INTRODUCTION
AN ENDURING EMERGENCY
In early August 2018 I took a trip to Chicago, the city where I grew up. While I was there, the city suffered what newspapers described as one of its deadliest weekends in recent memory. Between 5:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon, August 3, and 6:00 a.m. on Monday, August 6, at least seventy-one people were shot in the city, of whom twelve died. Thirty of the victims were shot within a single three-hour period early Sunday morning.
The violence was overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods on the city’s South and West Sides. Eight people were shot at one block party in South Side’s Gresham community alone. Anyone familiar with these neighborhoods would know that they are not strangers to this kind of violence, and that though the sheer amount of violence that week was unusual, its concentration in these particular places was not.1
The twelve people who died in the weekend’s shootings ranged in age from seventeen to fifty-nine, and they were a diverse group in other ways as well. Several were young men with extensive criminal records who were gunned down in what appeared to be gang-related disputes. Twenty-six-year-old Kendall Brown, killed by shots from a passing Jeep on the South Side around 1:00 a.m. on Sunday, had been arrested fourteen times between August 2009 and April 2014, including five times for domestic battery and once for being a felon in possession of a firearm. Others were the victims of trivial conflicts that escalated into deadly confrontations. Seventeen-year-old Kenny Ivory was shot twice after getting into an argument with some other boys while riding his bicycle near his home in Gresham. Thirty-year-old Earl Young was with his fiancée at her South Side apartment when they got into an argument with a neighbor about her puppies “peeing from her third-floor balcony onto his below.” The neighbor shot Earl in the back.2
Still other victims were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fifty-nine-year-old contractor Frank Warren was taking a lunch break just before noon on Saturday, on the grass in front of a house where he was working on a pool deck, in South Side’s Englewood community, when two men across the street began shooting at each other. Frank was hit twice in the abdomen and died shortly thereafter.3 Seventeen-year-old Jahnae Patterson, the lone female homicide victim that weekend, was at a late-night block party in North Lawndale on the West Side with her three best friends. As the four girls walked down the street to use the bathroom, two men began firing toward people at the block party. Jahnae was hit multiple times; she tried to run away but collapsed and died in the doorway of a nearby apartment building. She had hoped to become a nurse and had planned to buy a house someday with Chinyere Jordan, one of the friends who’d gone with her to the block party. “She shouldn’t have lost her life right here in front of everybody,” Chinyere said afterward. “We weren’t supposed to see that happen.”4
There was a grim sense of déjà vu to some of the twelve killings. Fifty-year-old Ron Johnson, who was shot in the head not far from his home in the Altgeld Gardens neighborhood on the far South Side shortly after midnight on Monday morning, had just the day before gone to the funeral of one of his best friends—also shot to death in Altgeld Gardens.5
But though the twelve people killed over the weekend spanned a wide range of ages and social circumstances, almost all of them had one striking thing in common. With the sole exception of Frank Warren, the Englewood contractor, all were African American.6 And as with the concentration of these deaths in certain neighborhoods, there was nothing new about that, either. Of the 564 killings in Chicago from August 2017 to August 2018, the race of the victim was recorded for 504. Of those 504 victims, 411 were African American, 49 were Hispanic, 43 were white, and one was Asian.7 In the city as a whole, only 31 percent of the population is African American; roughly the same proportion is non-Hispanic white, 29 percent is Latino, and 6 percent Asian. African Americans, then, were less than a third of Chicago’s population but more than 80 percent of its victims of homicide.8 By contrast, non-Hispanic whites, also a third of the city’s population, were only 9 percent of homicide victims.
The media, not only in Chicago but nationally, expressed predictable shock over this weekend of violence, and speculated over what it was about the city of Chicago in particular that could explain it. But while Chicago’s homicide rate is very high—at 24 homicides per 100,000 people in 2017, it was roughly four times the rate for the country as a whole—it is routinely outpaced by that of many other American cities. Two cities just a stone’s throw from Chicago—St. Louis, Missouri, and Gary, Indiana—racked up homicide rates in 2017 that were well over two and a half times Chicago’s. Across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, meanwhile, the perennially violence-torn small city of East St. Louis, Illinois, achieved a homicide rate of 111 per 100,000—close to five times Chicago’s rate of violent death.9
And in Chicago, as in all of these cities, violence has stalked the streets and homes for a long time. The city actually suffered its worst year for homicide in 1974, and though the numbers have fluctuated since then, there has never been a time in recent history that Chicago (or St. Louis, or New Orleans, or Detroit, or Baltimore) has not experienced levels of violent death that are otherwise seen only in the most violent countries of the developing world.10 And in every one of those cities, black Americans have been dramatically overrepresented among the victims.
In response to the especially deadly August weekend, Chicago’s police superintendent rushed to insist that “this is not a widespread issue among citizens of this city. This is a small subset of individuals who think they can play by their own rules because they continue to get a slap on the wrist when we arrest them.”11 The problem, he said, was that those who engaged in violence were not being held to account for their actions. “I hear people holding [the police] accountable all the time,” he said. “I never hear people saying those individuals out here on the streets need to stop pulling the trigger.” Those people, the superintendent concluded, “get a free pass from everybody, and they shouldn’t.” Chicago’s then mayor, Rahm Emanuel, called for an “attitudinal change” in the city. “This might not be politically correct,” he opined, “but I know the power of what faith and family can do.” A local city alderman said that it was up to “the community” to step up to put an end to the violence. The city promised to deploy an extra 430 police officers to the hardest-hit neighborhoods. When, despite the greatly increased police deployment, the city suffered another sixty shootings the following weekend, the police superintendent again reassured residents that the violence did not reflect anything about Chicago itself but only represented the actions of a “small element.”12 The following year, after two only slightly less deadly weekends—fifty-two shootings and eight deaths in the first weekend in June 2019, fifty-nine shot and seven killed over the first weekend in August—the response was not much different.13
And there was nothing new about this essentially evasive response, either. In Chicago, as in every other American city where violence is endemic, sudden flare-ups typically bring an initial flurry of outrage, sincere expressions of anger—usually directed at that “small element” who are seen as mainly responsible—and then a waning of interest. Not much is done to deal with the underlying problem, and the city goes back, at least for a while, to life as usual. Most of the time, in most places, violence in the black community doesn’t make the headlines or even rate a mention on nighttime TV. For most people who live outside the most stricken communities, deadly violence is just part of the background noise of contemporary American urban life, something that happens in “bad” neighborhoods—neighborhoods that are not theirs. That kind of complacency is harder to find in communities like North Lawndale or Englewood. But the people who live in those places usually have relatively little voice and even less political influence, which both serves to cover over the everyday violence that surrounds them and to ensure that the deeper conditions that cause it remain mostly unaddressed.
The result is that America continues to tolerate one of the most fundamental inequalities imaginable: a radical disparity in the very prospect of survival itself. And we tolerate it despite the fact that disparities in violence on this scale have been, for all practical purposes, eliminated in every other advanced industrial society. Other wealthy countries, to be sure, also have racial and ethnic differences in the risks of violent death and injury, but none come even close to the level of excess mortality, disability, and suffering that we have come to tacitly accept as part of the American landscape. And those stark gaps in the risks of violence do not stand alone: they are only one particularly glaring example of a much broader pattern of systemic racial inequalities in health and well-being that sets the United States off sharply from every other advanced nation in the world.14
Copyright © 2020 by Elliott Currie