An effort to understand and explain violence and related problems in the inner city

1
Code of the Street

• An effort to understand and explain violence and
  related problems in the inner city

2
Questions to bear in mind

• What is the code of the street?
• How does the code of the street affect the
  day-to-day lives of individuals who live there?
• Is Andersons characterization of life in the
  inner city on target?

3
Elijah Andersons Code of the Street

• The code is a set of informal rules governing
  interpersonal public behavior, including violence
• Respect is at the heart of the code
• Believed that there were two types of families

4
What is the code of the street?

• Rules that govern encounters with others in inner
  city neighborhoods
• Respect is the key goal
• Deterrence the threat of vengeance
• Violence becomes a common part of life

5
Decent Families

• Accept mainstream values and attempt to install
  them in children
• working poor
• Generally involved in a church community
• Tend to be strict with children
• Respect authority
• Polite, cooperative

6
Street Families

• Lack consideration for others
• Superficial sense of family/community
• Disorganized
• Aggressive with children ( physical punishment)
• Children generally come up hard

7
Campaigning for Respect

• Children from street groups go to the streets
  to hang, stay out late
• Friends are the primary social bond
• Children from the decent families have curfews,
  taught to stay out of trouble
• Some parents will impose sanctions if the child
  is not aggressive enough
• Have to look capable of taking care of oneself

8
Self Image Based on Juice

• Presentation of self through possessions/body
  language
• Objects are important ? willing to possess things
  that require defending
• Taking possession from others gets higher respect
• Zero-Sum Quality ? the extent to which a person
  can raise himself up depends on ability to put
  another person down.
• Must be vigilant against transgressions or
  appearnace of transgressions

9
By Trial of Manhood

• Something valuable is at stake in every
  interaction
• Must have nerve ? throw the first punch, take
  anothers posessions, have no outward fear of
  dying

10
Girls on the Street

• Respect is over assessments of beauty,
  boyfriends, gossip
• May feel required to take up for friend who has
  been slandered
• Girls will rarely use guns
• Wont put life on line like boys

11
Going for Bad/Oppositional Culture

• Uncertain about how long they will live, so they
  live on the edge
• They appear to go for bad but hope they will
  never be tested
• Create oppositional culture to preserve
  themselves and their self-respect because they
  feel alienated from society
• A street oriented demeanor is a way to express
  BLACKNESS
• This demeanor is also often used by decent
  blacks

12
The Viscous Cycle
13
Explanations of Poverty

• Causes of poverty
• Theorists have accused poor of having little
  concern for future and preferring to live for
  the moment and engaging in self-defeating
  behavior, characterized the poor as fatalists,
  resigning themselves to a culture of poverty in
  which nothing can be done to change their
  economic outcomes. Culture of povertywhich
  passes from generation to generationpoor feel
  negative, inferior, passive, hopeless, and
  powerless.
• The blame the poor perspective is stereotypic
  and not applicable to all of underclass. Not only
  are most poor people able and willing to work
  hard, they do so when given chance. Real trouble
  has to do w/ problems as minimum wages, and lack
  of access to the education necessary for
  obtaining a better-paying job.

14
Effects of Poverty Restricted Opportunity

• Children who grow up in poverty suffer more
  persistent, frequent, and severe health problems
  than do children who grow up under better
  financial circumstances.
• Children raised in poverty tend to miss school
  more often because of illness. These children
  also have a much higher rate of accidents than do
  other children, and they are twice as likely to
  have impaired vision and hearing, iron deficiency
  anemia, and higher than normal levels of lead in
  blood, impairing brain function

15
Big Brother

• According to another theory, the poor would
  rather receive welfare payments than work in
  demeaning positions as maids or in fast-food
  restaurants. As a result of this view, the
  welfare system has come under increasing attack
  in recent years. What is the problem of rent
  control?
• Hint Government created underclasses and
  ghettos??

16
Explanations of Poverty

• Poor families experience much more stress than
  middle-class families. Besides financial
  uncertainty, these families are more likely to be
  exposed to series of negative events and bad
  luck, including illness, depression, eviction,
  job loss, criminal victimization, and family
  death. Parents who experience hard economic times
  may become excessively punitive and erratic,
  issuing demands backed by insults, threats, and
  corporal punishment.

