November 21, 1999, Sunday
BOOK REVIEW DESK Street News By Bob Blauner CODE OF THE STREET Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. By Elijah Anderson. 352 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $25.95.
With two books, ''A Place on the Corner'' and ''Streetwise,'' Elijah Anderson established himself as one of our best urban ethnographers. ''A Place on the Corner'' is a sensitive account of the people who frequent a bar and liquor store on Chicago's South Side; ''Streetwise'' is a superb study of contact between racial groups and social classes in Philadelphia.
Now, in ''Code of the Street,'' Anderson returns to Philadelphia and reports on its northern black ghetto, a neighborhood ridden with unemployment, poverty and crack houses, and in which ''decent'' working-class African- Americans live side by side with street hustlers and criminals. It is the tension between the values of decency and the values of the street, as played out both between groups and within the hearts of individuals, that is the author's subject.
Anderson, the Charles and William L. Day professor of the social sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, has a fine eye for significant details that distinguish these subcultures. Both decent and street parents use physical punishment with their offspring, but only decent parents take the time to explain to their children why they are spanking them. Decent families argue and sometimes fight, except that they tone it down out of consideration for neighbors. The hustlers justify their illegal activities by invoking racism: discrimination has limited their opportunities. With their ethic of individual responsibility, the decent folks won't do this. Finally, the street people live their lives according to the principle that ''it is better to be feared than loved,'' while the decent people believe the reverse.
As we have seen in many memoirs of the black urban experience -- one thinks of Claude Brown's ''Manchild in the Promised Land'' -- the attraction of the street and its models of manhood can capture a very young child. From his interviews with teachers, Anderson estimates that in the first grade one-fifth of students are ''invested in the code of the street''; by fourth grade, however, fully three-quarters ''have bought into . . . the oppositional culture.''
Anderson is excellent in explaining how the criminal element, though a numerical minority, comes to dominate public space. One reason is that the ''old heads,'' the community's respected leaders who, in the past, socialized the young into righteous behavior, have today become almost irrelevant because of a lack of working- class jobs. The drug dealers, with their ostentatious display of money and power, fill this vacuum.
And pernicious as the code of the street may be, it still provides a set of rules and expectations that decent and street people alike can take into account in their behavior. Anderson feels that the code substitutes for formal law and order. Even decent people hesitate to call the police for help, because to do so can subject them to reprisals and make their lives worse in the long run.
Indeed, the ethos of the street is so pervasive that decency must often go underground. Serious students turn in their homework surreptitiously. Good kids, Anderson says, dress in street fashion to ward off abuse from their peers. But teachers, police officers and other representatives of society can't always recognize the good kid underneath the street garb and mannerisms, so he is neglected in school and hassled by the police.
In order to survive on the streets, decent people not only become streetwise, they learn to ''code-switch'' between the two different ways of being in the world. Street knowledge can save your life in a dangerous situation. Anderson includes a long discussion of the ''etiquette of the stickup,'' a kind of manual for potential victims on how to make sure that you give up only your money and not your life.
According to recent statistics, the unemployment rate for young black men is at a record low, and the proportion with jobs is at an all-time high. But by 1998, President Clinton's ''economic miracle'' had not yet trickled down into the North Philadelphia ghetto. Anderson has mainly bad news to report: the city of Philadelphia has lost more than 100,000 jobs in the last 15 years, and employment in the manufacturing sector has fallen 53 percent. But welfare reform has had an impact: ''There is more of an impetus for young men and women to take greater responsibility for their personal lives and, in turn, to have fewer babies out of wedlock.'' Still, Anderson's conclusion remains tentative: ''The jury is still out on this.''
Despite its many virtues, ''Code of the Street'' does not live up to the promise of the author's earlier work. It is so repetitive that judicious editing could have eliminated 50 pages. There are too many truisms presented as important new discoveries: after devoting much of the book to documenting the very point, he informs us that the ''street-oriented subculture is often violent.''
