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Man on the Street
How a sharecropper’s son deciphered the code of the city.
January/February 2008
by Julia M. Klein
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.
Strolling through Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market, a neon-lit collage of food stands, specialty shops, and ethnic restaurants, Elijah Anderson passes two Amish merchants in white bonnets and a swirl of conventioneers, tourists, and grocery shoppers. Casually dapper in blue jeans and a navy blue sweater and corduroy jacket, he strides past Formica tables, where groups are lunching on sushi, hoagies, and enchiladas, en route to his favorite shoe shine stand.
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Elijah Anderson’s graduate seminar is called “Urban Ethnography.” |
An old friend shows up unexpectedly and sits down beside him to catch up on news and gossip. The friend is white; Anderson is black. Their impromptu chat is a microcosm of market etiquette, where interracial amity is business as usual. A sociologist skilled at compressing complex interactions into pithy catch phrases, Anderson dubbed the Reading Terminal a “cosmopolitan canopy” in an influential 2004 article that he is now expanding into a book.
The canopy, Anderson explains, is a refuge from the ethnocentric streets, an oasis of civility “where people can practice being cosmopolitan.” Here people of all backgrounds do “folk ethnography,” he says, observing and reporting on the behavior of those around them—a less structured, less scientific version of Anderson’s own metier. Places like the Reading Terminal Market “may well be our salvation as an increasingly diverse society,” he says.
The Reading Terminal stop is part of a two-day trip to Philadelphia that the 64-year-old Anderson is hosting for his first-ever class at Yale, a graduate seminar called “Urban Ethnography.” (He also is teaching “Urban Sociology” to undergraduates.) The aim is to show his grad students, many already embarked on their own ethnographies, the sites where he—and one of his heroes, the sociologist W. E. B. DuBois—did their studies.
So closely is Anderson associated with Philadelphia, and especially its inner-city neighborhoods, that many of his colleagues believed it would be impossible to lure him away from his post at the University of Pennsylvania. But this past May, Anderson agreed to become Yale’s William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Sociology. Yale had, in fact, been pursuing Anderson since 1993. The former vice president of the American Sociological Association had turned down three offers, including one in the fall of 2006. When he finally said yes, “it was a shock even to me,” jokes Anderson, whose books include A Place on the Corner (1976); Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (1990); and Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999). In April, the University of Pennsylvania Press will publish Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black and Male, a volume of essays he’s editing that grew out of a 2006 symposium he organized at Penn.
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Anderson’s hiring was a big coup for Yale. |
Anderson’s hiring was a big coup for Yale. “It’s really very straightforward,” says Karl Ulrich Mayer, chair of Yale’s Department of Sociology. “He’s probably the most important urban ethnographer in the country, probably together with Mitch Duneier of Princeton.” Yale sociology ranked only 19th in faculty quality in the most recent National Research Council survey, published in 1995. And until now, the department has lacked an authority on race and urban communities—“clearly a major deficit,” Mayer says, given that race remains “one of most important and problematic realities in this country.”
For his part, Duneier calls Anderson “perhaps the most important figure to have worked in the field of urban ethnography since DuBois” and “a consummate micro-sociologist,” with “an ability to make deep sense of the smallest gestures, winks, nods, pauses, and inflections in the context of the larger social order.” Anderson is also “a genius at articulating concepts which have been useful to other scholars in explaining the life ways of the inner city,” Duneier says. “Ideas such as 'master status,' 'code of the street,' and 'streetwise,' among many others, have become part of the vocabulary of sociology.”
With a popular as well as academic audience, Anderson arguably has become, as W. H. Auden famously wrote of Freud, “a whole climate of opinion.” When President Clinton wanted advice on stemming urban violence, Anderson was among a select group of experts summoned to the White House. Code of the Street is used in numerous college courses. But the very ubiquity of his ideas may have played a role in his departure from Penn, where he was embroiled in a lingering controversy over a colleague’s book on poor, single mothers that he maintains leaned heavily, and without sufficient attribution, on his work.
