Elijah Anderson spent much of his career doing ethnographic studies in the poor, inner-city communities of Philadelphia. From his field research, he came to believe that people, especially young black men who lived in the most economically depressed, drug-infested, and crime-ridden sections of the city, had to contend with weakened rules of civil law. In the place of the usual civil laws governing people’s behavior evolved a “code of the street” (Anderson, 1999, p. 9). Anderson argues that at the core of this code is a set of informal rules organized around a search for respect that governs public social