Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black, and Male

Part I

Facing the Situation of Young Black Men in Inner Cities

Chapter 1

Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black, and Male

ELIJAH ANDERSON

Living in areas of concentrated ghetto poverty, still shadowed by the legacy of slavery and second-class citizenship, too many young black men are trapped in a horrific cycle that includes active discrimination, unemployment, poverty, crime, prison, and early death. When they act out violently, or are involved in dramatic crimes that make the news, the repercussions for the general image of the young black male can be far-reaching. Strongly identified with violent criminality by skin color alone, the anonymous young black male in public is often viewed first and foremost with fear and suspicion, his counter-claims to propriety, decency, and law-abidingness notwithstanding. Others typically don't want to know him, and in public seek distance from him and those who resemble him. Aware of his place as an outsider, he may try to turn the tables when he can, expressing himself on his own terms, behavior that is viewed, especially in public, as threatening, oppositional, and justifiable given their initial reactions.

The young ghetto male's self-presentation is often consciously off-putting or thuggish, a master status that overpowers positive qualities (Hughes 1944; Becker 1963; Anderson 1990). In a bid for respect, many value this image as part of a hip style that deters insults and attacks in the local ‘hood. But the image may have unintended consequences, giving potential employers reason to discriminate in favor of less threatening workers—often from the pool of recent immigrants, who appear clean-cut, hard-working, and willing to work for less and without the benefits and protections expected by the ghetto male. According to a Center for Immigration Studies survey cited in Preston (2007), 37.9 million immigrants, live in the United States today: one in eight people, the most since the 1920s. At least in the short run (see Jaynes, this volume), this steady stream of immigrants, many of them impoverished, along with mothers leaving welfare, high school dropouts, and retirees, make the low-wage job market more competitive, further diminishing the black ghetto male's already dismal job prospects. Beset with preexising fears, negative assessments, or prejudice (Kirschenman and Neckerman 1991), the employer may consciously exclude the stereotypical black ghetto male, contributing to his persistent joblessness and desperation.

As these circumstances become more widespread, the negative stereotype is perpetuated and strengthened, leading to more suspicion, discrimination, and marginalization—the wholesale diminution of social capital that energizes and intensifies the country's racial divide.

To understand the origin and nature of the problems and prospects of the black inner-city male, we must situate him in postindustrial urban America, as distinct from industrial America before the civil rights movement. In that past, the stereotypical hardworking factory man or construction worker and his female partner most often accepted the social conventions of their time. Their perspectives and orientations might be characterized as accommodating compared to those of their present-day counterparts. In many respects, society was more homogeneous, and the binary system of race relations gave quiet support to an oppressive racial order of white domination in virtually all areas of life.

In the 1950s more militant black people emerged to challenge the system collectively via the civil rights movement. Young people marched and led sit-ins, and political assassinations followed. Formerly moderate Americans, both black and white, lost their innocence. Yet in those last days of the industrial era, black men continued to work hard in factories and on construction while their wives worked as domestics, dishwashers, nurse's aides, and janitors. Though menial, these jobs gave a certain stability to the poor inner-city community, even as dissatisfaction with the socioeconomic position of black people was rising.

In time, this situation gave way to the postindustrial era with its recurrent recessions, major economic shifts from manufacturing to service and high technology, and the departure from the inner city of relatively high-paying and low-skilled jobs through deindustrialization and globalization (Harrison and Bluestone 1982; Perrucci et al. 1988; Wilson 1987, 1996; Wacquant and Wilson 1989; Anderson 1990). Persistent waves of immigrants, legal and illegal, gravitated to the urban centers to compete with African Americans for what was left of the manufacturing jobs (see Borjas 1999). Meanwhile, large portions of the safety net, including social programs such as child welfare, a mainstay since the New Deal, were chipped away. In this climate of political reaction, the union movement atrophied, becoming increasingly ineffective. A major result was that working people, black and white, slowly came to realize that they were on their own and had to fight for jobs and services. Among blacks, a nascent urban militancy became closely associated with the fight for civil rights, culminating in riots in which city after city burned. This militancy gave way to cultural nationalism in the urban ghetto.

