Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City Reprint Edition

Elijah Anderson has done an outstanding job of explaining the sociological, economic, and geographical factors that contribute to the mentality commonly seen among young men in the inner city and the violence that can emerge as a result. As a young black man that grew up in a two parent home in suburban Maryland, I was extremely confused when I left my small town for middle school. It was there that I was first exposed to black children with less fortunate financial backgrounds, single parent homes, and low value of education and order. As Anderson explains, even in the suburban regions of Maryland adjacent to D.C. inner city attitudes, styles, trends, and even volatility can be seen in young blacks as a result of 'cultural diffusion'. A phenomenon which has a peculiar property of moving up the socioeconomic ladder in the black community. What I appreciate about Mr. Anderson's book most is that it has finally helped me to answer the question of 'WHY', which has tormented me for almost 15 years. Why have I found myself to be different than many of my black peers as a young man and an adult when all I wanted was a good education, a good job, and to live a decent life. EVERY person, Black or White who has found themself glaring at the low socioeconomic black community and wondering what is wrong, or quoting Bill Cosby Rhetoric while watching a group of hoodlums bully any and everyone off of the sidewalk, or turning up your nose at a pregnant 19 year old girl yelling at her toddler as she mopes down the sidewalk... YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK. Understanding is the beginning of dealing with what has become everyone's problem.

Although I only have two chapters left I found it amazing how you can read each chapter of the book without relation to the previous chapter meaning you can read what interests you the most.I found it to be very eye opening and relational because of the fact I myself as a white man grew up and live in an inner city neighborhood out west. I found the stories in it to be applicable to some of the things that I have witnessed throughout my life given that the book was written in the 90s.Some of things you will find in this book are stories, drama, successes and failures, and knowledge about the social stratification of working class folks and those who have chosen to submit themselves to the life and rules of the streets. If this is what interests you then it is a must read.

As ordered

Since this book is about life and society in general, many themes could be derived from the work. The first theme is that the world is not perfect. A person who lives in a good neighborhood, has a good job, and a stable family should be aware that not everyone is that well of, that there are many people in the same city as that person who are in poverty, danger, and have no hope for a better life. The second theme is that in the inner city, gaining respect is almost impossible without violence. In the outside world, respect is based on education, personal achievement, moral values, etc, but in the inner city a person has to fight, show no weakness, exploit the system, sell drugs, and in general do whatever is needed. The third theme is about drugs and their consequences. In the inner city, there are not many legal ways to make good money consistently since low skill jobs such as factory work got outsourced to other countries. People started looking for other illegal methods of making cash and drug dealing was almost too good to be true. By dealing drugs, a person could potentially make as much or even more money than doctors, professors, etc, but at a cost. Besides being illegal, dealing is a very dangerous business where death is not an uncommon occurrence. The fourth theme is about decency. Although the inner city is dominated by the code of the street and street oriented people, there is a resistance of decent people who try to live according to the moral values of the outside world and attempt to protect their families from thelures of the street. The fifth theme is the idea that people are different. There are some who, once raised in the ways of the code, could never fully get out. Yet, there are others, although smaller in number, who try their hardest and succeed in changing their lives to decency even though they still have the ability to "code switch" back to their street behavior when the need arises.Code of the Street is about all these things and more. It is about the everyday life of people who have to live and survive in a hostile and very stressful environment where there is a lack of typical norms that people in better neighborhoods take for granted. Norms such as a responsible police force, safe streets free of open air drug deals and gangsters, good schools that are not just an extension of the street, real successful role models and not just drug dealers living out their pathetic 15 minutes of fame while ruining lives in the process, men who care about more important things such as education then expensive clothes and the conquering of women for the sake of looking cool to their buddies who do the same, etc. The book makes it clear that if nothing is done, then the problems of the inner city will only escalate.As a whole the Code of the Street is relatively good with some ups and downs. The very first chapter was well made and is a great introduction to the rest of the book. It introduces the setting and indirectly asks all the questions which will be very thoroughly answered in the subsequent chapters. For people who don't know much about the inner city, this book is very eye opening, entertaining, memorable and instructive. The most interesting parts were the interviews and direct accounts of various people's lives. The language in those parts is informal and authentic, and there is usually no author's explanation of the account until after it's over. These parts offer a break from the constant analyzing of the inner city. Even though Anderson offers a lot of good reasoning over the various issues presented in the book, he gets somewhat repetitive after a while, repeating thesame points over again a bit too much. Still, it is easy to agree with them since they are concise and well developed. Anderson talks about decent and street families and how there's a constant struggle between them, how the street is corrupting the children and the decent parents are doing everything they can to protect them from it. A lot of the young people in the inner city try to look street like for protection but inside they have decent values, and some people learn to code switch which seems to be the best way to go until it's possible to leave the neighborhood for a better one. Anderson often presents opposites such as decent fathers and the indecent street ones. He discusses all the points that make a father decent, but he also talks about why a lot of fathers fail to be decent even if they try. In that way he shows that even in street oriented people there is sometimes a conflict within them. Anderson even dedicated an entire chapter to a street oriented man who tried to change his life and always struggled with it. It is one of the most interesting chapters in the book because it provided a lot of direct interviews. All in all, all of Anderson's points are agreeable with since he always takes the humane perspective and although he gives good reasons for people's bad behavior, he never tries to justify any of it.Code of the Street raises many issues with the system. It is inexcusable that the government does almost nothing about the state of the inner city, because it can do something about it. More funding should be given to the public schools to increase safety and improve the education level. A lot of kids become street oriented at a young age, so there should be more programs to isolate them from that environment. The police presence should be increased in hotspots such as corners and parks to prevent crime and drug dealing. More media attention should be given to inner city areas to expose all the crime and make it everybody's business. Free training courses should be offered to unskilled individuals to at least help them get started on the right track, so they won't besucked into the street life. Even little changes could bring about long term results, and it is only a matter of starting some.Personally, the book was a good read and had some interesting parts although it did feel like it dragged on in a couple of places. It definitely provides a much clearer image about life in the inner city, with sections devoted to various subjects. Sometimes though, it seemed a little unrealistic. In the section about respect, in one person's account it stated that in a fight, street oriented people would know that going for the face is considering taking the fight to a new level. It just seems hard to believe that people would automatically know this, and that in general things worked that way. One would expect that if a fight breaks out, there are no rules since it's a street fight. Also, the whole concept of a code of the street seems a little too hard to believe as well. It does not seem like street oriented people would even think that they are following some sort of code. Of course if the code is seen as some sort of arbitrary social agreement, then it could be a much more plausible idea. Sociologically, the idea of a code is very helpful in understanding the inner city life and society, since it is very complex and difficult to analyze. It must have taken Anderson quite a while to visit inner city Philadelphia, study all aspects of it in good detail, and then be able to write an interesting book about it. That takes dedication and hard work. These feats make the Code of the Street worthy of reading, and give Anderson the credit he deserves.

L'autore è un testimone, attivista, membro della comunità: il soggetto perfetto per questo viaggio fra le strade popolate di disperati, criminali, emarginati, con un occhi umano ed attento alle profonde ragioni che si celano dietro i comportamenti devianti.Lo studio della relazione città-marginalità-crimine è condotto in maniera autentica, critica.Forse non troppo scorrevole, consigliato solo per studenti realmente interessati ad approfondire.

thanks. everything is fine with this book.