Dr. Elijah Anderson, a professor of sociology at Yale University, spoke to a capacity crowd Thursday at the Jackson State University Student Center.
More than 400 students thronged to Ballroom A on the center’s second floor, lining the walls, to hear the noted urban ethnographer speak about his latest book, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life.
Called “one of our best urban ethnographers” by the New York Times Book Review, Anderson has introduced the concept of the “cosmopolitan canopy” — or urban islands of civility amid segregated ghettos, suburbs, and ethnic enclaves.
The book explains how city dwellers interact across racial, ethnic, and social borders. Their “canopies” of social interaction create “a synergy that becomes a cosmopolitan zone,” he says.
In such an atmosphere, civility is the norm, but “incidents can arise that threaten and rend the canopy, including scenes of tension involving borders of race, class, sexual preference, and gender,” Anderson says.
Since the canopies are diverse, and reinforced daily through social interaction, however, they can also reinforce and spread tolerance through mutual understanding, Anderson says.
His previous books include the award-winning Code of the Street and Streetwise. His writings have also appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and the New York Times Book Review.