racial integration, significantly contributed to the mass exodus of Whites and middle-class African Americans out of the urban core and into the suburbs. The reader comes away from the book not clearly seeing the connection between this exodus, the loss of urban jobs, and the indifference of government and community institutions.

 

 

Interracial & Inter-Ethnic Relations      

            A major failing of Code of the Street is the absence of an analysis of relations among the poor inner-city residents’ races and ethnicities. Anderson speaks throughout the book of the social and community structures within the poor urban African American community, but never interviews or observes relations between them and their poor White, Latino, Asian, and immigrant neighbors. For example, the reader would be interested and benefit from understanding the dynamic between native-born African Americans and recent immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. Here, Anderson misses a chance to explore whether those Blacks from outside the U.S. have the same societal types of decent and street or the same oppositional attitude in response to discrimination.

  

            Likewise, Latinos, as the largest minority group, should have elicited some attention from Anderson in his observation and analysis of the inner-city poor and uneducated. They, like African Americans, are primarily urban dwelling and disproportionately poor and uneducated. The reader would have greatly benefited from an investigation of how poor Latinos relate with African Americans. Specifically, an analysis of poor, urban Afro-Latinos, the discrimination they face both within the Latino community and in society at large, and the tools they use to navigate what is often a minefield of racial and ethnic prejudices. Anderson could have scrutinized the similarities and differences in their social structures and schema. Correspondingly, there was no study of the small number of poor Whites and Asians and their respective social structures and attitudes toward their African American neighbors and toward the world at large. The proliferation of Asian small businesses in the form of local markets, take-out food places, and pawnshops, the frequent resultant tensions with African Americans in the community, and their apparent different outlook on academic achievement in the face of similar racial prejudice would have offered an insightful understanding of another crucial component of inner-city poverty. Unfortunately, Anderson misses all these chances to show the varied, complicated, and unexamined forces with the urban landscape which influence the lives of all its residents.

 

            Overall, Anderson’s Code of the Street is an excellent and refreshingly new analysis of the urban poor in America. His use of qualitative ethnography rather than a purely quantitative presentation acts to engulf the reader into the sights, sounds, and people of the urban core in a way which is not only gripping to read but enlightening to understand. His use of the social types of decent and street works perfectly to delineate and better explain how people who make up the urban poor are not an amorphous monolith but have different ways of manifesting their sense of alienation, abandonment, and disenfranchisement with the larger society. Anderson, unlike many of his peers in the social sciences, not only shows the larger macroeconomic, social, and institutional forces that create and maintain an underclass in America’s cities, but also explains it in a way which does not elicit pity or disbelief, but understanding. His only failing, in a book full of gems and kernels of enlightenment, is the dearth of examinations of the social dynamics among and between various races and ethnicities within the urban ‘ghetto’ and their respective similarities and differences in dealing with common problems. On balance Code of the Street is a must-read for anyone who cares about the citizens and direction of this country.

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Michael Jackson is a political analyst/researcher and freelance writer/editor living in New York City. He holds a B.A. in political science with a concentration in American Politics & Urban Studies from California State University, East Bay and was formerly graduate fellow at the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences' Ph.D program