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Even an academic star is not insulated from the injuries of race in America. |
The dispute, which was supposed to have been settled by a private agreement, is complicated, and sociologists nationwide have clashed over the particulars. While the 2005 agreement was never implemented, Anderson, though not pleased, says he is moving on. “It’s long behind me,” he says. “I’m looking to new projects.” Yet the imbroglio involved the very issues of race and respect and reputation he explicates so cogently in Code of the Street. Some might think that an academic star like Anderson would be insulated from the injuries of race in America. They would be wrong.
It is surely a long way from Anderson’s birthplace in the desperately poor, racially segregated Mississippi Delta to his spacious Prospect Street office on the northern end of Yale’s campus, with its picture windows, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, and unpacked boxes of books. On one wall hangs a photograph of Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950), a prominent black historian and one of Anderson’s role models. His desk is adorned with family snapshots: his wife, Nancy, a writer; his son, Luke, 26, now working on curriculum development for Chicago schools; and his daughter, Caitlin, 28, teaching English in Ecuador.
For all his exceptionality, Anderson’s own background encapsulates one major strand of 20th-century black history. Like many in their generation, his parents joined what has been called the Great Migration, fleeing rural Southern poverty in search of better jobs.
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Anderson’s parents were Southern sharecroppers. |
When Anderson was born in 1943, the middle child in a family of five, his grandmother was the midwife. His parents were sharecroppers, he says, “picking cotton, chopping cotton, living off the land.” But Anderson’s father, Leighton, drove a truck in the Army infantry during World War II, and the experience changed him forever. Happy to see American soldiers, “the British were so deferential and respectful,” Anderson remembers his father saying. “As a black person who was used to the South, this was an amazing thing. They treated him so well that he used to tell me he almost didn’t come back.”
Fortunately, opportunity beckoned in the industrial Midwest, in South Bend, Indiana, where two of Anderson’s uncles had already settled. With only a fourth-grade education, Anderson’s father landed a well-paid job at a Studebaker automobile factory. (When Anderson talks about deindustrialization, he sometimes compares his father’s position with the grim employment prospects of uneducated black men today.) Anderson’s mother, Carrie, worked as a domestic at first, and later owned a grocery store in the black part of town.
Anderson’s precocity was soon apparent. “He wanted to answer all the questions. He was always ready,” recalls Edward Myers, Anderson’s fourth- and fifth-grade teacher at a predominantly black elementary school. Myers also remembers Anderson’s dry sense of humor. During a discussion of religion, when the teacher asked who in the class wanted to go to heaven, only Elijah failed to raise his hand. As Myers recalls the incident: “I said, ‘Don’t you want to go to heaven when you die?’ He said, ‘Yes—but not with this bunch.’”
Anderson, who still cuts a formidably athletic figure, ran track and played football and basketball. And he made the South Bend streets his own. Indulging both his curiosity and an independent streak, “I had the run of the city at an early age,” he says. “I was the kind of a kid who just loved the streets.” At age ten, Anderson was a paperboy, selling newspapers; a year later, he was setting pins in a downtown bowling alley.
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“When I was 12, I decided to get a real job.” |
“When I was 12,” he says, “I decided to get a real job. So I went around to all the merchants in South Bend and canvassed them for jobs, and Mr. Forbes, the typewriter store owner, hired me. He just said, ‘What do you do?’ I said, ‘I can do whatever these other boys do.’” So, after school and on Saturdays, for 50 cents an hour, Anderson emptied wastebaskets, washed windows, mopped floors, and learned to fix typewriters.
At Indiana University, Anderson majored in sociology and minored in psychology and economics. For graduate school, the University of Chicago was a natural choice. Anderson later followed one of his mentors, Howard Becker, to Northwestern, where he completed his doctorate. To this day he considers himself an acolyte of the famed Chicago School of sociology, which emphasizes urban sociology and ethnography.
Gerald D. Suttles, author of The Social Order of the Slum (1968) and one of Anderson’s teachers at Chicago, remembers his student’s obsession with Elliott Liebow’s Talley’s Corner (1967), an account of black street-corner life. While Suttles usually discouraged students from undertaking fieldwork their first year, Anderson was “so enthusiastic and so talkative,” he says, “that I couldn’t resist him. He was kind of unstoppable.”
