Streetwise in His Book Streetwise:

Streetwise

In his book Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community,

Elijah Anderson offers an ethnographic comparison of two neighborhoods, both in West Philadelphia. The neighborhoods are side by side, but they have different characters. One is considered a slum and the other is a region changed by gentrification, which means it was a decaying neighborhood until developers put money into reviving the area and attracting a more up-scale population. Elijah Anderson is a black sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and he uses his perspective to illuminate interactions between the races and among people of the same race in both neighborhoods.

What he finds is an urban landscape in which people interact in a patterned way showing distrust and even fear. Whites traversing the area scrupulously avoid eye contact with blacks they do not know. The black workers in the area chafe at being treated in this manner and can feel the distrust when they walk down the street. What these workers express is the belief that they are being mistaken for street blacks instead of middle-class citizens of color, showing their own distrust of young black males who might victimize them if given the chance.

Anderson does not see these differing neighborhoods in terms of stark contrasts, with one good and the other bad. Instead, he finds ways in which each area has both elements in some measure, including in the way each reacts to the other neighborhood. His analysis does a good job of bringing out the fears of the people in each neighborhood, notably fears of the people in the other neighborhood, meaning fears of people of a different race, for the most part.

The earlier history of the two neighborhoods is discussed and shows more overt racism and anger about racial matters than exist there today. Part of the gentrification effort started with racist groups and groups trying to keep out certain people, like the Village Development Assocaition that made an effort "buying up properties, renovating them, and selling them or renting them to desirable tenants, black or white" (11). Other groups developed to "save the Village from the hands of 'the racists'" (11).

The lower income neighborhood people harbor some resentment, seeing themselves as the sort of people the other neighborhood has sought actively to keep out of the renovated area. The whites in the gentrified neighborhood do not see themselves as racist and indeed decry racism and seek in some ways to reach out as a way of overcoming perceptions of racism, but they then behave as noted above when faced with unknown blacks on the sidewalk. As Anderson shows, the stereotype of the urban black as predator is not true when applied as widely as it usually is, but he also shows that middle-class blacks also have that stereotype in mind when faced with some younger blacks in their path. The problem is that youth gangs have created an image that is emulated by young blacks who are not in gangs and also by young whites who also listen to the same music, wear similar clothing, and affect many of the same attitudes. This type of behavior muddies the waters and makes the streets even more fearful. Most of us have had the same experience, seeing young people wearing certain types of clothing that make us wonder if they are a threat or merely dressing as part of normal teenage rebellion. With two neighborhoods close together like these in Philadelphia, misunderstandings may be even more common as people from the already suspect neighborhood cross through the other neighborhood in the normal course of the day.

It is easy to see why such perceptions can be problematic and why one might take a judgmental view of people who react with fear to every black face, but the uncertainties of life in the city can make such a reaction difficult to eliminate.

Anderson uses these two neighborhoods as his study site, but what he finds is applicable to other parts of the city, other neighborhoods, and similar situations. In a broader context, the gentrification process always has a dual face. On the one hand, it recovers blighted property and so serves the needs of the city, providing housing where most would have though there was none, raising the tax base, and creating safer neighborhoods. 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 behavior of other sorts, though such problems may be more a function of poverty and similar pressures than race.