Code of the Street 25 Years Later: Lasting Legacies, Empirical Status, and Future Directions

This review, published on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Code of the Street (1999), considers the legacies of Elijah Anderson’s groundbreaking analysis of the interactional rules for negotiating street violence within the context of racism and structural disadvantage in Philadelphia. Empirical testing has yielded substantial support for Code of the Street’s key arguments. In the process of assessing its generalizability, such scholarship has inadvertently flattened and decontextualized the theory by, for example, reducing it to attitudinal scales. We identify a more politically conscious analysis in the original text than it is generally credited with, which we use to argue that “code of the street” has outgrown its reductive categorization as a subcultural theory. We conclude that the pressing issue of urban gun violence makes now an ideal time to refresh the theory by resituating it within the contemporary structural and cultural landscape of urban violence, analyzing the social-ecological features that shape the normative underpinnings of interpersonal violence, and studying the prosocial and adaptive features of the code.