The Code Of The Street

Street Culture is known or may be called as A Code Of The Street (informal rules governing interpersonal public behavior, including violence).

Decent and Street. These two orientations socially organize the community, and their coexistence has important consequences for residents, particularly children growing up in the inner city. Such enviroment means that "even youngsters whose home lives reflect mainstream values, and the majority of homes in the community do, must be able to handle themselves in a street oriented envioroment" (Pg.75 from Adler text book).

Decent families "generally working poor" tend to accept mainstream values more fully and attempt to instill them in their children. Aware of the envioroment they live in, decent families tend to be strict in their child-rearing practices, encouraging children to respect authority and walk a straight moral line. And that's exactly why my family try to teach to their kids...for them moral values such as respect for others is one of the most important thing any human need to grow with in order to be good people in this society. My grandma says: "my family is poor but we are respecful and we understand the meaning of it".

They are polite and considerate of others, and teach their children to be the same way. In contrast, street parents, often show a lack of consideration for other people and have superficial sense of family and community (Pg.77)

The attitudes of our society are implicated in the code of the streets. Most people in inner city communities are not totally invested in the code, but the significant minority do (youth who are have to maintain the code in order to establish reputations) because they have few other ways to assert themselves. Some Young black people "will consciously invest themselves and their considerable mental resources in what amounts to an oppositional culture to preserve themselves and their self respect" (Pg.85). Less young blacks have assumed a stret oriented demeanor as a way of expressing their blackness while really embracing a much more moderate way of life; they, too want a nonviolent setting in which to live and raise a family. These decent people are trying hard to be part of the mainstream cultrue, but the racism, helps them to legitimate the oppositional culture.

Black Spaces,Black Places

According to the prevailing view, blacks have undergone cultural assimilation or acculturation, but racism impedes their structural assimilation, that is, integration into mainstream "social cliques, clubs and institutions at the primary group level" leading some theorits to the conclusion that the assimilation model is most useful for understanding the incorporation of voluntary immigrants, not native gorn blacks who entered de US involuntarily and were selectively incorporated through enslavement (Pg.202).

An example of growing up around blacks we can see it on Michael from Riverton(Pg.206). He stated: "I can tell black people that didn't grow up around other blak people, cause they are different...I haven't been able to put my finger on it. It's either the expression, the way they give five, I mean its just something they missed; and that's not positive or negative, they just don't have an ingredient (Pg.206)

Blacks who did grow up around other black people hold a more salient racial identity than those who did not. Both groups believe that racial identity is suturued primarily through social interaction in the black world, and that black who miss the experience fail to interpret correctly the cultural cues group members use to draw boundaries around the black world (Pg.207)

Gender Identity

In our society an infant's external genitalia are visually inspected moments after birth, and, in most cases, he or she is immediately identified as a boy or a girl. The psychiatrist Robert Stoller once observed that "one can see evidence" of children's "unquestioned femininity or masculinity" by the time they begin to walk (Pg.99 from Adler text book 2nd ed).
"Although adults sometimes instruct young children about the defining anatomical characteristics of males and females, those instructions are often more confusing than enlightening in a society in which bodies are typically clothed" (pg.101). Young children learn about gender once they start to observe themselves, observe parents and people surround them; also by "practical experimentation transforming power of appearance management encourages them to embrace behaviorally their sex class identities" (pg.106).