In these circumstances, the image and stereotype of the black inner-city male ceased to be one of docility. Rather, it was rapidly transformed into a portrait of militancy mixed with anger directed toward the system of white domination in general, and white people in particular. In the minds of many whites, the figure of the black male became more and more mysterious, dangerous, and fearsome. Occasionally, he would act out this image, talking back to whites and challenging white authority. The common view among whites was of the young black man with an Afro asserting himself and disputing racial apartheid (Massey and Denton 1993), with expressions of militancy ranging from the peaceful civil disobedience of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the calls for revolution of Malcolm X and H. Rap Brown (Kerner Commission 1968).

Incessant urban turmoil, underscored and spread by the ubiquitous television coverage, encouraged and supported young blacks in questioning white authority. Among black middle-class people it became legitimate to fight for your full rights and first-class citizenship. Militant, and to a large degree oppositional, attitudes spread through the urban ghetto, settling in some of the most entrenched and disfranchised working-class and poor communities, where alienated young people were quick to act them out.

This unrest and activism did have the positive effect of encouraging whites in authority to open up the system somewhat and make accommodations to the aspirations of black people (Anderson 2001). The combination of affirmative action, set-asides, and fair housing facilitated the exodus of better-off blacks from the ghetto. The emerging black middle class increasingly gravitated to white neighborhoods, and many inner-city neighborhoods gradually underwent a process of transformation from all-white middle- and working-class to racially mixed but still economically stable to all-black working-class, poor, and destitute (Wilson 1987; Anderson 1990; Massey and Denton 1993).

In these circumstances, the black middle class was temporarily able to make a halting peace with the wider white society, while many of those residing in the increasingly isolated ghettos could not. Although only a small segment of middle-class people actively participated in the race riots, many whites were unable or unwilling to distinguish one class of black persons from another, and stereotypes spread. The distinctions blacks made among themselves often went unnoticed or were confused, and almost any white person living in close proximity to blacks was inclined to place as much distance as possible between him- or herself and them.

Amid the economic collapse wrought in the inner city by suburban decentralization, urban deindustrialization, and globalization, great numbers of the young blacks who remained in the ghetto found themselves subject to poor schooling, employment discrimination, and powerful negative stereotypes, all of which seriously diminished their human and social capital. As a result of these factors, they were unable to make an effective adjustment to the new economic realities, and the inner-city black community sank into entrenched structural poverty. In order to survive, residents created a thriving irregular, underground, and often illegal economy. The crack cocaine trade offered a way to make money, but entailed grave risks to individual and social health (Williams 1992). The violent crimes perpetrated by desperate addicts and greedy dealers reinforced deeply negative public images of the black urban ghetto.

All this set the stage for the situation we face today. The social costs of impoverishment fell particularly hard on the heads of the young black men who were feared by the rest of society and left to fend for themselves by white authorities. In his alienation and use of violence, the contemporary poor young black male is a new social type peculiar to postindustrial urban America (Anderson 1999). This young man is in profound crisis. His social trajectory leads from the community to prison or cemetery, or at least to a life of trouble characterized by unemployment, discrimination, and participation in what many are inclined to view as an oppositional culture—which is how he goes about dealing with his alienation from society. The wider social system is deeply complicit in this scenario, but, as indicated above, it relates to the impoverished black male by stigmatizing and further marginalizing him, informing him that he has no place in respectable society (Becker 1973; Goffman 1963; Anderson 1978, 1990, 1999).

His plight has vast social and racial ramifications in the city: on the bus, trolley, and subway; on sidewalks and street corners; in newspapers; in corporate offices and boardrooms; in grocery stores and shops; in restaurants and taxis. In many places of public accommodation, the anonymous black male is too often feared and considered guilty until proven innocent, and even that proof, when demonstrated, is not fully accepted. People—black as well as white—necessarily avoid him, and through their avoidance behavior teach him that he is an outsider in his own society. His image as bad and potentially dangerous is so powerful that it spreads to anyone who resembles him. This stereotype has implications for black males more generally, even those who are upper- or middle-class in education, achievement, and social standing. All males of color are then referenced by the stereotype of the bad boy.

