Do you consider Code of the Street to be in some sense a sequel to DuBoiss work?
What I’m doing is looking at how people are dealing with life in inner-city communities as great numbers of people fail to adjust effectively to the transition from a manufacturing economy to a service and high-tech economy. DuBois was concerned with how blacks were dealing with the advent of industrialism, and why black people were not participating in the system to the same extent that Europeans were. So it’s not literally a sequel. But it is true that my book addresses some of the same issues that his work addressed. And I’m very happy to be following in his footsteps in some sense. To what extent are the dynamics of inner-city life in Philadelphia representative of inner-city life throughout the nation? Wherever there are pockets of poverty and alienation — whether you’re talking about Chicago or New York, Rio or Johannesburg — you have the code of the street. As a social scientist I am trying to represent this reality as accurately as I can because I think it’s very important to
