Mayor Of New Orleans Summary

Recently the media has been covering stories of the amount of black lives being taken by the police. Statistics have shown that is not the case, that the loss of black lives are due to “black-on-black crime.” In this article, the mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu makes an effect to understand the root of this problem, of why African Americans are killing each other. The problem of race has been a continuous issue in America. New Orleans happens to be one of the top city in America with high rate of murder. When the person is convicted there is high price to pay due to Louisiana having one of the strictest sentencing in America. A lot can be learned from the example of New Orleans and its history of ongoing violence in Africa American communities.

He used both quantitative and qualitative analysis to explain the situation that New Orleans is facing. He presented numbers that showed for example, that 52% of African American men aren’t employed, which is one of the major reason behind the violence. Most of the sociological analysis was qualitative, where the author did personal interview with the people of New Orleans. He shared the conversations that he had with the mayor of New Orleans and there is also videos of his interview and his visit to the Angola prison. There was a variation between the people he spoke to in New Orleans. The mayor explained to Goldberg that there is epidemic going on and how we shouldn’t accept these norms when we see these violent acts happening all the time, instead of being a bystander, we should rise against it. When looking at the people incarcerated, the author shifts our attention to Angola known as America’s largest maximum security prison. The warden of Angola is Burl Cain, in the interviews with Cain, Goldberg gets to understand how Cain is trying to give the inmates a chance in life by trying to make them be useful to society and making them realize that violence isn’t the only way to let your anger out. He used the term “moral rehabilitation,” where inmates work at plantations and provide locally grown food for the prison. Those with shorted sentences are trained to be ministers so that they are good influences

From looking at this article in a sociological perspective, the only critic is the lack of much more scientific data to support this epidemic of African Americans killing each other. Since there is such a big number in the amount of African American who are killed every year, we should know the percentage of how many of the murderers and victims were African Americans. Other concepts such as social conflict theory could have been used in this essay to support the authors claims. If he had used the social conflict theory, he could have shown the conflict between the dominant group(whites) and minority group(blacks). Society clearly caters to the dominant group and that social inequality arises due to to race, sex, class and age. He could have shown the incarceration rates among white people and compared with those of