About Elijah Anderson

Elijah Anderson was born in the Mississippi Delta during World War II. Like so many rural poor Black Southerners, his parents made their living in the context of racial segregation. As part of the “great migration,” the family ventured north to South Bend, Indiana, where Eli’s father found work in the foundry of the Studebaker Corporation. In South Bend, Eli attended the local public schools, where he was a precocious reader. Later he joined the Cub Scouts and then the Boy Scouts, organizations that were critical for his later development. At age 10, he sold newspapers on downtown street corners. At 11, he set pins at a downtown bowling alley. At 12, he went door to door to downtown merchants, asking for steady work. Marion Forbes, the owner of a local typewriter company, hired him. At Forbes Typewriter, Eli emptied wastebaskets, washed windows, and did handyman work. Serving in a kind of apprenticeship, he learned to clean and repair typewriters, and worked there until he graduated from high school. Mr. Forbes allowed him time off to engage in school athletics, including basketball, track, and other sports. As many of his athletic peers began to look forward to higher education by way of athletic scholarships, he was inspired by their example and began to look forward to college as well.

After graduating high school, Eli began classes at the Indiana University extension in South Bend. He did so well that he earned a scholarship to enroll at the main I.U. campus in Bloomington, Indiana, where he fell in love with books and academic work. He graduated from I.U. with a bachelor’s degree and then went on to the University of Chicago for his master’s degree and Northwestern University for his Ph.D. From there, he was recruited and appointed Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College, and later recruited by the University of Pennsylvania, where he rose from assistant professor to associate professor to professor, and then to an endowed professorship and ultimately to a distinguished professorship, with a secondary appointment in the Wharton School. After teaching at Penn for many years, he has recently joined the faculty of Yale University as the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Sociology. He has written a number of books considered classics of sociology, all focusing on race and inequality in the United States.

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Elijah Anderson Speaks

When you think of a scientist, you probably imagine someone in a white coat, mixing chemicals in a test tube. I am a scientist, but not that kind. I don’t work with test tubes and Bunsen burners. I am a social scientist—someone who studies human society and the way people within that society relate to one another. My special field of study is urban ethnography. At Yale University, where I am a professor, I teach courses in topics like “Urban Sociology” (the study of cities) and “Ethnography of the African American Community” (ethnography is about describing and documenting a current culture—in this case, modern African American culture.)

But like those scientists in white coats, I have my own laboratory: the social settings of the city. These are the places I study in order to do my research. For instance, my first book was called A Place on the Corner. In order to write it, I spent three years on the south side of Chicago, hanging out and engaging in “participant-observation” at a bar and liquor store on what I called “Jelly’s corner.” There I interviewed and listened to the men who were regulars there, learning all about their small community and how it worked.

I paid special attention to how those men constantly established and re-established their status in everyday life. I wrote copious field notes about my research experiences, and those notes formed the basis for my book.

More recently, I have written a book called Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. I based it on research and observations done in the city of Philadelphia. In the book, I focus on Germantown Avenue, a major artery that runs through the city. It begins in some very well-to-do “suburbs” within the city, then moves into more middle-class neighborhoods, and eventually into the heart of inner- city Philadelphia. For the purposes of Code of the Street, Germantown Avenue became my laboratory.

Let me give you a look at Germantown Avenue, and tell you about some of my observations there.

The top of the avenue lies in the affluent community called Chestnut Hill. It is a mostly white area, although becoming more racially mixed. The houses are generally large, surrounded by lawns and trees. The shopping district is full of small, upscale businesses: gourmet food shops, a camera shop, jewelry stores, clothing boutiques. A casual, taken-for-granted mixing of the races is common. You see integrated groups of children on the playground. At the bank, there is cheerful interaction between Black and white tellers and clients. Mixed-race groups of friends stroll past the shops. Everyone is polite and seems relaxed. When people pass one another on the sidewalk, they often make eye contact and smile. Folks stand chatting quietly on the sidewalk, sometimes with their backs to the street. You don’t get the feeling that there is any hostility or that people are on guard against being hassled or insulted or robbed. There is a pleasant, civil atmosphere.

