If you talk to Dr. Elijah Anderson, an urban ethnographer in Penn's Department of Sociology, it doesn't take long to notice his easy habit of punctuating the ends of occasional sentences with "you see what I'm saying?" or simply, "you see?" More than just holding forth on his subject matter, Anderson is just as concerned with confirming that his assertions have been correctly understood. In the natural flow of discussion and exposition, it's as if he needs to check in with his conversation partner: "Most of the people in these inner-city communities are 'decent' and trying to be, but there're not many rewards for being decent on the street, you see."

But if he is preoccupied with the success of communication, it's largely because of the what he is trying to communicate. Anderson writes about race in America. In the climate of guilt, anger, and confusion that roils around that subject, such an undertaking inevitably invites attack. Skittish as a street cat, Anderson proceeds with his research anyway. He documents and reports on what almost none of his readers and Ivy League students have ever experienced: what it means to be a member of the inner-city underclass and black. In a number of books and articles, he attempts to represent a complex and profoundly alienated subculture, which implies that he is trying to make us see something disturbingly alien to the experience of the mainstream culture most of us inhabit. "Good ethnography is part of a dialogue between classes," he explains. "It's opening up a line of communication between vastly different segments of society, trying to replace fear with understanding."

The prevailing individualist ideology makes it hard for us to see how social and economic structures, when fired in the cauldron of unequal race relations, can frustrate individual initiative and confound opportunity. In a society that views itself as the land of opportunity where individuals are held accountable for their economic status, this is a picture that's not easy to convey. Anderson keeps asking, "Do you see?" because he wants some reassurance that his efforts to explain seeing to those who have never experienced sight have met with some measure of success. Then it wouldn't matter that he had to take a few hits.

Many sociologists prefer library and office-chair research that sends oceans of data sluicing through a computer's circuitry and pours out a statistical printout-picture of society at the other end. Research for Anderson means "participant observation": a methodology that amounts to hanging out in inner-city ghettos and border neighborhoods, observing and talking to people, and taking copious field notes. He frequents street corners, public housing projects, schools, stores, laundromats, car washes, parks, barber shops, or just "the streets"–mostly in Chicago, DC, and in some of the poorest, most blighted neighborhoods in Philadelphia. "In some ways," he explains, "field work is not unlike what a journalist would do, except that I'm trying to develop a theory that allows people to understand what's driving this whole thing."

When the Guggenheim Foundation asked Anderson to help make sense of the seemingly senseless violence that regularly convulses the inner city–in his words, "why so many of these kids are hurting each other"–he had already put in years of field work. The May 1994 cover story of the Atlantic Monthly carried Anderson's essay, "The Code of the Streets," which lays bare the culture of threat, the "set of informal rules governing interpersonal public behavior" that sometimes ignites in mayhem and murder on the streets. (A fuller elaboration of that article will be published in the spring as a book bearing the same title.)

The magazine article resonated with many people's experiences. Inner-city school principals and teachers recognized in their hallways the attitudes and behaviors Anderson describes. Congressman Bobby Rush from Chicago, a former Black Panther, phoned him for permission to photocopy the article for distribution to all members of Congress. President Bill Clinton invited Anderson to the White House for a seminar that included Al Gore, Leon Panetta, and George Stephanopolous as well as a number of experts on issues pertaining to inner city youth and violence.

Anderson notes the "lost sense of security" that has overtaken the inner-city's decaying neighborhoods. "The inclination to violence springs from the circumstances of life among the ghetto poor," he writes. Although the community is full of "decent" families (as residents put it) who profess middle-class values, the pervasive despair of living walled in by inescapable poverty has spawned what Anderson calls an "oppositional culture." This "street" element deliberately opposes itself to the norms of mainstream society with a set of values that Anderson codifies in the code of the streets. Lawless and proudly so, the drug trade and gang life are ruled by the code. It is a life orientation informed by acquisitiveness, aggression, and cynicism. The two poles of value orientation, decent and street, socially organize the community, but the aggressive street-oriented minority dominates the public spaces.

Chief among the circumstances that give rise to the code is the extreme isolation of the black ghetto, which throws its inhabitants back upon their own resources. "The code of the streets is actually a cultural adaptation to a profound lack of faith in the police and judicial system," writes Anderson. "The police are most often seen as representing the dominant white society and not caring to protect inner-city residents."

In some of the poorest communities, if the police are called, they may not come, or if the police come, they are often late and are likely to mistreat the people who called them. Although there are certainly ranks of police officers with integrity, this is a common experience reported to Anderson in his field work and is the source of deep distrust that causes residents to feel the need to take extraordinary measures to protect themselves. "If the police have the reputation for not giving you and your community respect," he points out, "you can't count on them to be responsible for you. The code of the streets emerges where the influence of the police ends and personal responsibility for one's safety is felt to begin."

Where potential danger is encountered on a daily basis, it is necessary for ghetto residents, whether decent or street, to "go for bad"–to adopt a facade aimed at deterring aggression. The self-presentation includes characteristic facial expressions, gait, and language as well as clothes and accessories that communicate unmistakably a predisposition to violence. The code is a social mechanism that holds the violence in check. It is possible to walk the streets and negotiate the neighborhoods of the inner city; it's not total anarchy with people being stabbed or shot all the time. The tenuous order brought about by the code seems not unlike the balance-of-power maneuverings of realpolitik, where political gestures are crafted to "send a message" and stability is founded upon raw-power nuclear strategies like Mutual Assured Destruction. "You let people know," says Anderson, "in no uncertain terms, that if you mess with me or mine, there'll be consequences–not from the police, not from the white man, but from me. It's like an undercurrent. This is what keeps things stable."

