Structural Racism and the Segregation of Violence in Ethnoracial Neighborhoods

Scholars have debated why crime rates are consistently higher in some ethnoracial neighborhoods than in others for nearly a century. We move beyond prior research to test the hypothesis that disparities in violent crime are a function of racialized income segregation, a central mechanism of structural racism. Drawing from the second wave of the National Neighborhood Crime Study, which documents recent sociodemographic conditions and violent crime in 8,227 neighborhoods nested within 61 cities circa 2008-2016, we estimate multilevel models with controls at the neighborhood- and city-levels. Consistent with the racial invariance thesis, the models reveal that racialized income segregation fully explains heightened violence in Black, Latinx, minority, and multi-ethnic neighborhoods relative to White. We conclude that Massey’s (1996) image of an increasingly polarized world, one in which the trend is towards race and income segregation, does indeed have profound implications for explaining ethnoracial disparities in violent crime.