Code of the Street
Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City
Format:Paperback
Publisher:WW Norton & Co
Published:4th Jul '01
Should be back in stock very soon
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.
"A brilliant diagnosis of the internal factors that hold blacks back." -- Wall Street Journal
"One of the most interesting examinations of poverty, violence and sociology to emerge in recent years." -- Boston Herald
"One of our best ethnographers.... Anderson is excellent in explaining how the criminal element, through a numerical minority, comes to dominate public space." -- New York Times Book Review
"Important.... [Anderson] demonstrates, time and again, how optimism, ambition and decency can sprout in the most unlikely places, given even the slimmest chance." -- Newsweek
"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
ISBN: 9780393320787
Dimensions: 211mm x 140mm x 25mm
Weight: 395g
352 pages