SOCIAL ANATOMY OF RACIAL AND ETHNIC DISPARITIES IN VIOLENCE
"The public health of the United States has long been compromised by inequality in the burden of personal violence. African Americans are six times more likely to be murdered than whites, a crime that is overwhelmingly intra-racial in nature. Homicide also is the leading cause of death among young African Americans, and both police records and self-reported surveys show disproportionate involvement in serious violence among blacks. Surprisingly, however, Latinos experience lower rates of violence overall than blacks despite being generally poorer, and Latino rates have been converging with those of whites in recent years."
"Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that African Americans are segregated by neighborhoods and thus differentially exposed to key risk and protective factors, an essential ingredient to understanding the black-white disparity in violence. The race-related neighborhood features predicting violence are percent professional/managerial workers, moral/legal cynicism, and the concentration of immigration. We found no systematic evidence that neighborhood- or individual-level predictors of violence interacted with race/ethnicity. The relationships we observed thus appeared to be generally robust across racial/ethnic groups. We also found no significant racial or ethnic disparities in trajectories of change in violence."
Humans have evolved two fundamental syndromes of survival, guardian and commerce. Guardian and commerce are fundamentally different. The guardian is slow, it’s serious; it cares about group welfare. It reserves the right to kill. It will go to war if you threaten it. It reserves the right to be duplicitous, and it shuns commerce.
Commerce, on the other hand, is quick, effective, highly creative, and it’s honest - because you can’t do business with somebody for very long unless you’re honest. When you get the two together, you get a hybrid. From our perspective, if you get commerce into the guardian, you corrupt it. If you get the guardian into commerce, you slow it down. As a social collective, Blacks in America have completely surrendered the guardian syndrome and have consequently been productized by and in the pursuit of commerce. Because commerce knows no boundaries and eschews the guardian - the one-sided process driven by commerce has spiralled out of control causing ever increasing damage to the black social collective.
Unless black managerial and professional workers move back into the hood in droves, and, reinstall a stabilizing guardian syndrome within our social collective that provides moral, legal, educational and commercial impetus for the whole - the hood is for all intents and purposes, a collective lost cause incapable of bootstrapping itself out of its present plight.
Posted by at December 23, 2004 05:14 PM | TrackBack