The Continuum of Structural Violence: Sustaining Exclusion through School Closures

In this paper we demonstrate the utility of structural violence as an analytical device to make visible intergenerational patterns of exclusion obscured by institutional arrangements initially established to represent and defend community interests. We apply an interdisciplinary critical analysis of the history of economic and social marginalization of neighborhoods to the recent closure of seven neighborhood elementary schools in South Sacramento. By stressing the importance of distribution as an important social arrangement that can cause injury to individuals and populations, we demonstrate how disparate impact, briefly defined as the unequal distribution of resources that affect life chances, has current as well as future effects on households and neighborhoods. We argue that patterns of structural violence are not only contingent upon historical processes but are also embedded prospectively, or in other words, into the future of neighborhood stability. We find that the structural violence continuum is a phenomenon embedded in the past, present, and future in a manner that constrains the inclusion of certain neighborhoods in the social and economic life of urban settlements.