Anderson began hanging out at a liquor store and bar on Chicago’s South Side. He called the place, which reminded him of his father and uncles' old haunts, “Jelly's” in his writings. With the help of a janitor who became his friend and mentor, and his own meticulous field notes, Anderson investigated social identity and status distinctions within Jelly’s fluid social group, whose members defined themselves as “regulars,” “hoodlums,” or “wineheads.”
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A Place on the Corner started Anderson’s career off with a bang. |
“When you do this work it’s a function to some extent of your own background, what you bring to it,” Anderson says. “So, for me, the issue seemed to be status and how these men came together again and again, and made and remade their local stratification system. That’s what the book deals with, that’s what it illuminates—not just for these black men, but for people more generally.” A Place on the Corner, which evolved from his doctoral dissertation, started his career off with a bang. William Julius Wilson, director of the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program at Harvard University, calls it “a classic work of urban ethnography.”
Anderson’s first teaching job was at prestigious Swarthmore College, outside Philadelphia. But Penn offered the attractive mix of an urban location and a graduate program. Renee Fox, Penn’s sociology department chair at the time, recruited him. At the time, there was, “not untypically, no person of color in the department,” Fox says, “and very few persons of African American background throughout the university.” Choosing her words carefully, she adds: “Sociologists are oriented to being sensitive to ethnicity and social class and problems of prejudice and discrimination. We study these things. But it took us a long time to invite Eli to become a junior member of our faculty.”
Anderson and his future wife made their home near Penn, in Powelton Village, and he quickly turned his curious eye on his neighbors. While ethnographers traditionally have adopted the role of the “participant observer,” Anderson says he always has tried to go beyond that—to be an “observing participant,” who, through time and proximity, learns a setting “so well that it becomes second nature.”
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Streetwise is about boundaries and the tensions that erupt there. |
Like A Place on the Corner, Streetwise is about boundaries and the tensions that erupt there—in this case, between Powelton Village (“the Village”) and the ghetto neighborhood of Mantua (“Northton”). “The book, in a way, is really all about that border, about how do people live in this kind of community that is supposed to be so dangerous,” he says. “Well, they become streetwise.” The book won the 1991 Robert E. Park Prize, an American Sociological Association award for urban sociology.
In Streetwise, Anderson introduced the dichotomy of “decent” and “street,” labels borrowed once again from the people he was studying. “Most people are decent and trying to be decent,” says Anderson. It’s a phrase he repeats like a mantra. “If it were not that way,” he says, “it would be complete chaos.”
But, as he would show in Code of the Street, which describes the further deterioration of Philadelphia’s inner-city neighborhoods as a result of the drug trade and the loss of manufacturing jobs, “the decent people are under pressure, because decency won’t get you much on the street. So if you’re going to be decent all the time you become vulnerable. So you have to code-switch and become street, which allows other people to treat you with a certain respect. Because if you’re street, you have the right to get ignorant, so to speak—you can fight back, you can resort to violence.”
As Anderson explains, the code has its benefits : “The code of the street is actually a cultural adaptation to a profound lack of faith in the police and the judicial system—and in others who would champion one’s personal security. … The code of the street thus emerges where the influence of the police ends and where personal responsibility for one’s safety is felt to begin.” Anderson brings to life the environment in which the code dominates, and the costumes and customs that telegraph status: “Now and again a young boy appears, dressed in an expensive athletic suit and white sneakers (usually new; some boys have four or five pair).” Other boys “profile or represent, striking stylized poses, almost always dressed in expensive clothes that belie their unemployed status” and “lead others to the easy conclusion that they 'clock' (work) in the drug trade.”
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Anderson brings to life the costumes and customs that telegraph status. |
To acquire the details that bring his narratives alive, Anderson has always relied on his own ability to code-switch—“to speak the language of the community and the language of the wider society,” each at the appropriate time. “Growing up,” he says, “I would speak one language at home and one language at school, and it’s something that followed me throughout.”
Anderson and his wife are now living in an apartment in downtown New Haven, near where the campus and the community meet. But he continues to head his Philadelphia Ethnography Project and commute occasionally to his longtime hometown, where on a recent morning he leads his Yale graduate seminar on a sociological tour.
