Inner-city black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence, but in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. This unwritten set of rules—based largely on an individual's ability
Following his award-winning work on inner-city violence, Code of the Street, sociologist Elijah Anderson introduces the concept of the “cosmopolitan canopy”—the urban island of civility that exists amidst the ghettos, suburbs, and ethnic enclaves wh
A compilation of some of The Atlantic’s most important writings on race and society over the past century and a half, featuring W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and m
