Social Issues In Easy Street

In Streetwise, Elijah Anderson (1990) discusses the social forces at work in an urban area he calls the Village-Northton. His is a sociological field study of the daily interactions between the residents of an area encompassing two communities--in his words, "one black and low income to very poor (with an extremely high infant mortality rate), [and] the other racially mixed but becoming increasingly middle to upper income and white" (Anderson, 1990, p. ix). In keeping with valid sociological fieldwork, Anderson (1990) immersed himself in the community from the summer of 1975 through the summer of 1989.

Everyone wants to be a part of the streets but not everyone has the heart, dedication, or strength to live the lifestyle. There is a law of ethics when running around in the streets. There are rules that one always has to follow in order to survive. There is no love when dealing with those that follow the code, ones heart has to be made coal because anything can happen and anything goes. Out there in the streets you are a family that continuously looks out for each other and let nothing separate the bond that you have on the streets. In this paper I will discuss what the code of the street is and what is consist of, also residential segregation and how it hold those in the streets back from achieving success.

Culture in urban communities, also referred to as inner-cities, are growing increasingly violent. In the article, The Code of the Streets by Elijah Anderson, he begins to take an in-depth look at the root of the evil. He deduces that economic factors, parenting and the troublesome environments largely influence the violent norms within this culture.

In Brent Staples’ “Just Walk On By: Black Men and Public Space” he forces women to recognize the feeling of estrangement from the surrounding public that he has endured. He first took notice at the age of twenty two, when his own self-judgement resulted from scaring a woman when solely walking at night near his college, the University of Chicago. He maintained his dejected attitude when he wrote that a few years later, his own work mistook him for a thief instead of a journalist. Brent Staples heightened his frustration by mentioning a black male journalist who was blamed as a killer in a murder, instead of the writer reporting it. In portraying two versions of his story, he proves that this was a rather common and difficult occurrence for not only him, but others of his race. To attempt to resolve this, he decided to attempt to cross the street or sing classical songs to portray innocence. In this article, Staples’ forces his audience to encounter the hypocrisy in which all black men are dangerous. He concluded the essay with the realization that you can't change what people think, only attempt to show them who you are. Brent Staples appeals to the audience through his emotionally charged language with the use of his experiences with unconscious prejudice.

The Elijah Anderson’s article, “Code of the Streets” is a perfect illustration for cultural arguments because it involves environments that are susceptible to learning a criminal culture; even up to a point of promoting that type of criminal behavior as “normal”. It also has links to Differential Association and Social Learning theories of crime

In the movie Charlie Chaplin plays a tramp who finds a baby that has been abandoned by an unfit mother. At first Chaplin tries to get rid of the baby, but when that fails he decides to take him in as his own. The movie then skips ahead to when the boy is about five years old and shows Chaplin and the kid scamming their neighbors by breaking their windows and then making them pay for Chaplin to fix them. One day the kid gets sick so Chaplin calls a doctor who, after seeing the kid’s living conditions’ calls the police to have the child taken away. The rest of the movie is about Chaplin’s journey to rescue the kid and ends with a dramatic reuniting scene.

“Éste es un mundo brillante, éstas son mis calles, mi barrio de noche, con sus miles de luces, cientos de millones de colores mezclados con los ruidos, un sonido vibrante de carros, maldiciones, murmullos de alegría y de llantos, formando un gran concierto musical (Thomas, Down These Mean Streets, 1998, p. 3)”, is how Piri Thomas describes his birthplace, East Harlem. The diversity of cultures, the vibrant street life, the passion and conflicts of everyday life and media portrayal in movies such as West Side Story make East Harlem an exciting and mysterious place. But hidden under the dirty faces of the children is the struggle in the search for acceptance and belong,

Throughout the article “The Code of the Streets,” Elijah Anderson explains the differences between “decent” and “street” people that can be applied to the approaches of social control, labeling, and social conflict theories when talking about the violence among inner cities due to cultural adaptations.