Following the route traced in the opening pages of Code of the Street, Anderson drives south along Germantown Avenue, from quaint, prosperous, and traditionally WASP Chestnut Hill—where he and his family moved in 1996—to middle-class, integrated Mount Airy, and then to Germantown, now predominantly black and poor. The tour continues through the ghetto of North Philadelphia, whose trash-strewn lots and abandoned houses are occasionally relieved by colorful murals. “I’ve taken students on this trip,” says Anderson, “and they’ve said, ‘Is this America?’”
“You can seen how there’s been this disinvestment,” he says in his soft rumble as he drives through Germantown. “This is the ’hood, the serious ’hood. On Saturdays, in the summertime and springtime, this whole area is just jumping with activity: fancy cars, people holding up traffic, carrying on conversations, styling, wearing their fancy clothes, their T-shirts, their gold.” Here, he says, the police may not come if you call, and “the code of the street prevails.” Rufus Thomas, 43, a camp supervisor for Easter Seals, waiting for a bus outside a Burger King, explains the code this way: “If you look like you’re soft or act like you’re soft, they will take advantage of you.”
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“It’s a struggle for black academics to really take their place at the table.” |
That afternoon, sitting in the pews of historic Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in the heart of the territory DuBois explored, Anderson tells his class: “You can come to any number of grad programs in sociology and never hear about DuBois, and part of that is because his work was marginalized. His work was obscured by people who pushed him aside. And I think that has affected me in some ways. It’s a struggle for black academics to really take their place at the table because people don’t appreciate the contributions of black scholars always. And it’s got to be changed.”
Over the years, Anderson says, he has turned down offers not only from Yale, but from Amherst College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Virginia, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of California at Santa Cruz, among others. Anderson “wanted to stay at Penn,” says Harold J. Bershady, an emeritus sociology professor at Penn. “He was well established here.” And if Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas had not written Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage (2005), he would very likely have remained in Philadelphia for the rest of his career.
From the first time he heard Edin, then an associate professor of sociology at Penn, present her findings, Anderson says he heard echoes of his own work on sexual relationships in the ghetto. In both a 1989 article and his two most recent books, Anderson has painted a portrait of the conflicting interests of inner-city teenagers. Young men, he says, try to burnish their status by boasting of their sexual conquests, with babies serving as proof of their claims. Meanwhile, their female partners dream of marriage, families, and economic security. This clash, which he sums up as “the game and the dream,” is responsible, he suggests, for the current epidemic of unmarried mothers and intermittently involved fathers.
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“I never called it plagiarism. I always tried to be collegial about it.” |
Edin and Kefalas, who interviewed black, white, and Hispanic women of varying ages in eight Philadelphia-area neighborhoods, reach different conclusions. They argue that poor women often explicitly choose motherhood because it imbues their lives with meaning. At the same time, they say, the women may reject marriage to their sexual partners because they associate the institution with a commitment they’re not ready to make and a level of prosperity neither they nor their partners have attained. While their focus is on women and Anderson’s on men, and they dispute his view that poor women seek marriage and economic dependence, they do validate some of his other findings—such as the women’s belief in fate and the men’s frequent denial of paternity. And not all the points of agreement are footnoted.
“I never called it plagiarism,” says Anderson, who later released a list of 22 textual similarities in their books. “I always tried to be collegial about it.” Over lunch at Au Bon Pain, he tried to settle the matter privately with Edin. According to Anderson, “She said, ‘I’ll take care of it—it’s an oversight.’” In a conciliatory e-mail to Anderson, she called their talk “extraordinarily helpful” and promised to reread his work and “try to keep a tally of where additional citations should go.”
Instead, Edin started fighting back, taking her case to department chair Paul D. Allison and enlisting support from other colleagues. In response, Anderson held firm, telling Allison: “My work has got to be acknowledged. It cannot be marginalized, as has happened with so many black scholars in the past.”
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“My work cannot be marginalized, as has happened with so many black scholars in the past.” |
Edin has never spoken publicly about the fracas. But she referred questions to Frank F. Furstenberg, Zellerbach Family Professor of Sociology at Penn, who has written a memo dismissing Anderson’s charges as overblown. “I pointed out that most of what both he and Kathy have said has been in the literature since basically the beginning of the twentieth century,” says Furstenberg, whose most recent book is Destinies of the Disadvantaged: The Politics of Teen Childbearing (2007). “I said [to Anderson], ‘You’re making a mistake. You didn’t heavily cite this material, and neither has Kathy. You basically did the same thing—which was rediscover parts of it, and make your own original contribution.’”
