Murder Town, USA

Homicide, Structural Violence, and Activism in Wilmington

Yasser Arafat Payne, Brooklynn K. Hitchens, Darryl L. Chambers

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781978817364, 9781978817371
• eBook ISBN: 9781978817388
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

James Short Senior Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology

Far 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Street Identity, Structural Violence, and Street PAR
• Part I: Context of Opportunity and Violence
• Part II: Management, Containment, and the Social Control of Black Wilmington
• Part III: Street Agency: Coping with and Ending the Structural Violence Complex
• Conclusion: Calling for a Radical Street Ethnography: Street PAR, SOR Theory, and the Bottom Caste
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Series List