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: Governing Through Crime

The Strangers We Know

By Jonathan Simor

As sociologists of urban American have powerfully documented, our inner city neighborhoods of highly concentrated poverty have suffered under a powerful stigma of crime fear that influences almost all aspects of economic and social life from the unwillingness of retail enterprises to open in such neighborhoods even when federal welfare transfers assure a profitable market for at least some essentials (like groceries) to the willingness of the police to assume that virtually anyone of the right age and gender on the street is involved in gangs and crime. In many respects this stigma has now replaced (and arguably reproduced) the stigma once associated with non-White racial status in American (and especially "Blackness"). The other side of this equation is the huge "pass" middle class Americans give neighborhoods that are coded as middle class (where most people have jobs and a plurality of them, at least, are white...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on December 30, 2010 (boomark / email).