Divergent Social Worlds: Neighborhood Crime and the Racial-Spatial Divide

Notes

127 Notes Chapter 2 1. In Columbus, only twenty-six tracts (13 percent) averaged one or more murders per year from 1999 to 2001. 2. Note that the rates for Los Angeles do not include rapes; the police department did not provide data for this offense. Rapes constitute a small portion of reported violent crimes at just 0.8 percent in Los Angeles and in the nation as a whole (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2001). 3. Over 40 percent of all deaths of African American males age fifteen to twenty-nine are due to homicide. Over 20 percent of deaths among Hispanic males of these ages are homicides. As a cause of death for white nonHispanic males, homicide ranks fourth for ages fifteen to nineteen (4.3 percent of all deaths), third for ages twenty to twenty-four (4.6 percent of all deaths), fifth for ages twenty-five to twenty-nine (4.6 percent of all deaths), and fifth for ages thirty to thirty-four (3.6 percent of all deaths). 4. With Omi and Winant’s racial formation perspective, both social structure and cultural representations are critical to how race is created, used, reproduced , and changed. Here we emphasize the structural component because of its centrality to our approach and that of others theorizing about racial inequality. 5. These are not the only authors who provide structural theoretical perspectives on racial inequality. Rather, our discussion is intended to illustrate the types of structural theoretical approaches being applied to understand the meaning of race in society. Examples of other noteworthy perspectives include laissez-faire racism (Bobo 2004; Bobo, Kluegel, and Smith 1997) and structural racism (Aspen Institute 2004; Grant-Thomas and powell 2009; powell 2007). Further, we do not mean to deny the distinctions that exist across the views of various race scholars. Rather, we intend to point up the essential commonalities emphasized in structurally based race approaches. 6. For 1960 the Census Bureau reported data for “nonwhites,” while for 2007 it provided data for “blacks.” 7. As we were preparing this book, the collapse of the subprime market was a serious contributor to the major economic recession that began in 2008. The Obama administration and the U.S. Congress are now developing policies and legislation to stabilize the housing market and the broader economy. 8. Of additional importance, the direction of influence between preferences for integration and actual behavioral integration is from preferences to actual integration, not vice versa. Indeed, actual neighborhood integration with minorities has no effect on one’s preferences for such integration (Charles 2006). 9. Claude Fischer and his colleagues (2004) show that the decline in blackwhite segregation extends back to 1970. 10. In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537 [1896]) legalized segregation through the doctrine of “separate but equal.” Such legalized segregation was not overturned until the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (347 U.S. 483 [1954]). 11. Crime under these circumstances represents what Robert Merton (1938) and other strain theorists (for example, Messner and Rosenfeld 2001) describe as innovative behavior. 12. Defining concentrated disadvantage as the top quarter of disadvantage for all U.S. neighborhoods, Sampson and his colleagues (2008) found a higher proportion of white (and Latino) children living in Chicago areas of concentrated disadvantage. However, under this definition, 97 percent of African American children included in their Chicago survey lived in such conditions , again making comparisons impossible. 13. Census tracts are small, relatively permanent statistical subdivisions of a county or statistically equivalent entity delineated by local agencies under U.S. Census Bureau guidelines. They generally include between 1,500 and 8,000 people, with an optimum population size of 4,000. Tracts are designed to be relatively homogeneous with respect to social, economic, and housing characteristics (available at: http:/ /www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/ glossry2.pdf; accessed March 1, 2010). Given their size and design, census tracts are the best available units approximating neighborhoods for which a wide range of data are available throughout the United States. Census tracts can cross city boundaries; the NNCS includes 9,593 tracts that are wholly or partly within the boundaries of the 91 cities. Excluded from the data set are 623 whole or partial tracts with small populations (less than 300) and 303 cases for which the police department provided no crime data. A large portion of the 926 excluded tracts (756, or 82 percent) are partial tracts where only a small area...