The Production of Local Race Relations: Race, Crime, and Politics in Multiracial Neighborhoods

• In Event: 467 - Regular Session. New Directions in the Study of the Dynamics of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

Abstract

How do perceptions of race relations—such as the belief that racial tension exists around a given issue—emerge and how are they reproduced over time? In this paper, I examine the issue of public safety in two multiracial Chicago neighborhoods. In one neighborhood, public safety became highly racialized, while it remained largely uncontested in the other one. I discuss the role that electoral campaigns and community organizations play in producing divergent racial meanings of public safety. These meanings, I show, have measurable consequences for multiracial community and civic activism. I discuss implications for the study of race relations and urban sociology.

Author

• Jan Doering, University of Chicago