Unlike Anderson's previous books, ''Code of the Street'' suffers from an excess of jargon. Many chapters are made up of dense passages in which the author theorizes about his topic, often using what sociologists call an ''ideal- typical'' description rather than a concrete one with living, breathing characters. Or he will illustrate his generalizations with long monologues from his informants, some of the comments running on for nine pages or more. Anderson is most interesting when he gives us stories instead of generalizations; these often have a powerful immediacy, especially when his own actions are part of the plot.
Fortunately, the last two chapters are almost good enough to overcome the problems of the book. In the first we identify with a ''John Turner'' as he struggles to resist the lure of the street and stay out of jail. Anderson finds Turner jobs and lends him money, first small sums, then a sizable amount; he finally realizes, though, that his friend isn't going to make it. But Robert, the protagonist in ''The Conversion of a Role Model,'' gives us a success story to end the book; he was able to make the difficult transition from teenage gang leadership and prison to a decent life operating two small businesses.
Anderson himself blames the system and not the morality of individuals for their plight. ''Only by re- establishing a viable mainstream economy in the inner city, particularly one that provides access to jobs for young inner-city men and women,'' he concludes, ''can we encourage a positive sense of the future.''
Bob Blauner's books include ''Black Lives, White Lives: Three Decades of Race Relations in America.'' http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1566_reg_print.html Still the Big News
Racial Oppression in America
Bob Blauner
"Blauner's thoughtful writings reflect so much of our thinking on race matters in the last three decades—the exuberant theorizing, the rising uncertainties about what we really now about race and ethnicity, and the turning to the lives and voices of people themselves. Required reading for the twenty-first century—a time when we will all be minorities." —Ronald Takaki, author of A Different Mirror
For more than thirty years, Bob Blauner's incisive writing on race relations has drawn a wide and varied audience. Whether his topic is the Watts riots in 1965, Chicano culture, or the tension between Blacks and Jews, his work is remarkable for its originality and candor. Beginning with the key essays of his landmark book, Racial Oppression in America, this volume makes the case that race and racism still permeate every aspect of American experience.
Blauner launched his concept of internal colonialism in the turbulent 1960s, a period in which many Americans worried that racial conflicts would propel the country into another civil war. The notion that the systematic oppression of people of color in the United States resembles the situation of colonized populations in Third World countries still informs much of the academic research on race as well as public discourse. Indeed, today's critical race and whiteness studies are deeply indebted to Blauner's work on internal colonialism and the pervasiveness of white privilege. Offering a radical perspective on the United States' racial landscape, Bob Blauner forcefully argues that we ignore the persistence of oppression and our continuing failure to achieve equality at our own peril. Excerpt available at www.temple.edu/tempress
"Bob Blauner's Racial Oppression in America was a landmark text, a beacon of radical enlightenment, for those of us in
the 1970s and 1980s desperately seeking an intellectual framework for critiquing mainstream American sociology's mystifications on race. This revised and expanded edition, containing many new essays, and informed throughout by authorial hindsight and second thoughts, should win a new audience for a postwar classic of critical race theory." —Charles W. Mills, Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago, and author of The Racial Contract Part I: The Emergence of a Critical Race Theory 1. Almost a Race War: The Climate of the Late 1960s 2. Theoretical Perspectives 3. White Privilege: The Key to Racial Oppression 4. Colonized and Immigrant Minorities 5. Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt 6. Racism and Culture 7. Black Culture and Its Critics
Part II: Institutionalized Racism 8. Whitewash over Watts: The Politics of the McCone Commission 9. Jury Selection in the Huey Newton Murder Trial 10. More Than Just a Footnote: Chicanos and Their Movement 11. Toward the Decolonization of Social Research
Part III: Rethinking Critical Race Theory in a New Era 12. Some Self-Critical Reflections on Colonized and Immigrant Minorities 13. Talking Past One Another: Black and White Languages of Race 14. White Radicals, White Liberals, White People: Rebuilding the Anti-Racist Coalition 15. Blacks and Jews: A Study in Ambivalence 16. Race in the 2000 Election: Still the Big News
Notes