Department of Health Policy and Management, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 750 East Pratt Street, 15th floor, Baltimore, MD, 21202, USA.
Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Yale School of Public Health, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2024 Oct;358:117255. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117255. Epub 2024 Aug 15.
Despite the early promise of centering structural racism in explanatory models of firearm violence, there are noticeable gaps in what's been produced thus far; in particular, a deeper and more serious engagement with long-standing theories of racism is needed to further enrich our understanding of how structural inequalities produce unequal burdens of firearm-related harms. Thus, building on theories and concepts from a range of academic fields and Black philosophical perspectives, we developed a theoretical framework to help explain the role of place-based structural racism on firearm violence disparities. A central component of our framework is the concept racial capitalism, which contends that racial exploitation and the accumulation of assets depend on and reinforce one another. In this article, we present our framework and highlight how two processes related to racial capitalism-racialized dispossession and racialized spatial stigma-are connected with geographic disparities in firearm violence. We also present the results of an ecological cross-sectional study that reveals a potential key association between racial capitalism and firearm violence disparities on the neighborhood-level. We used a structural intersectionality approach and descriptive epidemiological methods to highlight and quantitatively describe spatial firearm violence disparities that could potentially be linked to the varying exposure of two dimensions of racial capitalism-historical redlining and contemporary racialized subprime mortgage lending. We found that sustained disadvantaged census tracts (tracts that were historically redlined and experienced higher contemporary subprime lending) experienced the highest burden of firearm violence in Baltimore City between 2015 and 2019. Our research suggests that racial capitalism could potentially be a root cause of firearm violence disparities. A theoretical framework based on racial capitalism can inform the development and usage of indicators and analytic methods for racism-related firearm violence research. Moreover, this framework can identify factors to prioritize in equity-based violence prevention policies and programs.
尽管将结构性种族主义置于枪支暴力解释模型的中心位置在早期有一定的前景，但迄今为止，相关研究仍存在明显的差距；特别是，需要更深入和更认真地探讨长期存在的种族主义理论，以进一步丰富我们对结构性不平等如何导致枪支相关伤害负担不平等的理解。因此，我们借鉴了一系列学术领域和黑人哲学观点的理论和概念，制定了一个理论框架，以帮助解释基于地点的结构性种族主义对枪支暴力差异的作用。我们框架的一个核心组成部分是种族资本主义的概念，该概念认为，种族剥削和资产积累是相互依存和相互强化的。在本文中，我们介绍了我们的框架，并强调了与种族资本主义有关的两个过程——种族化剥夺和种族化空间污名——如何与枪支暴力的地理差异相关联。我们还介绍了一项生态横断面研究的结果，该研究揭示了种族资本主义与邻里层面枪支暴力差异之间可能存在的一个关键关联。我们使用结构交叉性方法和描述性流行病学方法，突出和定量描述了潜在的枪支暴力空间差异，这些差异可能与种族资本主义的两个维度——历史红线划分和当代种族化次级抵押贷款放贷——的不同暴露有关。我们发现，在巴尔的摩市，从历史上被红线划分且经历更高当代次级抵押贷款放贷的持续处于不利地位的普查区（tracts）在 2015 年至 2019 年间枪支暴力负担最高。我们的研究表明，种族资本主义可能是枪支暴力差异的一个根本原因。基于种族资本主义的理论框架可以为与种族主义相关的枪支暴力研究的指标和分析方法的制定和使用提供信息。此外，该框架可以确定在基于公平的暴力预防政策和方案中需要优先考虑的因素。
