Code of the Street – Decency, Violence & the Moral Life of the Inner City: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City - Softcover

Anderson, Elijah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393320782 ISBN 13: 9780393320787

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001

Synopsis

Inner-city black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence, but in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. This unwritten set of rules-based largely on an individual's ability to command respect-is a powerful and pervasive form of etiquette, governing the way in which people learn to negotiate public spaces. Elijah Anderson's incisive book delineates the code and examines it as a response to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, to the stigma of race, to rampant drug use, to alienation and lack of hope.

About this title

Review:

One of the most interesting examinations of poverty, violence and sociology to emerge in recent years.

A brilliant diagnosis of the internal factors that hold blacks back.

One of our best ethnographers.... Anderson is excellent in explaining how the criminal element, through a numerical minority, comes to dominate public space.

Important.... [Anderson] demonstrates, time and again, how optimism, ambition and decency can sprout in the most unlikely places, given even the slimmest chance.

Eloquent and moving.... A strikingly powerful work that rings with urgency.--Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here

This is the best treatment we have of the tormented inner life of young people wrestling with nihilism in a society indifferent to their plight and predicament.--Cornel West

Synopsis:

Anderson shows how violence in inner-city black America is regulated through an informal code. The code is a response to: the lack of jobs; drug use; alienation and a lack of hope. The most powerful force against the code is the family, which is often defeated as the code controls public space.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0393320782
• ISBN 13: 9780393320787
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352