Code of the Street

Anderson pivots to the connections between street crime, drugs, and violence. He cites The Philadelphia Negro, an 1899 work by W.E.B. Du Bois, as fundamental to understanding the current reality of Black families in the inner city. Du Bois’s central argument is that racial stereotyping eventually pushes inner-city Black families to a point of economic inviability, which keeps these families stuck in the cycle of poverty. Alienated from the economic opportunities of mainstream society, young Black people often turn to the underground economy, which revolves most prevalently around the drug trade. As a collateral effect of the drug trade, turf wars often emerge, which then increases violence within the community. In addition to the drug trade, robberies also emerge as a common aspect of life in the inner city. As all of these factors accumulate, Anderson argues that “violence comes to regulate life in the drug-infested neighborhoods and the putative neighborhood leaders are increasingly the people who control the violence” (134). Consequently, violence becomes normalized in the community, to the point where violent deaths also become a common occurrence.

Throughout this chapter, Anderson develops two major topics. First, in his reference to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, he points to the pervasive Danger of Racial Stereotypes. Du Bois’s work, published 100 years before Code of the Street, points to the systemic damage caused by stereotyping. Du Bois identifies that the foundational aspect of Black poverty in the inner city is rooted in “race prejudice, ethnic competition, and a consequent black exclusion and inability to participate in mainstream society, all in the context of white supremacy” (108). While Du Bois was writing in 1899 and therefore from a completely different political context—the United States had abolished slavery only 34 years earlier and the country was still in the midst of Reconstruction, a reimagining of the nation post-slavery—it is telling that the problems he articulated remain relevant on the cusp of the 21st century. This would indicate that while the US did restructure after the Civil War, Reconstruction failed to seriously contend with the structural inequality that resulted from Black people’s enslavement.

Another key theme in this chapter is The Hopelessness of Poverty, which forces countless young Black people into the underground economy of the drug trade or sex work. This comes with an implicit association with criminal consequences or even violent death. Counter to mainstream racist arguments that blamed criminality on individual moral failings, such as those put forward in the 1965 Moynihan Report, which stated that “the widespread family disorganization among Negroes has resulted from the failure of the father to play the role in family life required by American society” (Moynihan, Daniel P. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. 1965), Anderson asserts that participation in the underground economy is often the only option available to young Black people in the inner city. As employment opportunities in the mainstream become increasingly scarce, the underground economy often presents itself as the only viable pathway for survival.