The chronic family breakdown and social catastrophe unsettling black communities inside the ghetto imparts to children an important lesson of the code: you have to fight for your place in an unkind world. Growing up, many inner-city children, particularly those with desperate home lives, learn by example to solve problems by yelling and hitting. From their peers on the street, they learn how to fight. Many parents impose sanctions on children who are not sufficiently aggressive. In an environment where being, or at least appearing, tough is a prerequisite for survival, parents who received such lessons as children need little justification in passing them on. By the time they are teenagers, most youths have internalized the code.

Lanky and fit looking, Anderson has a slow style of speaking and a voice as smooth as silken gravel. A mustache and growth of stubble on his chin contrasts smartly with his clean shaven head. Throughout the interview, he tapped on the table top with a piece of folded paper.

At the heart of the code is respect–or "juice." To outsiders, it seems an arcane and incomprehensible PR campaign over trifles; to those who reside where the code holds sway, being treated "right" can mean the difference between life and death. If a young man is assaulted, he must salvage his self-respect and the respect of his "running buddies" by avenging himself, or else risk being "moved on" by others. Anderson writes: "To maintain his honor, he must show he is not someone to be 'messed with' or 'dissed.' In general, the person must 'keep himself straight' by managing his position of respect among others; this involves in part his self-image, which is shaped by what he thinks others are thinking of him in relation to his peers."

Possessions play an important part in establishing respect. The wearing of fashionable jackets, sneakers, and gold jewelry that require defending amounts to a show of nerve that commands respect. To seize these items from another bestows upon them the status of a trophy; they become a sign that one has the nerve to "dis" another, thus enhancing the prestige of the aggressor. To many, it is acceptable to risk dying over the principle of respect, and those not afraid of death have few compunctions about taking the life of another when the situation calls for it.

The prospect of imprisonment can even enhance one's reputation on the street. As a result, the wider society loses any hope of influencing those who feel they have no stake in it. These individuals are the "baddest dudes." Many no longer even try to negotiate the mainstream system. But, notes Anderson, their often cavalier attitude towards death implies a very limited view of life. He draws attention to the zero-sum quality of these transactions in respect. "The extent to which one person can raise himself up depends on his ability to put another person down. This underscores the alienation that permeates the inner-city ghetto community. There is a generalized sense that very little respect is to be had, and therefore everyone competes to get what affirmation he can of the little that is available."

Anderson lays out the legacy of white supremacy that underlies the predicament of poor, inner-city blacks. "The attitudes of the wider society are deeply implicated in the code of the streets," he says. "There's serious resistance to full incorporation of black people. Ironically, many of the black people in this society are old Americans: their ancestors were brought here over 200 years ago. The slave trade became illegal in 1808. Many of the descendants of these old Americans are living in ghettos like Mantua [in West Philadelphia] and North Philadelphia. Normally, the mobility process would favor people just by their being in this country. When the system is receptive, people usually move up. That's happened for so many of the white counterparts of slaves' descendants: they've not been ghettoized; they're not second-class citizens; they're not members of the underclass."

Anderson's voice remains modulated and detached, but the table tapping has become sharper, quicker, more pointed. "So many of these old Americans are members of the underclass. How do we straighten that out in our minds? See what I'm sayin'?"

His argument is that skin color has long been a barrier to opportunity, despite recent progress that has led to the establishment of a black middle class. It's not enough to emancipate a race of people who've been held in bondage. The racist sensibilities that enslaved them in the first place must also be reckoned with. The values and attitudes of the former slave owners continue to rule social relations, either in the form of naked prejudice or as institutions infected with economic and social structures that put African Americans at an extreme disadvantage. The interaction of racism and shifting market forces that have driven decent-paying jobs out of the city while leaving blacks trapped there, have yielded a "twoness" in American society whose boundary is not easily crossed.

"The black underclass is full of people the system has given up on," remarks Anderson, "telling them that they're not worthwhile. What this does is set up in the person a need to tell everybody, 'The wider society is wrong about me.' And the surest way to make that claim is by demanding respect. And what you want to do in trying to make the claim that the wider society is wrong about you is to disabuse people of that every chance you get. It sets up a craving for respect that is above and beyond the simple need to keep oneself safe and defended. It's really the other side of racism in a sense. If you're victimized by society all the time, it messes with your self-esteem. And so to deal with that, you exaggerate the other side. You see what I'm saying?"

As you move away from the most impoverished and disenfranchised communities of the black ghetto, the code of the streets diminishes in its force. It feeds on isolated pockets of poverty. This, according to Anderson, would seem to argue for more and better economic opportunity and policies to combat the isolation that characterizes these neighborhoods.

"I think it's important for the policy makers and others who influence policy to have an accurate account of what's going on," says Anderson. "And with that account, presumably things can be changed for the better. I'm not so naive as to believe that just because we know things, virtue will follow, but I think it's important as a scholar to represent this aspect of the world accurately. That's all I can do, you see. Then responsible elements of society can't look back on the situation and say, 'Well, we didn't know.'"