Yasser Payne, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, is the coauthor of  Murder Town, USA: Homicide, Structural Violence and Activism in Wilmington, with Brooklyn Hitchens and Darryl Chambers (Rutgers University Press, July 14, 2023). The book uses a street-ethnography approach to tell the story of 15 people formerly involved with the streets in Wilmington, Delaware, who became activists related to gun violence. 

Far too many poor Black communities struggle with gun violence and homicide. The result has been the unnatural contortion of Black families and the inter-generational perpetuation of social chaos and untimely death. Young people are repeatedly ripped away from life by violence, while many men are locked away in prisons. In neighborhoods like those of Wilmington, Delaware, residents routinely face the pressures of violence, death and incarceration. Murder Town, USA is thus a timely ethnography with an innovative structure: the authors helped organize 15 residents formerly involved with the streets and/or the criminal justice system to document the relationship between structural opportunity and experiences with violence in Wilmington's Eastside and Southbridge neighborhoods. 

Earlier scholars offered rich cultural analysis of violence in low-income Black communities, and yet this literature has mostly conceptualized violence through frameworks of personal responsibility or individual accountability. And even if acknowledging the pressure of structural inequality, most earlier researchers describe violence as the ultimate result of some moral failing, a propensity for crime and the notion of helplessness. Instead, in Murder Town USA, Payne, Hitchens, and Chamber, along with their collaborative team of street ethnographers, instead offer a radical re-conceptualization of violence in low-income Black communities by describing the penchant for violence and involvement in crime overall to be a logical, "resilient" response to the perverse context of structural inequality.