The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story about the recently-released paperback edition of a volume edited by Elijah Anderson entitled, Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black and Male. The collection of sixteen essays, includes work by William Julius Wilson, Gerald D. Jaynes, and David Kairys, with a foreword by Cornel West.

The Inquirer reports:

They are overrepresented in the ranks of the unemployed and the incarcerated, and underrepresented as college students, as live-in husbands, and as fathers raising children. They are more likely than most to die early and violently. Perhaps most important, young black men are among the most misunderstood people in America.

To bring awareness and understanding to their plight and to offer solutions, sociologist Elijah Anderson has brought together a roster of eminent and emerging social scientists and activists in his latest work, Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black, and Male.

The review goes on to say…

Anderson has made certain to include the perspectives of emerging young thinkers as well, including his son Luke, a community organizer in Chicago; Waverly Duck, a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at Yale; and Imani Perry, a professor of law at Rutgers-Camden who is joining the faculty at Princeton University.

Anderson has long contended that in impoverished black communities, income is derived from three main sources: low-paying jobs, welfare, and an irregular, underground economy based on bartering, borrowing, hustling and street crime.

The failure of any one of those sources, he asserts, pushes individuals to one of the two others, and the disappearance of low-paying jobs and welfare drives people to the underground economy, which is governed by violence. This assertion is the premise of Anderson’s seminal books Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999) and A Place on the Corner (1978).

In his own essay, Anderson writes that inferior schooling, employment discrimination, and stereotypes have taken a heavy toll on the social capital of young black men.

“All this set the stage for the situation we face today. The social costs of impoverishment fell particularly hard on the heads of young black men who are feared by the rest of society and left to fend for themselves by white authorities,” Anderson writes. “In his alienation and use of violence, the contemporary poor young black male is a new social type peculiar to postindustrial America. This young man is in profound crisis. His social trajectory leads from the community to prison or cemetery, or at least to a life of trouble characterized by unemployment, discrimination and participation in an oppositional culture – which is how he goes about dealing with the alienation from society.”

The overwhelmingly positive review encourages interested readers to seek out this book to better understand an array of social problems, but reviewer Vernon Clark notes that “a weakness of the book is that the prescribed solutions are not nearly as concrete or commensurate in number as the relentless documentation of the problems and the long list of them.”

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