In this paper, I plan to first describe the “Code of the Street” which is a term coined and a book written by Elijah Anderson. I would also summarize and describe two journal articles that test Anderson’s idea of the “Code of the Street” for a more definite explanation. I will tell how the two articles that I have chosen relates to some of the concepts that Anderson talked about in the book. I will then define general strain theory and social learning or differential association theory. Lastly, I will explain how general strain theory and social learning theory or differential association theory explain some of the behaviors that were seen by the individuals in the book published by Anderson. I will point out some of the individual’s behavior and demonstrate whether it may lead to crime or whether the behavior was learned in any way.

For this assignment I decided to read the book Code of the Street: decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city by Elijah Anderson. This book is about how inner city people live and try and survive by living with the code of the streets. The code of the streets is basically morals and values that these people have. Most of the time it is the way they need to act to survive. Continuing on within this book review I am going to discuss the main points and arguments that Anderson portrays within the book. The main points that the book has, goes along with the chapters. These points consist of Street and decent families, respect, drugs violence, street crime, decent daddy, the mating game, black inner city grandmother. Now within

Mabel 's Strange Predicament is a 1914 American comedy film starring Charles Chaplin, famously known for being the first time Chaplin wears the tramp costume. The movie was token place in a hotel lobby. A drunk man, the tramp, runs into Mabel and tries to engage in a conversation. Mabel walks away and goes on a date with her lover. Once Mabel returns, she goes to her room and plays with her dog. While leaving her room for a quick moment, the door closes and she gets locked out in her pajamas. The tramp comes up the stairs and finds her. He tries to grab her but she escapes. As she tries to hide, she enters the room next to hers and hides under the bed. In the room is a man whose wife recently left to complain to the manager about Mabel. Her lover comes and knocks on Mabel’s door to visit but gets no response; he decides to wait for her with his friend, Mabel’s neighbor. Soon he discovers Mabel under the bed and assumes that she is having an affair with the neighbor. The wife enters the room and assumes the same as the lover. After fighting, Mabel is kicked out and finds the tramp again. The lover fights off the tramp and realizes it was the drunken man’s fault that Mabel was hiding under the bed. Mabel and her lover reconcile while the older couple continue to fight. This film shows a great representation of the time period and what we learned because of how it demonstrated the views of women, black, and drunkeness.

Charlie Chaplin’s iconic Tramp character is often someone to laugh with, or laugh at, but not necessarily someone you learn from. The Tramp character is impulsive and reckless, hardly the standard for model behavior. Despite this characterization, the Tramp’s role differs significantly in Easy Street. He is the hero that the titular street desperately needs, a place where the depraved and deprived struggle to survive. The use of social issues in Easy Street is not merely to use them for the jokes, but to lighten the burden surrounding the subjects, and in doing so providing a more hopeful perspective: one where these issues are not overwhelming and the solutions don’t seem Herculean, but instead are presented as being within the audience’s begging grasp. The film provides relief by portraying issues a general public can be dealing with, and not treating them as these daunting things to be intimidated by, but to laugh at, since they can be solved, as the Tramp demonstrates, through religion and labor.

Analysis of Cumulative Effects of Neighborhood Social Adversity and Personal Crime Victimization on Adolescent Psychotic Experiences

In 1999 Ontario implemented the Safe Streets Act (SSA). Broadly, this legislation prohibited “aggressive panhandling”, solicitation of a captive audience and unsafe disposal of needles, condoms and broken glass (O’Grady, Gaetz and Buccieri, 2013). Even though the legislation does not explicitly state this, there is consensus in the academic literature about the SSA that this legislation was, for the most part, a response to “squeegee kids” (Chesnay, Bellot, and Sylvestre, 2013; Glasbeek, 2006; O’Grady et al. 2013; Parnaby 2003). Squeegee kids were a group of homeless youth in the city of Toronto that would wash car windshields at intersections, during red lights, in the hopes of getting money in exchange from drivers. Chesnay et al. (2013)

The final and most significant delivery of the meaning of Chaplin’s film is given during the last scene. The audience sees that the flower girl now has her own flower shop, thanks to the kindness of the tramp. She is no longer blind, and now can truly see the world for what it is, thanks to the operation that the tramp’s generosity gave her. When she sees the tramp getting bullied on the street, she is amused and feels bad for him so she tries to offer him some change. Although she now has sight, she cannot see him for who he really is; the