When the black male appears in public, common codes of civility are severely tested. Systematic observations on trains show that the anonymous black male is often the last person others will sit next to. Black men generally agree that they spend entire journeys seated alone, unless the train is crowded and seating is scarce. Black men of all social classes understand that most whites and some other blacks avoid them on public transportation. The black male may put white people off just by being black, and the younger he is and the more ghetto he looks, the more distrust he engenders. Many adopt the working conception that white people, their protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, generally dislike or fear black people, but especially black males.

As young black men talk among themselves, each man has a story of police harassment or public discrimination in which strangers go to great lengths to avoid him. Regardless of the degree to which this is true objectively, this belief leads the black male to develop his own sense of position vis-à-vis the wider society, especially whites. Black men compare notes and develop elaborate strategies for managing or avoiding such arbitrary treatment and salvaging their self-respect.

At times, young men attempt to turn the tables. Deciding they would rather ride with a seat to themselves—which may well be in part a sour grapes rationalization—they sometimes puff themselves up and adopt an off-putting appearance, displaying looks geared to make others uptight and determined to avoid them, to reject the other first. Strikingly, other blacks will also avoid anonymous young black males they are uncertain about, though blacks are usually more savvy about distinguishing those who pose an authentic threat from those who do not. Familiar with black life, they are generally capable of making finer distinctions than are their white counterparts.

Upwardly mobile males of color generally try to avoid the stereotype by using every means available to distance themselves from the bad black male, including his dress and demeanor. Parents teach their sons that to look, talk, or walk like him is to be associated with him and to suffer his stigma. At the same time, it may be assumed that the black male can wield the stereotype strategically in negotiations with whites and the dominant society, striking fear in their hearts. Many others embrace the image simply to look tough and hip and to be cool, often in the name of street credibility. The image has been perversely glorified, but it carries heavy costs for the status and situation of those people who cannot switch this identity on and off. It can serve, nonetheless, as an important defensive strategy for the black male who operates with a provisional status in white-dominated settings (Goffman 1963; Anderson 2001).

The poor inner-city male is subject to even more overwhelming challenges. To understand why, we must shift back from interactions and negotiations in public places to the fundamental structural factors that shape the increasingly isolated and impoverished urban black ghetto. The inner-city economy at ground zero rests on three prongs: (1) low-wage, casualized jobs that offer little continuity of employment and few if any benefits; (2) welfare payments, including Aid to Families with Dependent Children and its successors, food stamps, and other government transfer programs; and (3) the informal economy, which encompasses (a) legal activities carried on outside the marketplace such as bartering labor and goods among friends and relatives, (b) semi-legal activities such as small businesses operated out of the home under the radar of regulation, and (c) illegal activities such as drug dealing, prostitution, and street crime. Members of families, households, and neighborhoods engage in non-market exchanges, borrowing and lending and, in the process, transferring and transforming these resources. While individuals obtain financial resources from one or more of these sources, resources also circulate between and among them.

Until recently, poor black people relied on all three ways of gaining income simultaneously. For example, welfare checks and earnings from employment not only supplemented one another but provided capital and consumers for small business, such as braiding hair, washing cars, or watching children. If any one of these elements is unproductive or fails to deliver financial resources, people are pushed to engage in the remaining two.

With the recent drastic reductions in welfare payments and the latest contractions in job opportunities for less educated workers, many inner-city residents have increasingly relied on the informal economy. The more desperate people become, the more the underground economy becomes characterized by criminality and violence. The marginalization of black inner-city men by economic forces is profoundly exacerbated by the legacy of racism in America.

The reality of daily life for too many young black men in areas of concentrated poverty revolves around simply meeting the challenge of staying alive. To avoid being killed as they navigate their way in public within the disfranchised community, they acquire personas with a street-toughened edge. This image becomes generalized, supporting the negative stereotype that has become a dominant image of the black man throughout white society. Employers often reject young black male applicants on this basis, undermining their prospects for legitimate employment (Kirschenman and Neckerman 1991). Joblessness has deeper ramifications that feed on themselves, leading many young men to rationalize their involvement in the illegal, and often violent, underground economy.

