Both Du Bois, writing as a historian, and Elijah Anderson, a sociologist focusing on policy
issues affecting inner-city poverty, employ the technique of ethnography - the close
observation of people interacting in social situations - as an element of their overall
analyses.
Anderson is an exceptionally accomplished ethnographer who looks closely at the minute
details of African-American urban experience and culture. He is deeply concerned about
urban policy issues, but he lets the reality of ghetto life speak for itself in ways that are
sometimes startling and always brutally honest: in one chapter of Code of the Street, he
even describes the correct way to survive the experience of being robbed!
The core problem of ghetto life, writes Anderson, is the pattern of “interpersonal violence and
aggression” that “wreaks havoc daily on the lives of community residents and increasingly
spills over into downtown and residential middle-class areas.” The source of this violence is
“the circumstances of life among the ghetto poor - the lack of jobs … limited basic public
services … the stigma of race … rampant drug use and drug trafficking … alienation and the
absence of hope for the future.”
issues affecting inner-city poverty, employ the technique of ethnography - the close
observation of people interacting in social situations - as an element of their overall
analyses.
Anderson is an exceptionally accomplished ethnographer who looks closely at the minute
details of African-American urban experience and culture. He is deeply concerned about
urban policy issues, but he lets the reality of ghetto life speak for itself in ways that are
sometimes startling and always brutally honest: in one chapter of Code of the Street, he
even describes the correct way to survive the experience of being robbed!
The core problem of ghetto life, writes Anderson, is the pattern of “interpersonal violence and
aggression” that “wreaks havoc daily on the lives of community residents and increasingly
spills over into downtown and residential middle-class areas.” The source of this violence is
“the circumstances of life among the ghetto poor - the lack of jobs … limited basic public
services … the stigma of race … rampant drug use and drug trafficking … alienation and the
absence of hope for the future.”
