On the other hand, many are excluded from the process and even driven out by it. Some of those people may indeed be undesirables and may constitute a criminal element, but the process often creates the perception that everyone excluded fits this category, which is not the case.
Being poor in itself is not a moral issue. Reviving a neighborhood that was once just like an adjacent neighborhood leaves the people in the latter feeling both excluded and vulnerable.
Anderson finds too many signs of unrest in some of the cultural elements of the time. He often seems obsessed with rap music as a sign of racial anger and incipient criminality, for instance, while at some point such music becomes little more than background, perhaps an expression of anger by the performers, but only an accepted form of music with no other meaning to most listeners. This is also true of the mode of dress affected by many young people, though it should be no surprise that gang-inspired dress also inspires suspicion on the part of the community. People area accustomed to judging people by the way they dress and to dressing themselves to impress others and to give a certain message, so they see the way others dress as a message as well. The message may only be, "I'm a teenager and this is the way we dress," but sorting out who is only fashionable and who is a threat is difficult.
Anderson also examines thee two neighborhoods at a given time and takes the word of others about what these neighborhoods used to be like. When the older generation decries the younger generation and remembers how in the old days the young.would gather to learn from the older, wiser man in the neighborhood, Anderson seems to accept this vision, which may be colored by nostalgia more than reality. Anderson also seems to see minorities as more affected by certain social problems, from drinking and wife-beating to anti-social...
Such programs could alleviate some of the poverty in the one neighborhood, but it is not clear how much would have to be done to keep people in the other neighborhood from averting their eyes when they see a strange black person in the street. It would appear that the one way to alter this reaction would be to gentrify the other neighborhood as well. Indeed, Anderson may realize but does not overtly state how much appearance alone causes in the way of reaction behaviors. The people in the gentrified neighborhood look with suspicion on people who live in the other neighborhood not because the people themselves look so different but because where they live looks so different. The whites and middle-class blacks associate poverty with more crime, less civilized attitudes, and the like, and when this perception is coupled with perceptions about race, the level of fear rises when faced with anyone who seems different or who seems to belong to the other neighborhood. Such issues area part of the urban landscape. Unless a city is going to gentrify every neighborhood and completely drive out the "undesirables," which is never going to happen, people have to come to grips with the fact that they are not isolated and will always encounter people different from themselves their reactions have to be kept more in line with reality and less with often media-driven perceptions about what other people are like.
Works Cited
Anderson, Elijah. Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