At the same time that our elected leaders have made major cuts in the safety net, including welfare and other social supports, poor people must compete more fiercely for low-paying jobs and scarce resources with new immigrants to the U.S. as well as with poor working people around the globe. Globalization has completed what suburbanization and deindustrialization began. When corporations send their manufacturing operations to other places that offer plentiful supplies of low-wage labor, now including China and India as well as the U.S. South and West, Mexico, and the Asian Pacific region, even more jobs leave Philadelphia and other industrial centers, creating an employment vacuum. And inner-city black men have many competitors for the few jobs that do exist. Black women may have an advantage in customer service positions; immigrants may get a foothold in key employment niches. For the truly disadvantaged, especially high school dropouts or men with criminal records, jobs are very difficult to obtain (Pager 2003, 2007).

The end of welfare as we know it coincided with a brief period of unusual expansion in the labor market, fueling the illusion that most people would be able to move from welfare to work, but the recessions that followed have exacerbated the effects of these structural shifts, and joblessness and distress are now widespread. Under these conditions, the informal, underground economy expands to pick up the slack. For the poorest residents of the inner city, this third prong of the economy has become increasingly salient. More and more people engage in irregular exchanges, hustling, and at times, outright street crime in order to survive.

The jobs held by people living in the inner city qualify them as the working poor. They toil as night watchmen, janitors and office cleaners, street sweepers, dishwashers, construction laborers, car washers, landscapers, fast food workers, nurse's aides, office assistants, and domestic workers. Most of the available jobs pay little, and provide few if any benefits. They are also insecure, to some degree a function of a favorable economy. In an economic downturn, these people are among the first casualties, thus encouraging their participation in the informal economy. Moreover, even the steady jobs do not generate enough income to get people out of poverty. Despite the rise in the official employment rate in the community, conditions in many inner-city black neighborhoods have not improved, with the impact felt most acutely by uneducated young black men (see Mincy 2006). And a great many people who do find employment remain impoverished while working. In these circumstances, the neighborhood effects of concentrated poverty described by Wilson (1987) become ever more salient, exacerbating local problems.

The inner city is frequently the scene of many irregular business ventures that fall close to the blurry line between legality and criminality. For example, a party host might sell dinner platters for six or seven dollars. People routinely gamble on card games; a minimum stake of twenty or thirty dollars a person is required, and the game goes on all evening, with people joining in and dropping out. People organize other forms of gambling in their homes, in the back rooms of barbershops and bars, or on the street. Illegal forms include playing the numbers, dog fights, cock fights, and dice games. Legal gambling, in the form of the state lottery, is also highly popular.

All these exchanges turn on cash or credit. The barter system works through the exchange of goods and services instead. For example, a person repairs a neighbor's car on the weekend, helps paint someone's steps, performs a plumbing job, or styles someone's hair, but takes no money for it; rather, the individual waits to be paid back with a favor in the future. Mothers routinely trade child care in the same manner.

In the inner-city community, money earned is quickly spent. One common scenario begins with a paycheck from a legitimate employer. Many inner-city residents don't have bank accounts, so they cash their paychecks at the cash exchange, which charges exorbitant fees. Often, the man then goes to the corner tavern for a taste, a drink of liquor with friends. Typically, the man has accumulated debts to associates on the corner which he must pay back when he sees them or answer to the lender. Debts accumulate in part because the man's earnings are insufficient to cover all his expenses between paychecks; he must often borrow money from friends to make ends meet. Through the week before payday, men can be heard soliciting others to let me hold ten [borrow ten dollars] until Friday. When payday comes, if the debt is not paid, the lender's sense of self-respect may be on the line; arguments and altercations leading to outright violence may ensue over the money owed. When a debtor is observed using the money for something else, the lender can feel disrespected, or dissed. So he may need to set the debtor straight. And if the debt is not paid promptly enough, the lender is not likely to extend credit again. This informal economic system has built-in sanctions.

Since the tavern is often one of the first places the man visits after receiving his pay, his wife, if he is married, may try to intercept him there, demanding the check or the money before he has a chance to mess it up. Some men will give their women a large portion of the check to hold for them. In other cases, a bartender or proprietor of the tavern will hold the man's money for him, with predictable results (Anderson 1978). The money is passed on, in this case to the proprietor and his bank account. Much money leaves the community in just this manner.

