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Overview
"This book explores the societal construction of "black-on-black violence" - referring to the 1980s when acts of aggression among African American perpetrators and victims increased. Massive job losses, debased identities, and rampant physical decay made American blacks seem ripe for explosive behavior. Many people blamed black lifestyle, values, and culture. David Wilson shows how America imbued a process of violence with race and accepted it as one of the country's most vexing ills during the Reagan era and afterward. Based on statistics, ethnographies, anecdotal accounts, and national reportage, these findings are hard to dispute." Wilson tells of prominent conservative and liberal writers, reporters, and politicians who collectively nurtured this issue, then parlayed it into "truth" in the public mind. Mixing memoirs, critical geographic studies, and race theory, the book shows how vulnerable groups of society can become pawns in an acute process of racial demonization and how, in America, this behavior allowed blacks to be marginalized.Synopsis
Wilson (geography, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) examines how conservative and liberal discourses of "black-on-black violence" were constructed in the United States in the 1980s and describes their respective "fields of understanding" about cities, inner cities, African American youth, inner city institutions, and urban politicians. He argues that both discourses coalesced around the concept of a dysfunctional underclass culture and considers why such an idea resonated with mainstream America. Finally, he documents how politicians and the media used the discourse of "black-on-black violence" pin the blame for a spreading crime panic on inner city black people. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR