Code of the Street

Abstract

Abstract Of all the problems besetting the poor inner city black community, none is more pressing than that of interpersonal violence and aggression. Simply living in such an environment places young people at special risk of falling victim to aggressive behavior. Although there are often forces in the community which can counteract the negative influences – by far the most powerful being a strong, loving, “decent” family committed to middle‐class values – the despair is pervasive enough to have spawned an oppositional culture, that of “the streets,” whose norms are often consciously opposed to those of mainstream society. Street culture has evolved what may be called a code of the street, which amounts to a set of informal rules governing interpersonal public behavior, including violence. At the heart of the code is the issue of respect – or “street cred” – loosely defined as being treated “right,” or granted the deference one deserves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 121 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.