Nevertheless, Anderson and Edin did finally sit down with a mediator—Princeton’s Duneier, a friend of both. On June 27, 2005, Edin, Kefalas, and Anderson signed an eight-point agreement mandating additional references to Anderson’s work in text and footnotes of future editions of Promises I Can Keep. In return, all parties were to “refrain from disparaging one another professionally” and keep the terms of the agreement confidential. Penn offered the University of California Press $5,000 to cover the cost of the changes.
That might have been the end of it. Instead, in October, the dispute escalated into a media controversy after Bershady sent an e-mail to his Penn sociology colleagues accusing the two women of “conceptual plagiarism.” He says he was responding to concerns expressed to him that summer at the American Sociological Association and was seeking to quell “a mounting public scandal that, I believed, they needed to address quickly, decisively and above all, openly.” Within the department, “what was happening was denial—denial of any wrongdoing on her part,” Bershady says. “It became very quickly partisan, and then it became a women’s issue versus a black issue, and that’s what I wanted to stop.”
But the Bershady e-mail was leaked to the press, and several prominent sociologists responded with a letter calling his charge “absurd.” Some 110 other graduate students and professors, many of them African American, rose to Anderson’s defense. “We do not believe that such dismissive language would have been used if the author of the original work was a White male,” they wrote. And Anderson weighed in with his own views, stating that “Promises exhibits enough unacknowledged similarity to Code that it constitutes an unfair use of another’s scholarship.”
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The epilogue satisfied no one, least of all Anderson. |
The epilogue satisfied no one, least of all Anderson. Edin was promoted to full professor at Penn, but left to become a professor of public policy and management at Harvard. Her book, touted on the cover by Harvard’s Wilson as “the most important study ever written on motherhood and marriage among low-income urban women,” won an American Sociological Association prize. And the promised editorial changes were never made. Furstenberg justifies that reversal by saying that Anderson’s public comments had violated the agreement, a view Anderson dismisses. “I put it in terms of errors and sloppiness,” he says. “That was not disparaging somebody. If you make an error, it’s not to say you’re a bad person. If you make an error and agree to correct it, you should correct it.” In the end, he says, “what was academic, and should have remained so, became political and out of control. It was an unfortunate series of events.”
But a fortunate one for Yale, whose offer he now accepted.
“What should be emphasized,” says Fox, “is what an outstanding sociologist [Anderson] is. The reason why he left is touchy. I’m very admiring of Yale for having ignored all this. They wanted Elijah, period. They hung in there. They basically ignored what they should have ignored.”
Mayer, the Yale sociology department chair, says simply: “I always believed it would be a good thing for him to make a change.”
Anderson, who knows Philadelphia so intimately, is still learning his way around New Haven. But he clearly relishes the opportunity to found a New Haven Ethnography Project here. He is organizing an ethnography conference at Yale in April, bringing together several generations of the field, including his teachers and students. New Haven is “sort of a miniature New York,” he says, as we drive west, through areas where prosperity butts up against poverty. “In some ways, it’s got all the issues, all the problems of a big city, right here—writ small. And they’re therefore somewhat manageable. At the same time, you’ve got the same kind of desperation. You’ve got mayhem and murder in the inner city, where people have no hope.”
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New Haven, Anderson says, doesn’t have many places that function as cosmopolitan canopies. |
New Haven, Anderson says, doesn’t have many places that function as cosmopolitan canopies. He thinks the city could use their educating influence, and he hopes policymakers will pay attention. For his work here he will examine, among other things, the economic and social impact of recent immigration—how, for instance, the newly arrived Latinos and Asians and long-established African American communities are sometimes learning, and sometimes failing, to get along. He’ll use the same techniques he has always used in new settings: “I begin to observe the life around me. I begin to look at race relations, begin to look at immigrants and natives, and I begin to do the folk ethnography that we all do. I’m not that different from the ordinary person.
“It’s just that I try to be more systematic and tell truths that sometimes I don’t agree with, that I don’t necessarily embrace. But you have to tell the truth,” he says. “Otherwise, why do the work?”  |
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