The Next Cause: Murder Equality?
03/22/2017
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF

2016 Hillary voters or 2015 gun violence?

From The Guardian last January:

Like income inequality, murder inequality in America is stark
To illustrate how much St. Louis is beset by Murder Inequality, The Guardian provided these two graphics. First, a utopian St. Louis of perfect Murder Equality:

Screenshot 2017-03-21 23.00.30

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Second, the real dystopian St. Louis of Murder Inequality:

Screenshot 2017-03-21 23.01.22

It may look like murder in St. Louis correlates with where blacks live, but you’re wrong! It correlates with racial segregation.

Anyway, we don’t call it “murder” anymore because “murder” is associated in the uneducated popular mind with “murderers,” which implies agency. Instead, we now call it “gun violence.” And gun violence “falls,” like the dew, if the dew mostly fell on black segregated neighborhoods.

Gun violence is a regressive tax that falls heaviest on neighborhoods already struggling with poverty, unemployment, and failing schools. The unequal burden of violence is also marked by intense racial disparities.

“It’s not about race, per se, it’s about how other conditions are racialized, are racially inequitable,” said Lauren Krivo, a Rutgers University sociologist who studies the geography of race and crime.

Occam’s Butterknife.

[Comment at Unz.com]

Print Friendly and PDF