Broken streets, broken lives. - Review - book review

Public Interest, Spring, 2000 by John J. Diiulio

DESPITE the dawn of political correctness, we have come along and welcome way from the days when Daniel Patrick Moynihan was excoriated as a racist and sexist for suggesting in a 1965 U.S. Department of Labor report that the rise of the female-headed "Negro family" was a burgeoning threat to black socioeconomic progress. We have even advanced from the not-too-distant days a decade ago when, having written in this journal on inner-city crime, I was scolded by liberal academic colleagues for suggesting that poor but decent blacks wanted the "truly deviant" criminals in their neighborhoods to be incarcerated.

Elijah Anderson's superb Philadelphia-focused ethnography of "the nature of public life in the inner-city ghetto" is further proof that, even on the academic Left, the era of truthful discourse about contemporary black urban life may well be here to stay. "Of all the problems besetting the poor inner--city black community," he advises in Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City, [ ] "none is more pressing than that of interpersonal violence and aggression."

None indeed. In the mid 1990s, black males aged 14 to 24 were 1 percent of the population but 17 percent of the homicide victims and 30 percent of the homicide perpetrators. Since 1993, black homicide victimization rates have fallen by over 40 percent, but no big city has yet resolved the crisis of violence by and against young black males. Nationally, during the first half of 1999, murders in cities of more than a million residents rose by 1 percent. By the year 2006, America will be home to over 20 million teenagers of all races, the largest teen cohort since 1980, and the largest cohort of minority teens ever. Many risk factors that solid empirical research has consistently found to be associated with predatory street criminality have abated hardly at all. For example, boys raised in mother-only homes are about twice as likely as otherwise comparable boys to commit crimes that lead to imprisonment. About 28 percent of all children, and 70 percent of black children, who will turn 16 in 2006 were born to un wed mothers.

Anderson quotes one person in his study as follows: "You go up to Graterford (the state maximum-security prison in Philadelphia), 90 percent in that penitentiary are black." True, and no juveniles are more likely to experience child maltreatment and go on to commit or suffer extreme acts of violence than the offspring of imprisoned low-income minority males. No one knows how many brutalized inner-city boys have fathers behind bars, but we do know that, on any given day in 1998, about 1.1 million children under age 18, at least a third of them black, had a father in state prison. Thus a recent Morehouse College statement on father absence among blacks pled the need to monitor, mentor, and minister to the children, youth, and families of imprisoned inner-city black men.

THE tragic alternative is to forsake these children to what Anderson terms the "code of the street," the rules, rites, and rituals that regulate a self-destructive black urban street subculture. In this culture, hair-trigger violence is often a behavioral norm, and even cold-blooded murder can be considered morally mandated if one has not been "granted one's 'props' (or proper due) or the deference one deserves." To violate the code, wittingly or not, is to risk a severe beating or sudden death. Thus, in certain predominantly black sections of Philadelphia, knowledge of the code "is literally necessary for operating in public." That is why even many inner-city black parents with "a decency orientation," who reject outright "the values of the code," nonetheless "encourage their children's familiarity with it in order to enable them to negotiate the inner-city environment."

What Anderson poignantly describes as "the dilemma of the decent kid" is that familiarity with the code (averting stares, avoiding fights) often breeds self-contempt. "Young people who project decency," he notes, "are generally not given much respect on the streets." Typically, poor black inner-city kids who simply want to do well in school, attend proms, go to church, and work toward a better life in the future come to feel that they "must do more than make peace with the street group ... they must get cool with the people who dominate the public spaces." For decent black inner-city kids, seeking help or protection from nonparental neighborhood adults is not only uncool but increasingly impossible. As Anderson explains, into the 1970s, "old heads"--street savvy inner-city black men--articulated and enforced the code in ways that, while not preventing murder and mayhem in the community, generally kept the violence in check and away from decent families, Some old heads became "decent daddies," the hard-work ing, "principled and moral" black men who not only raised their own sons responsibly but served as surrogate fathers to "young men on street corners." The decent daddies knew that racism was a reality, but they were "intolerant of excuses," had little patience with men who failed "to meet their responsibilities as fathers or husbands," and held "individuals, not the system," responsible for social ills.