More on the costs of racial exclusion: Race and violent crime in New York City, 1980–1990

Abstract

Neighborhood social organization theorists argue that the race-violence relationship is a spurious artifact of the differential exposure of Blacks to the community conditions that foster violence. The subculture of violence theory, in contrast, argues that values legitimizing violence are internalized, and therefore continue to influence behavior regardless of the contextual environment. In statistical terms, the former view implies an interaction between race and community contexts, while the latter does not. As a means to shed light on this debate, I test for interactions between race and structural disadvantage using data on New York City neighborhoods within a pooled 1980–1990 time series framework. The results show that the race-violence relationship varies significantly with structural contexts; it is, therefore, difficult to attribute the results solely to a subculture of violence indigenous to the Black community. Rather, the analysis demonstrates that as disadvantage and race become ecologically concentrated, so does race and violence.