The third element of the ghetto economy, the irregular component, overlaps with and influences the local circulation of money from wages. On the legal side are various interpersonal accommodations, such as bartering or trading favors with friends and relatives, and outright begging. Illegal activities include gambling, robbery, burglary, fencing, dealing drugs, and loan sharking. Marginal forms of work merge into the informal economy: freelancers may work on their own, doing odd jobs or engaging in petty entrepreneurship as street vendors, or for someone else, most notably at the car wash for tips only. In this sector of the economy, relations are informal, characterized by age-related peer groups, family relationships, and personal connections, reminiscent of the marginal urban economies in developing or underdeveloped nations.

Crime, in various low-level forms, has taken up some of the slack left by the termination of government transfer payments and the contraction of wage-earning from legitimate jobs. Illegal activities supply some income to the neighborhood. More men can now be heard in barbershops and bars saying such things as I'm gon' get mine somehow and Somebody's gon' pay me. These allusions to street crime made by men who appear peaceful do at times get acted out. It's hard to quantify such impressionistic evidence, but an observer gains a clear sense of the high frustration levels in the community. While many people are managing to adjust, many others develop short fuses, and anger is easily aroused. The Korean grocers who have opened stores in otherwise all-black neighborhoods appear to be bearing the brunt of this frustration. Not only are they of a different ethnic group and national origin, but they appear to be making money off the black community. To be sure, many proprietors are solicitous of local people and employ them in visible positions, but enmity can build, and occasionally this tension mounts to the point that a Korean is killed in a robbery of the family's grocery store. There is an observable connection between frustration levels and the number of robberies and assaults occurring on the streets. When frustration levels are high, the potential for violence rises.

In these circumstances, informal social transactions become an increasingly common way to deal with life. Strikingly, these exchanges are made essentially without the benefit of civil law. In the local community, the civil law and its agents have limited credibility, and over time confidence in the law has been seriously eroded. Street justice fills the void, becoming an important principle of local social relations. And matters of reputation or street credibility become all the more important, serving as a form of social coin. But street cred cannot be attained once and for all; it is high maintenance and must be husbanded, nurtured, and replenished from time to time. Strikingly, it is replenished most effectively not by talk and recriminations, but through actual deeds, which must be performed repeatedly to earn the desired effect: respect. Ironically, certain inner-city residents constantly look for opportunities to develop and have others validate their street credibility. In these circumstances, shows of disrespect must always be addressed, creating a stimulus for interpersonal violence.

The peculiar forms of social capital and regulation that develop in the isolated inner-city community, street justice and street credibility, not only sustain the drug trade but exacerbate its violence and extend its reach. Residing in areas of concentrated poverty in which hustling and crime flourish, poor inner-city males see possibilities for making money just outside their door. Drugs are everywhere, as the illegal enterprise moves in where the wider economy has failed local residents. Young men, who cannot avoid confronting the drug network, often seize the economic opportunities made available by the drug trade and the remunerative street crime that accompanies it.

Although the dominant society fears the violence of alienated young people, the inner-city neighborhood itself suffers the greatest harm at their hands. In response to persistent structural poverty, failures of public policy, and intensifying joblessness, the irregular economy expands, but its fallout is violent crime perpetrated primarily by desperate young males (Jones 2004; Ness 2004).

Many alienated and otherwise idle youths enter the drug trade voluntarily, motivated by a street culture that emphasizes material objects, such as new sneakers, gold chains, and leather jackets, which function as signs of status and may help a man win the attentions of young women and prestige among his peers. For many of these young people, participating in the drug trade is a strong bid for financial success. Aspirations for well-being exist alongside a desperate desire for street cred.

