How does the color-line operate today? Dr. Elijah Anderson addresses how the “color line” is experienced and negotiated in everyday American life at the Annual Goldkamp Lecture

The Department of Criminal Justice held its annual Goldkamp Lecture on Friday, September 19, 2025, in memory of the late Professor John Goldkamp, recognizing his significant contributions to criminal justice research. Each year, graduate students nominate potential speakers, followed by a student vote to finalize the selection. This year, the department was fortunate to have Dr. Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at Yale University, to discuss how the color line continues to shape everyday American life, drawing on his intellectual journey and decades of scholarship as examples.

Dr. Anderson is recognized as one of the nation’s leading urban ethnographers, with research that focuses on urban inequality, race relations, and the Black American experience. During his lecture at Temple, he traced his academic path and explained how his latest work, Black in White Space, builds upon his first book, A Place on the Corner, and subsequent publications. Reflecting on his own life, Dr. Anderson described growing up in the Mississippi Delta, his family’s migration north during the Great Migration, and his time in Indiana, where he received his undergraduate degree. He began graduate school at the University of Chicago, where he first immersed himself in ethnographic research. To understand the everyday lives of Black men, he spent months in local bars and liquor stores in a Chicago ghetto, leading to one of his most influential books, A Place on the Corner. Emphasizing the importance of ethnography, Dr. Anderson noted how urban communities create “local knowledge” in response to their struggles, and how only by living alongside people and earning their trust can scholars faithfully capture their lives. As he explained, “This local knowledge gets manifested in various myths, rituals, but ultimately in the patterns of everyday life.”

Dr. Anderson situated his later works—Code of the Street, Streetwise, The Cosmopolitan Canopy and Black in White Space—as chapters in a broader effort to examine how the color line is negotiated in everyday American life. He described how structural inequalities, disinvestment and mistrust of institutions, like the police, lead residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods to develop their own codes of respect, which can also produce cycles of violence when credibility must be constantly defended. At the same time, he pointed to spaces such as Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, where people from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds interact under what he calls a “cosmopolitan canopy,” offering glimpses of civility and inclusion amid deep segregation. Still, he reminded us, exclusion persists through the “Black tax,” job discrimination, police brutality and racial barriers in housing. Throughout his research, Dr. Anderson underscored how structural inequalities and cultural adaptations intertwine to shape these lived realities. His lecture emphasized that even today, in the fabric of daily American life, many continue to struggle with racial inequality and division.