Coping in Murder Town USA: How Urban Black Women Adapt to Structural Strain in a Violent, Small City

• In Event: 2304 - Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) Research Session: Issues in Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Stratification

Abstract

I utilize a mixed-method approach based on 300 surveys and 52 in-depth interviews with low-income, urban Black women and girls ages 16 to 54 from two high-crime neighborhoods in Wilmington, Delaware. I examine the variation in adapting to and coping with structural strain, specifically through the use of violence and/or crime or involvement in street life, the spectrum of networking behaviors and activities that manifest through both legal and illegal activities in urban Black spaces, as a means of personal and economic survival. Applying a cross-sectional design and a methodological framework called Street Participatory Action Research (Street PAR), I address four research questions: First, I examine the relationship between structural strain and street life among these women across age. Second, I analyze variations in how low-income, urban Black women cope with and adapt to structural strain, and how some strains are potentially more conducive to involvement in street life than others. Third, I examine how coping mechanisms—social, psychological and economic— mediate the effects of the strain-crime and strain-violence relationships among the women. Lastly, I analyze how racial-ethnic identity moderates the relationship between strain, violence and crime, and how awareness of Blackness as an identity strengthens or weakens this relationship. Ultimately, I argue that although structural strain imbues deleterious effects on poor communities of color, modes of adaptation and coping strategies differ among urban Black women as a function of their relationship to the streets and access to structural means of opportunity.

Author

• Brooklynn K. Hitchens, Rutgers University, New Brunswick