In Philadelphia, the drug trade is organized hierarchically, in terms of top dogs, middle dogs, and low dogs (Anderson 1990), similar to a pyramid scheme. The top dogs are believed to make the most money, operating essentially as drug king pins, but to local residents they are mostly invisible, known largely in the abstract or as urban legends. As aging babydaddys, homeboys, brothers, cousins, nephews, and sons, the middle dogs are more visible and often have an everyday presence in the community. Ranging in age from twenty-five to thirty-five, they visit the local street corner carryouts, clubs, barbershops, and car washes and drive around the neighborhood in a Lexus, Mercedes, or BMW, their flashy rides attesting to their financial success and drawing the attention of youthful wannabes. On their rounds, they do their business, but also are on the lookout, or even an outright hunt, for young recruits to the trade. Their most likely prospects are financially strapped young boys in need of self-esteem. Typically, these boys lack a decent and strong father figure or other male presence in their lives, but the draw of the street is so powerful that boys from even the most intact families can be taken in.

Upon spotting vulnerable boys, sometimes as young as thirteen or fourteen, the middle dogs seek to cultivate them and turn them into low dogs. By showing them attention, the middle dogs overtly or subtly court them, perhaps letting them hold (borrow) a few dollars or doing other small financial favors for them. The task, or the challenge, may be as simple as serving as a lookout. With each completed task, a bond is struck between the young boy and the middle dog, and mutual confidence grows. As their relationship develops, the middle dogs let them do incrementally larger favors, with completed tasks earning them more trust. Eager to please the middle dogs, the boys return their favors so as to gain the middle dog's approval. The young boy wants to step up to the plate and to prove that any degree of faith, which may well be confused with respect, shown by the middle dog was justified and not misplaced—to show that he is ready. In time, these little favors turn into odd jobs and other tasks for which the boys may be paid, encouraging dependence and bonding the boy to the middle dog. At times, benefiting from the occasional largesse of the middle dog, the young boy may use his credit and build up a debt that becomes ever harder to repay. As the young boy becomes increasingly dependent on this relationship, his street credibility is ever more strongly tied to his job performance as evaluated by the middle dog.

This hierarchical relationship has elements of coercion as well as seduction, given the differences in age and power between the middle dog and the low dog. When directly approached by an older man to work for him, a young boy may take the offer as a threat, and after discovering that the man is a real dealer, he may feel intimidated, believing it is too risky not to work for the man, and that if he refuses, his life may be in danger. But with the promise of living large with ready money and enhanced street credibility, why not? To seal the deal and initiate him into the drug trade, the middle dog may offer the young boy a package to hold, or even a corner to stand on and sell drugs. Deeply flattered, but also anxious, he detects a certain dilemma, but the young boy may find it easier to comply with the wishes of the middle dog than to refuse.

The stage is now set for the boy to become a full-fledged low dog in the local drug trade. Consummating his new status, he stands on the corner holding or selling drugs to passersby. The young boy stands on the corner day and night, typically making drug transactions and handling large sums of cash. In the neighborhood and on the streets, the boy is now clocking, which means that the middle dog has fronted him drugs to sell, often on consignment. But it also means that the young boy has taken on the burden of a drug bill, a promissory note that must be paid, either in money or by the return of the unsold product.

If the youth is unable to meet his account, his very life may be on the line. These debts can easily grow to unwieldy proportions, since interest rates of fifty cents on the dollar are not uncommon. If the boy borrows money from a dealer and fails to repay in the allotted time, a middle dog may allow him to repay by working in the trade. Failure to pay his debt is to place the middle dog's street credibility in jeopardy, leading the middle dog to exact payment in some form, through physical harm or even assassination.

Making matters worse, conditions of endemic poverty have encouraged the emergence of stick-up boys, who roam the ghetto streets robbing the low dogs who stand on the corner selling drugs; money or drugs is what they are after. If a boy is robbed and is unable to account for his drugs by producing the right amount of cash, he may be told by his middle dog that, If you don't pay up, you have twenty-four hours to live. Under pressure to come up with the money on short notice, the boy may well resort to robbery and other forms of street crime. Before scores can be settled, several people may die. Violence and counter violence have a place in many transactions. Through the erosion of civil law, street justice becomes the only way of mediating disputes, and in these circumstances, street credibility becomes the coin, for both expressive and instrumental reasons.

