Abstract

Syracuse, New York, a city of about 145,000 is the administrative seat for Onondaga County in Central New York. It is also infamous for having among the highest concentrations of Black poverty among cities of its size. Throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries communities of color in Syracuse have had disproportionately high rates of morbidity and premature mortality, including, for example, infant mortality, HIV/AIDs, lead poisoning, gun violence and other morbidities.

Public policy to address these disparities traditionally focused on individual behavior change. Beginning in the mid-1990s we developed an Action Anthropology-based approach, Community Action Research and Education (CARE), to address these disparities in collaboration with community members, university faculty, and agency staff. Using the CARE model, we have investigated the upstream causes of these disparities and brought the findings to bear on the development and implementation of public policy. Structural violence has been a key conceptual touchstone of this work.

This chapter discusses the value and challenges of using structural violence as a conceptual frame. It also shows how the concept can be an effective tool for community organizing.

The chapter appears in the De Gruyter Handbook of Structural Violence.