Down the hill, Germantown Avenue wanders through the communities of Mount Airy, Germantown, Nicetown, and then reaches Broad Street in North Philadelphia. As the Avenue moves south, the scene changes rapidly. The racial mix changes to become more evenly mixed, then almost completely Black, working-class, and poor. The large, affluent homes of Chestnut Hill disappear, replaced first by tidy single- family homes and then by row homes, boarded-up buildings, and vacant lots. Boutiques and trendy restaurants vanish, giving way to pawn shops, barbeque joints, liquor stores, and storefront churches. There are bars on windows and riot gates outside of businesses.

Along with the visual differences, there is a very noticeable change in atmosphere. By the time the avenue reaches the Broad Street area, it is striking how closely people seem to watch their backs. They are very careful how they present themselves. They keep a close eye on others who are sharing their space. People avoid making eye contact for too long. If they don’t, a hostile “What you looking at?” may result. Young people gathering on the street at times pepper their conversation with loud obscenities, as if daring anyone to object. A noisy argument in the park may move into a nearby alley to be settled with a fight, maybe with guns. There is a sense of simmering anger, of violence lurking under the surface.

Why? Why is the atmosphere so different between communities like Chestnut Hill and North Philly? Why do people in one seem friendly and relaxed, while people in the other tend to act suspicious, cold, and hard? Is it a matter of race, or of income? Are white people or well-off people naturally friendlier and more laid-back than Black or poor people?

Clearly, that isn’t true. Anyone who has spent time in the Black community or among poor people has experienced the same warmth, love, and friendship that exist in any human community. But in public, behavior is very different. The realities of ghetto life have created a “street culture” that affects everyone living there.

Even children growing up in the most decent homes have to learn to handle themselves on the street. (I do not use the word “decent” as a moral judgment. Local residents typically say “decent” to mean “committed to conventional, mainstream values.” “Street” culture, on the other hand, generally opposes those traditional values.)

Code of the Street

Of all the problems facing the poor inner-city Black community, none is more critical than that of interpersonal violence and aggression. Such violence wreaks havoc daily on the lives of community residents. Increasingly, it spills over into downtown and residential middle-class areas like Chestnut Hill. Muggings, burglaries, carjackings, and drug-related shootings, all of which may leave their victims or innocent bystanders dead, are now common enough to concern all urban and many suburban residents.

The roots of such violence lie in the realities of life among the ghetto poor: the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, limited basic public services (such as police response in emergencies, building maintenance, trash pickup, lighting, and other services that middle class neighborhoods take for granted), the stigma of race, the fallout from rampant drug use and drug trafficking, and the resulting lack of hope for the future. Simply living in such an environment places young people at risk of falling victim to aggressive behavior. It is true that there are often forces in the community that can counteract the negative influences. By far the most powerful is a strong, loving, “decent” (as inner-city residents put it) family that is committed to middle-class values. But the despair in the ghetto has given birth to a second culture, the culture of “the street.” The norms of the street often directly oppose the norms of mainstream society.

If you are a young man living in the inner city, you may be thinking, “You don’t have to tell me what it’s like here. This is my home.” And I don’t doubt you could tell me a great deal about your daily reality. But sometimes it’s hard to look objectively at the environment we live in, especially if it is what we’ve always known. In my opinion, it is extremely useful to recognize the way these two orientations—decent and street—affect you and your community. How the two coexist and interact has important consequences for residents, particularly for youngsters growing up in the inner city.

Above all, this environment means that even young people whose home lives reflect mainstream values have been forced to learn to handle themselves in a street-oriented environment. This is because the street culture has evolved a “code of the street”—a set of informal rules governing public behavior, particularly violence. The rules dictate how people are supposed to behave and how they are to respond if they are challenged. They set rules for the use of violence. The rules have been established and are enforced mainly by street-oriented people. But on the streets, the distinction between “street” and “decent” isn’t very relevant. Everybody knows that if the rules are broken, there are penalties. For this reason, even families who are thoroughly “decent”—who generally oppose the values of the street code—reluctantly encourage their children to become familiar with that code. They know their children need the code of the streets in order to negotiate the inner city environment.

