Deaths of Despair in Black and White: Gun Violence, Political Economy, and the Case for Macro Intervention

This article argues that elevated levels of gun homicide and gun suicide among younger black men and middle-aged white men, respectively, are the consequences of a political economy that produces widespread despair among the most vulnerable segments of the laboring classes. Understood in this way, these phenomena share a common etiology whose roots can be traced to two major, temporally distinct developments: (1) postwar shifts in the political economy that redefined central cities as sites of black dislocation, and (2) the more recent intensification of globalization and investor class power that has redefined smaller cities, towns, and rural communities as sites of white dislocation. These transformations have rendered working-class blacks and whites (and others) vulnerable to a wide range of maladies and adverse social outcomes, including involvement in gun violence. In addition to examining these political-economic transformations and their effects on black and white working-class communities, this article also explores the divergent racialized manifestations of gun violence within these demographic groups. While micro and mezzo interventions are typically stressed to respond to these issues, their ultimate resolution requires recognition of their common roots in conditions of structurally imposed despair and the concomitant remedy of those conditions at the macro level.