Well, Ed, find yourself a window. As demands for gun control and stiffer sentences escalate, author and sociologist Elijah Anderson is Mr. Root Cause himself. A University of Pennsylvania professor, Anderson has labored for decades in the confined world of university presses. Now his sharp-edged and disturbing explorations of the ghetto’s psyche are gaining attention in the current debate over crime and welfare, even from conservatives who might scorn his conclusions. While others condemn “victimization” thinking and call for ending welfare, Anderson blames the economy and racism for illegitimacy and crime. Create jobs for the poor, he argues, and you’ll help break the “vicious cycle” of hopelessness and alienation-which produces the violence racking the cities.
His views sound almost old-fashioned these days-too softheaded, you might say-but they offer a compelling counterpoint to those arguing for the quick fix. Anderson practices what’s known as the Chicago School of sociology. Instead of relying on sanitized statistics, Anderson dissects behavior the old-fashioned way-by observing. Journalist Nicholas Lemann, who writes on poverty issues, calls him one of the few prominent “street sociologists” today. In the 1970s Anderson practically lived for three years at Jelly’s, a bar and liquor store in Chicago. His observations produced “A Place on the Corner,” a classic in the ethnography of the black ghetto. He later studied two Philadelphia neighborhoods and in 1992 wrote “Streetwise,” which described the emergence of alienated young blacks as ghetto role models.
His latest writing, in The Atlantic Monthly, deconstructs how and why many inner-city residents fall into a world of drive-by shootings and seemingly unprovoked crime. Frustrated by the lack of jobs and desperately searching for a self-image, the ghetto poor organize their fives into an “oppositional culture,” governed by what Anderson calls the “code of the streets.” At the heart of this code is a pathological reverence for respect. The message youth receive from parents and friends: “Watch your back. If somebody messes with you, you got to pay them back. If someone disses you, you got to straighten them out.”
The craving for respect, which turns into a thin-skinned quest to prove “manhood,” inevitably leads to violence. While others may walk away from a slight, street youths are required under the code to show their “nerve”-by pulling a trigger or throwing a punch. “Many feel that it is acceptable to risk dying over the principle of respect,” says Anderson. “In fact, among the hardcore street-oriented, the clear risk of violent death may be preferable to being ‘dissed’ by another.” It is also assumed that everyone understands the code. So if a victim of a mugging responds “wrong” according to the code-by, for instance, maintaining eye contact too long-the perpetrator “may feel justified even in killing him.”
The residents who don’t subscribe to this code-most don’t-are what the street defines as “decent” people. They tend to have jobs and share middle-class values. Anderson’s own story illuminates this. Born in the Mississippi delta to a family of sharecroppers, Anderson moved to Indiana with his family in the 1940s. He had a stable two-parent family, and his father was able to get a factory job with Studebaker paying about $5,000 a year. The equivalent wage today, he says, is about $33,000-but few fourth-grade dropouts, as his father was, can find such pay in an economy that has lost millions of manufacturing jobs.
Anderson argues that the paucity of such jobs is responsible for urban ills, beginning with illegitimacy. Unable to financially support a family, many young men choose to wield their sexual prowess as evidence of manhood-leaving behind babies often doomed to troubled lives themselves. Conservatives like Charles Murray cite Anderson’s picture of sexual wantonness to argue for eliminating welfare, an idea gaining adherents among politicians. But Anderson rejects that conclusion. He contends that young blacks don’t make babies simply to get a welfare check; ending welfare would only leave inner-city residents poorer and wouldn’t greatly reduce illegitimacy.
Anderson’s insights are most valuable as a description of the urban environment. He’s weaker in prescribing the medicine. He goes lightly on personal responsibility and how to create more jobs (he calls for government programs). But as Congress studies the Clinton crime bill and welfare-reform proposals, Anderson’s voice tilts the debate back toward the root causes.
