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The Underclass Up CloseThe Code of the Street: Decency, Violence

and the Moral Life of the Inner Cityby Elijah Anderson

William W. Norton & Co. , Inc. , 1999, 352 pages , $25.

Reviewed by Kevin R. Kosar

lijah Anderson s latest sociological trea-

tise offers a first person yet analytical ac-count of life in the inner city. What

Anderson describes is disturbing- it's a worldwracked by violence and a general lack of de-cency. Like Thomas Hobbes ' state of natureAnderson s inner city is a place where life is poornasty, brutish, and short.

The book begins with a stroll onGermantown Avenue. Chestnut Hill, located onthe northwest edge of Philadelphia, is a mostlywhite area, with boutiques, clean streets , andpolite people. Life has a happy buzz here; foullanguage , rude behavior, and violence are veryrare. Anderson then walks readers further downGermantown Avenue toward the heart of Phila-delphia. Slowly but surely the scene changes. Thenumber of Whites decreases , the number ofBlacks increases. Check cashing joints and liquorstores multiply; pricey brick townhouses give wayto unkept, dilapidated buildings with barred win-dows. Graffiti tags are everywhere and trashblows about the streets.

The walk ends in the North Philadelphiaghetto, where crack zombies and drug-addictedprostitutes stagger the streets, children run amokand unsupervised, and people drink alcohol andsmoke dope openly on the street. There s not awhite man to be found. It's a great introductionto the book, for it shows the reader a spectrumof American life-from the 1990s white, wealthy,well-ordered, and urbane to the black, impov-erished, chaotic, and inner city.

Most of the remaining 300 plus pages aredevoted to describing life in this particular ghetto.In sum, a great number of inner-city residentsappear to Anderson to be wholly uncivilized byengaging in obviously self-destructive, anti-so-

SPRING 2000

cial behavior. Though some families and peoplehave life nurturing cooperative lifestyles , Ander-son finds that most inner-city dwellers do not.They rob, they dope up, they brutalize. Youngmen father children and then disappear, preg-nant girls drop out of schools and have childafter child, but spend their days watching televi-sion and getting high instead of being attentivemothers. Armed young men with hair triggertemperments rule the streets.

One might wonder just how this self-destructive environment perpetuates itself. Ifpeople who live in the inner-city are so self-de-structive, why don t they all simply die off?Obviously some residents bear children, but thesechildren are not born drug dealers and crooks.

Anderson explains that the ghetto regener-ates itself through "the code of the street" Thecode is a hierarchy of values that exalts impu-dence, machismo, and regular displays of vio-lence while it denigrates manners, responsibility,and compassion. Children born in or broughtto the inner-city face the inescapable "dilemmaof the decent child" ; either be a good kid likeyour parents and teachers tell you and get beatup by other kids , or start behaving like a thug organgsta." Understandably, a great many youths

choose the latter path. Thus the "hood" lives, transcending individuals and sucking in more

and more children into criminal behavior, de-spite the best efforts of some parents.

Anderson devotes whole chapters to topicslike drugs and violence

, "

the mating game

" "

thedecent daddy," the increasing number of blackinner-city grandmothers having to raise theirchildren s children, and other facets of inner-citylife. Though a few chapters come off as a littlelonger than necessary, on the whole, Anderson

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sharply chronicles the bad, the ugly, and whatlittle good is to be found.

Occasionally, his writing slips and the readerbecomes painfully aware that Anderson has beenin the academy many years. The effect can be .comical, as his stiff descriptions bring to mindthe image of an egghead in a pith helmet wan-dering the mean streets and writing feverishly inhis notebook:

(TJhe staging area is also a densely populatedpb:e where young people hang out and lookto meet members of the opposite sex. Hereyoung men and women out to be "with itor "hip" smoke cigarettes or drink "fortiesor other alcoholic beverages , or perhaps they

are there to get high on "blunts" (drug-lacedcigars). (p. 78)

Though Black like his subjects , Anderson , a

renowned professor of social studies and soci-ology at the University of Pennsylvania with a

slew of publications to his name , clearly isnquite one of the people he is studying. Termslike "blunts" and "forties" appear to strike himas exotic, but they are common parlance amongAmerican teenagers- one need only turn on MTVor grab a copy of Spin or any other pop musicmagazme.

Thrmgh Anderson greatly adds to thestock of research about the urbanunderclass , he doesn t offer a serious dis-

cussion on the origins of the Black ghetto.He appears to subscribe to William JuliusWilson s theory (Wilson, 1996) that the

ghetto is the result of the disappearanceof heavy manufacturing jobs and racism

though he does not engage the subjectand conspicuously ignores Lawrence M.Mead' s research (1992) that indicates that jobsare available but the poor often don t care to

take them. Thus , Anderson, in an unsatisfyingthree-page policy prescription at the end of thebook, asserts that government can remedy theproblem by creating "living-wage jobs." His logicis simple: healthy inner-cities minus jobs madefor ghettos; thus , ghettos plus jobs will makefor healthy inner-cities.

This policy prescription does not comportwith Anderson s description of the inner-city.

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Recall, Anderson says the ghetto is filled withfolks who are living perverse, unhealthy lives-they break the law, they drink too much, do dope

and are hostile toward work and responsibility.Yes, creating jobs may help the decent individu-als who have not gone bad- but how will thishelp those who are bad? Does Anderson thinkthat the gangstas he saw will drop their bluntsand forties, pick up a lunchbox, and march offto the 9 to 5 world?

This solution doesn t fly because

treats the pathologies as the outcome of a ratio-nal choice by individuals: they choose to behaveas they do because the costs to behaving wellare prohibitively low or the payoffs of behav-ing badly are so high. Considering that welfarereform has driven large numbers of the for-merly nonworking poor into the workforce , one

might well argue that disfunction and nonwork-ing is not so much a matter of a lack of oppor-tunity, but of the permissiveness of governmentaid programs (Mead, 1986).

Worse, creating jobs would appear to offerassistance only to those few who are willing toforgo the temptations of the street. Everyoneelse, presumably, would be free to continue liv-ing as they had- committing crimes , poisoningthemselves with alcohol and drugs , and menac-ing those who try to live straight. So the verymechanism that perpetuates the misery, the code

of the street, will live on.Elijah Anderson has offered a richly de-

scriptive text on life in the inner-city that

should become canonical for those study-ing the ghetto and pondering ways to bet-ter it. He has painted in vivid colors this troubledworld and the dangerous persons who rule itand the code of the streets which perpetuates it.The ghetto will not disappear until the code ofthe street is broken. Thanks to Andersonpolicymakers may better understand the chal-lenge they face. 1YYBI

ReferencesMead, L. M. (1992). The Nell) Politics of Poverty: TINNon

JPorki17g Poor i17 AtJJelica. New York: Basic Books.Mead, L. M. (1986). Beyond Entitlement, The Social Obligations of

Citizenship. New York Free Press.Wilson, W J. (1996). When WO1k Disappears: The World of

the NelP Urban POOl: New York: Knopf.

THE WAGNER REVIEW