Description
Book SynopsisFar too many poor Black communities struggle with gun violence and homicide. The result has been the unnatural contortion of Black families and the inter-generational perpetuation of social chaos and untimely death. Young people are repeatedly ripped away from life by violence, while many men are locked away in prisons. In neighborhoods like those of Wilmington, Delaware, residents routinely face the pressures of violence, death, and incarceration.
Murder Town, USA is thus a timely ethnography with an innovative structure: the authors helped organize fifteen residents formerly involved with the streets and/or the criminal justice system to document the relationship between structural opportunity and experiences with violence in Wilmington's Eastside and Southbridge neighborhoods.
Earlier scholars offered rich cultural analysis of violence in low-income Black communities, and yet this literature has mostly conceptualized violence through frameworks of personal responsibility or individual accountability. And even if acknowledging the pressure of structural inequality, most earlier researchers describe violence as the ultimate result of some moral failing, a propensity for crime, and the notion of helplessness. Instead, in
Murder Town USA, Payne, Hitchens, and Chamber, along with their collaborative team of street ethnographers, instead offer a radical re-conceptualization of violence in low-income Black communities by describing the penchant for violence and involvement in crime overall to be a logical, "resilient" response to the perverse context of structural inequality.
Trade Review“Murder Town, USA covers essential terrain for sociologists and other social scientists to more aggressively venture into such that the complexities of contemporary African-American life can be more fully unpacked. The scholarship is sound and the writing is clear.”
-- Alford A. Young Jr. * author of From the Edge of the Ghetto: African Americans and the World of Work *
“Most debates about the urban gun violence epidemic exclude the voices of those who are most grievously impacted. By centering the experiences of street-identified residents of Wilmington, Delaware and situating them within their structural context,
Murder Town, USA is required reading for anyone in search of solutions.”
-- Jamie J. Fader * author of On Shifting Ground: Constructing Manhood on the Margins *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Street Identity, Structural Violence, and Street PAR 1
Part I: Context of Opportunity and Violence
1 A City of Banks: A Long Legacy of Economic Violence and Crime 27
2 “Welcome to Wilmington—A Place to Be Somebody”: Negotiating City Culture and Building Rapport 41
3 “Murder Town, USA”: Reframing Gun Violence and Resilience in a Small City 57
Part II: Management, Containment, and the Social Control of Black Wilmington
4 "I'm Still Waiting Man . . . on That Golden Ticket!" Education and Economic Justice, a Dream Deferred––in Perpetuity 87
5 “F-ck the Police!” Standing Up to the Policing Machine 113
6 “I Don’t Let These Felonies Hold Me Back!” How
The Streets Radically Reframed Re-entry 135
Part III: Street Agency: Coping with and Ending the Structural Violence Complex
7 “Brenda’s Got a Baby”: Competing Roles of Black Women as Matriarchs and Hustlers 157
8 “Street Love”: How Psychological and Social Well-Being Interrupts Gun Violence 181
9 “Winter is Coming!” White Walkers, Revolutionary Change, and the Streets Call for Structural Transformation 196
Conclusion: Calling for a Radical Street Ethnography: Street PAR, SOR Theory, and the Bottom Caste 217
Notes 233
Bibliography 263
Index 000