In these circumstances, for his own sense of security, the young boy becomes highly motivated to get himself a gun. Acquiring a weapon begins largely as a matter of personal defense. Typically, the gun is seen as standing between the young dealer and his own death. He must be prepared to defend what is his, be it money, drugs, or street credibility. From his experience of the streets, he knows that his very life depends on it.

Possession of a gun provides instant street credibility, which is why weapons are so sought after. Guns are readily available and quite easy to acquire; young boys beg, borrow, rent, and steal them. Once he has a weapon, the boy often carries it, but also likes to present himself as strapped, adopting elaborate ruses including a hunched or labored style of walking that, for those who are streetwise, sends the unmistakable message, I'm packing. Through the multifarious drug transactions that go down on the corner, the young boy becomes involved in a web of social and financial relations that are regulated not by civil law but a code of the street (Anderson 1999) that makes street credibility all the more critical to the young man's survival. Beefs can arise from most anywhere at any time, and the youth must be prepared to deal with them. For protection, the youth carries his piece to the Multiplex, to Mickey D's, to his girlfriend's house, sometimes even to school, to any staging area where trouble might arise and beefs might be settled.

This almost insatiable need for street credibility, reinforced by a code of silence that prohibits and penalizes snitching, contributes powerfully to the high murder rate that Philadelphia and other cities are presently experiencing. A primary root cause is persistent urban poverty, which leaves no clear way to acquire money other than engaging in this criminal, violent dimension of the underground economy.

Young black men face extreme disadvantages just by living in areas of concentrated urban poverty. Most families in inner-city communities— even those who are most impoverished—hold decent or mainstream values, but they are under extreme pressure in the neighborhood. They try to socialize their children into decent values, but the open display of these values is dangerous, calling the youths' street credibility into question. Young boys from decent families must learn to code-switch, developing an exquisite ability to tell what time it is and to behave accordingly.

Even in childhood, these boys are often criminalized. Police officers guard the entrances and hallways of their schools. If a youth is involved in an altercation, disruption, or disorder, he often does not go to the principal's office but is handcuffed on the spot. His name is entered into a computer database as someone who has violated the law, so he gets an instant record. Meanwhile, his neighborhood peer group smokes marijuana cigarettes or blunts, experimenting with mind-dulling drugs. By the time a black male gets out of school and approaches the job market, he can't pass the background check or the drug test. The employer then has a ready excuse not to hire dark-skinned young males, typically discriminating in favor of immigrants or young people from the suburbs.

The life course of the young black male in the inner city is shaped by the concentration of poverty in an isolated, segregated community. Almost everyone around him is beset by problems, and he is subject to these concentration effects as he grows up. Instead of seeing adult males who are successful in family life and at work, he is exposed to alternate role models who engage in drug dealing and other underground activities. In the segregated environment, he has no contacts with the wider society and real people not in his situation. The black youth sees others similarly situated and naturally identifies with them. This limited experience and perspective forms his orientation and outlook on life, its possibilities and limitations. He thrives in the company of his peers. A large part of his formation comes from watching TV, with its messages that are like cartoon cutouts of the real world. Typically his home life is female-centric; he lives with his mother, perhaps along with his grand-mother or an aunt, but not with a father. The men in his life are his brothers and cousins, occasionally an uncle or a grandfather. Seldom does he have the direct influence of a father who lives nearby and stays in touch. When a father figure is present, he is rarely an effective role model. This man may be compromised by poverty to the point where he is involved in crime and hustling. He might take or sell drugs. He is unlikely to be a strong, upstanding man with a job and a sense of connection with mainstream society and the wider culture.

Everyday life pushes boys in other directions. Young boys and men twelve to twenty years old hang out on the corner, on their way to and from school if they still attend school and for the greater part of the day if they do not. Here they sell drugs, shoot craps, and discuss their situation. The big issue for them is having enough money. The whole community is in the pit of poverty, and it seems like there is never enough. Everything is about getting money so that they can acquire the trinkets that are so important to social identity: the gold bracelet or neck chain, the iPod, the jacket, the sneakers. The oversized white T-shirt worn over pants that hang well below the waist is the urban uniform. It makes one suddenly presentable, and at three, four, or five dollars, it is cheap and allows everyone to be part of the crowd. Given the competitiveness that pervades youth