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41 Criminology 645 (2003)
Structural Inequality and Homicide: An Assessment of the Black-White Gap in Killings

handle is hein.journals/crim41 and id is 659 raw text is: STRUCTURAL INEQUALITY AND HOMICIDE: AN ASSESSMENT OF THE BLACK-WHITE GAP IN KILLINGS* MARfA B. VPLEZ University of Iowa LAUREN J. KRIVO RUTH D. PETERSON Ohio State University This paper examines the relationship between race and violent crime by directly modeling the racial gap in homicide offending for large cen- tral cities for 1990. We evaluate the role of black-white differences in aspects of both disadvantage and resources in explaining which places have wider racial disparities in lethal violence. The results show that where residential segregation is higher, and where whites' levels of homeownership, median income, college graduation, and professional workers exceed those for blacks to a greater degree, African Americans have much higher levels of homicide offending than whites. Based on these results, we conclude that the racial homicide gap is better explained by the greater resources that exist among whites than by the higher levels of disadvantage among blacks. KEYWORDS: Violence, vengeance, conflict management. Rates of lethal violence offending among blacks have ranged from 6.2 to 9.5 times that for whites over the past two decades (U.S. Department of Justice, 2000). Thus, researchers have focused considerable attention on understanding the sources of racial inequality in homicide (e.g., Harer and Steffensmeier, 1992; Krivo and Peterson, 2000; Messner and Golden, 1992; Parker, 2001). The most common approach in examining this differential is the analysis of separate models of white and black rates of killing across places (Harer and Steffensmeier, 1992; LaFree and Drass, 1996; Lee, 2000; Messner and Golden, 1992; Messner et al., 2001; Parker, 2001; Parker and * Direct correspondence to: Maria B. V61ez, Department of Sociology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242 (maria-b-velez@uiowa.edu). We would like to thank Yolonda Brown, John Reynolds, and Helen D. Rizzo for their research assistance, and Barbara House for computer programming. This research was supported by a sub- grant to Ruth D. Peterson and Lauren J. Krivo from the National Science Foundation's National Consortium on Violence Research (SBR-9513040). This paper was presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America, Washington D.C. CRIMINOLOGY VOLUME 41 NUMBER 3 2003