At the heart of the code is the issue of respect— loosely defined as being treated “right” or being granted one’s “props.” Respect is a universal human desire. However, in the troublesome environment of the inner city, what one deserves in the way of respect becomes increasingly problematic and uncertain. A major reason for this uncertainty is residents’ feelings about official law enforcement. The police are generally viewed as representing the dominant white society and as unconcerned about inner city residents. When police are called, they may not respond, leading many residents to feel they must take extraordinary measures to defend themselves and their loved ones. Respect for the law erodes, and “street justice” fills the void. In this context, a person’s “street cred” becomes his security. But maintaining street credibility takes constant effort. It’s never accomplished once and for all. And the attempt to preserve and build it up feeds into an endless cycle of argument, violence, and then payback. Respect or street credibility is both hard-won and easily lost, so it must constantly be guarded. With the right amount, individuals can avoid being bothered in public. This is so very important, for if they are bothered, not only may they face physical danger, but they will have been disgraced or “dissed,” thereby losing some of that all- important cred. Many of the forms that dissing can take may seem petty and even bewildering to middle- class people (maintaining eye contact for too long, for example), but for people living in persistent racialized urban poverty, self-esteem is an extremely competitive affair. Young people become profoundly envious of each other, as any positive quality or special possession raises one person’s status above another’s. Competition for status may be settled through various sorts of contests, including verbal sparring, argument, and, finally, physical violence.

As the above shows, the code of the street is actually a cultural adaptation, a useful way of surviving the harsh realities of the inner city. But living by the code places young people in a sort of “Catch-22,” a situation that leads to inevitable defeat. Because while living by the code may be an effective survival mecha- nism on the street, its open display seriously damages the young man’s chances of success in the outer world. Few employers know how to tell the difference between a genuine thug—a criminal—and a decent kid who has adopted the thug dress, speech, look, and behav- ior to protect himself on the street. The result? In an increasingly competitive unskilled-job market, employ- ers develop more reasons to continue discriminating against young Black men. This discrimination under- cuts those young men’s economic viability, thereby limiting their choices in life.

There is no question about it: our inner cities are in crisis. The days when almost any able-bodied man could find a job at a living wage are gone. Our economy has shifted away from manufacturing toward service and high technology, areas requiring specialized training. Good jobs are leaving our cities for the suburbs or being shipped overseas to developing countries like India and China. Many of the residents who have the skills and education to leave the inner city have done so, leaving behind the most hopeless and disillusioned.

In order to turn things around in our cities, fundamental changes must be made on all levels, from community to city to state to federal. The first challenge is that the wider “conventional” society and its leaders, especially corporate America, must come to understand the situation for what it is: that centuries of discrimination have led to racialized urban poverty that now places the Black urban poor in untenable circumstances. Building upon such understanding, economic opportunities must be brought back to our cities for young Black men. Gun control must become a reality. We need social programs that will encourage effective mothers, fathers and other role models for our young people, models that will teach personal responsibility at an early age. Our own Black professionals must reach back and encourage young people to take education seriously, and to be able to persuasively point out the rewards of education, both for the individual and the community.

As a social scientist, I am more inclined to report and analyze what I see than give prescriptions for what I think ought to be. But given a chance to talk to young men who want a better life for themselves, I’d say this: “Take every opportunity to develop what we call ‘human capital.’ By human capital I mean education, skills, ways of behavior that can serve you outside the ‘hood. The fundamental three R’s—reading, writing, and ’rithmetic—are absolute necessities for success. Those things become coin: coin that you can trade in order to achieve a better place.”

In the ghetto, “street knowledge” and behavior serve as a valuable form of coin. Outside of the ghetto, it is worthless—worse than worthless; it is a barrier to success. Our young men have to “know what time it is,” and to be able to “code switch”—to handle themselves on the street, but also be able to adopt conventional behaviors that allow them to succeed in mainstream society. Schooling, standard English, conventional manners—all those are coin of the larger society. They are power. Our young men have shown themselves clever and savvy enough to adopt one set of behaviors to survive in the mean streets of urban America. But if those behaviors are all they know, they are fated to live and, all too often, die in those streets. By adopting another code, our young men have a far better chance of thriving in the world at large. If they learn to practice and to excel by observing the conventions of mainstream behavior, they can negotiate the wider system. And negotiating the system is key to climbing the ladder of success.