Podcast #115: Jill Leovy on Murder and History in America

By Tracy O'Neill, Social Media Curator
June 7, 2016

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In the United States, black men make up six percent of the population but are nearly forty percent of those murdered. How can this happen? In Jill Leovy's Ghettoside, the journalist investigates, focusing particularly on Los Angeles. Every year NYPL’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism is given to journalists whose books have brought clarity and public attention to important issues, events, or policies. This year, NYPL was proud to name Leovy the winner of the award, and for this week's episode of the New York Public Library podcast, we're proud to present Leovy on murder and history in America.

Jill Leovy

Leovy spoke about her decision to name the race of murder victims in her writing, a move meant to highlight the disproportionate rate of homicide in black communities:

"I had people angry at me about it, and I took some criticism for it. The criticism was that the reason journalism adopted that convention in the first place, that it was irrelevant information to talk about race, that it was potentially stigmatizing information to talk about race, and that you shouldn't include that in a news report. I guess I felt that the disproportion in death rates were so urgent and so important that it just had to part of the conversation, but I had other people, including some colleagues of mine, including other journalists, that I was treading on ground that could be seen as racist."

To address the problem of violent death, Leovy has concluded that we will need to more powerfully combine qualitative and quantitative methods:

"We need more than correlation. We need to actually see and document the mechanics with what's going on with crime before we draw any conclusions, and that is very hard to do. You can't just sit in an office and look at data. You need to combine qualitative studies with quantitative studies. You have to get out there and observe and follow the dynamics of things and watch them, and then you also have to do the data analysis. It's not either or. It needs to be both things, and if you're going to say, for example, that saturation of policing tactics suppress crime and that the numbers show that, you need to also show me how. Show me the mechanisms. Tell me the observations."

Asked about the most surprising thing she learned in reporting Ghettoside, Leovy responded that she has, in fact, found more questions. She points to the exciting possibilities of historical research in understanding our present conditions:

"At the end of the day, I have spiraled into a maelstrom of bigger questions, personally. Ghettoside is just the tip of the iceberg for me. This work that I did on homicide made me think about law completely differently. It made me think about violence completely differently. It made me think about race completely differently. It made me see the history of this country in an entirely different way... There's still so much work to be done, and I've been encouraged especially that there seems to be an uptick in interest in Reconstruction and the Redemption Period because I think there are huge uncharted zones in that history and that if we did understand what went on, it would change our view."

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