Murder Town, USA : Homicide, Structural Violence, and Activism in Wilmington

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. Contents Introduction: Street Identity, Structural Violence, and Street PAR Part One. Context of Opportunity and Violence Chapter 1 A City of Banks Chapter 2 “Welcome to Wilmington—A Place to Be Somebody” Negotiating City Culture and Building Rapport Chapter 3 “Murder Town, USA” Reframing Gun Violence and Resilience in a Small City Part Two. Management, Containment, and the Social Control of Black Wilmington Chapter 4 “I’m Still Waiting Man . . . on That Golden Ticket!” Chapter 5 “F-ck the Police!” Chapter 6 “I Don’t Let These Felonies Hold Me Back!” Part Three. Street Agency: Coping with and Ending the Structural Violence Complex Chapter 7 “Brenda’s Got a Baby” Competing Roles of Black Women as Matriarchs and Hustlers Chapter 8 “Street Love” Chapter 9 “Winter Is Coming!” White Walkers, R evolutionary Change, and the Streets Call for Structural Transformation Conclusion: Calling for a Radical Street Ethnography: Street PAR, SOR Theory, and the Bottom Caste Notes Bibliography Index About the Authors