Blood in the Rust Belt: Mourning and Memorialization in the Context of Community Violence

Abstract

This paper examines the use by those living in impoverished neighborhoods of color in Syracuse, NY, of artifacts and rituals of memorialization in response to intense ongoing violence. This work is part of a longitudinal, communityuniversity action anthropology collaboration on trauma due to neighborhood violence. This Rust Belt city of 145,000 residents had 30 murders in 2016, the highest murder rate in New York State and one of the highest nationwide. Since at least 2009, the majority of Syracuse's homicides resulted from neighborhood violence in which adolescent and young adult members from competing turf areas carry out ongoing feuds. Neighbors, coworkers, family members, and friends of murder victims face trauma, including emotional and somatic symptoms. There is little public recognition of the deep pain and grief experienced by community members. In response, community memorialization takes place through a process of acknowledging key events with symbols, folk art, martyrdom, and language. These artifacts express shared values, even when those values are contrary to and in resistance to values of the larger society. We compare these practices to those seen in civil conflict areas to suggest that such memorialization may unfortunately fuel ongoing violence through processes of social contagion. In late 2015, a 15-year-old high school sophomore was killed in a drive-by shooting as he was sitting on a porch in the early evening. Around his neck, he wore the laminated photographs of his three good friends who had all previously been murdered (House 2015). The young man literally carried his memories of his friends with him, honoring their lives. The shooting prompted the lockdown of the Syracuse University campus a mile and a half away (Pucci 2015), yet to our knowledge, neither this murder victim nor his deceased friends have been commemorated in their own school; there have been no scholarships, no plaques, no statues erected in their memory, and no minute of silence. In the comments section in the local newspaper , many of the writers blamed the decedent and his parents for his death, while a community member noted, "If a kid dies in a car crash, runs into a tree, drunk driving in another school district, they'll stop, offer counseling, right, to anyone who that needs, and then only resume curriculum after that." In this article, we examine the memorialization of friends, family, and compatriots in the context of profound poverty and ongoing neighborhood violence. We see the social practices that we describe in this article as preserving and extending the social identities of the deceased (Unruh 1983; Walter 2015) and as strategies through which people who often find themselves marginalized can shape the social life of their communities to give

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