17
Poverty continued.

• Sociologists have been particularly concerned
  about the effects of poverty on the black
  underclass, the increasing numbers of jobless,
  welfare-dependent African Americans trapped in
  inner-city ghettos. Many of the industries
  (textiles, auto, steel) that previously offered
  employment to the black working class have shut
  down, while newer industries have relocated to
  the suburbs. Because most urban jobs either
  require advanced education or pay minimum wage,
  unemployment rates for inner-city blacks are
  high.

18


Feminist Perspective on Poverty

• Significant increase in numbers of single women
  in poverty alone, primarily as single mothers. In
  last three decades proportion of poor families
  headed by women has grown to more than 50
  percent. This feminization of poverty has
  affected African-American women more than any
  other group.
• This feminization of poverty may be related to
  numerous changes in contemporary America.
  Increases in unwanted births, separations, and
  divorces have forced growing numbers of women to
  head poor households

19
Feminization of Poverty.

• Increases in divorced fathers avoiding child
  support coupled with reductions in welfare
  support have forced many of these women-headed
  households to join the ranks of the underclass.
  Further, because wives generally live longer than
  their husbands, growing numbers of elderly women
  must live in poverty.

20
Exercise 1

• The natural process of everyday labeling
• What are some things that we put labels or tags
  on?
• What labels do we embrace or reject

21
One view of all of this

• Personal respect is something we all desire
• Fighting as a way of maintaining respect has been
  a feature of several American subcultures (e.g.,
  rural South)
• Drugs and availability of guns has taken violence
  to a new level

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Effects on day-to-day life

• Increases risks to personal safety,especially for
  young men
• Increases confrontations between police and young
  men
• Contributes to racial profiling by police
• Creates stereotypes of inner city residents among
  those who live outside the inner city

23
Contrasting Life Styles within the Inner City

• Decent and Street Families
• Decent civilly disposed, socially conscious,
  and self-reliant
• Street inconsiderate, ignorant, desperate
• Achieving and maintaining respect
• Code-switching among decent kids
• Is code-switching necessary for safety and
  physical survival among decent kids?

24
Positive family role models within the inner city

• Decent daddy
• Works hard
• Supports his family
• Rules his household
• Protects his daughters
• Raises his sons to be like him
• Encourages other young people to exhibit these
  qualities

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Positive Role Models, continued

• Factors that undermined the role of the
  decent daddy
• Challenges from young blacks over how to confront
  prejudice and discrimination (Black Panthers to
  themes of Hip Hop)
• Rejection of white society by African Americans
  who are decent, who follow the rules

26
The Grandmother

• Important role in reality and in folklore
  roles
• Taking responsibility for children abandoned by
  their parents
• Asserting her moral authority for the good of the
  family
• Sometimes rearing children herself

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Challenges faced by current inner city
grandmothers

• Convincing young people that being decent and
  acting right will bring success
• Fewer and fewer women have the social capital
  (networks, respect in the community) that permit
  them to play this role

28
Wacquant, AJS (May 2002)

• Anderson replaces negative stereotypes of inner
  city residents with positive stereotypes of
  decent people trapped in a bad situation.
• Parochial, solely American view of urban poor
• close to his subjects with insufficient
  attention to larger sociological theoretical
  issues
• Mad scramble for accessible books on sexy topics
• Anderson is sexist

29
Overview of Anderson, 1-2, 5-6

• Most people in the inner city are decent people
  trying to make the most of a difficult situation
• Question Is Anderson replacing negative
  stereotypes with positive stereotypes?

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Andersons response

• The sociologists job is to challenge
  conventional wisdom (The Sociological
  Imagination)
• Ethnographic work, involving participant
  observation and personal interviews, gives one an
  in depth picture
• Most people, including young people in the inner
  city, would like to be decent people
• Respondents may be sexist but he is not

31
Overview, continued

• The social structure of the inner city (lack of
  opportunities, drugs, violence) and the culture
  of the inner city reinforce one another.
• Question How responsible are individuals in the
  inner city for their personal behavior in this
  difficult setting?