In an every day sense, people who live in bad urban neighborhoods in the United States are less affected by actual violence than they are by young men who have hardened themselves to violence. The issue is one of the almost constant implicit threat of violence. If you’re paying attention, what you notice in nicer neighborhoods or in suburbs is that nobody in your every day life is posturing in a way that’s designed to indicate to that they are ready for physical violence if necessary.
I have a theory that men are more sensitive to this than women, which might explain why some conservative men appear to liberals to be more, “afraid” of big cities. I think what’s happening is that these are men who are especially attuned to implicit threats of violence and who are correctly picking it up everywhere they go in urban areas.
When my wife and I are out in a city I will often clock a guy doing this and then it will distract me for as long as he is present in my environment and my wife can sometimes get kind of annoyed because I seem distracted and she’s not sure why.
This is another case of perception being reality. That distraction I’m feeling, that sense of uneasiness, that’s an actual thing that actually exists in the actual physical world. It is in principle measurable, though it appears in no statistical record.
In fact, pretty much every middle-class norm is designed to make strangers feel comfortable, to signal loudly and repeatedly, “I am not a threat to you.”
https://twitter.com/wanyeburkett/status/1821886939882254495
In bad neighborhoods the opposite is pervasive. Young men, even those who might not necessarily want to harm you, nevertheless signal by default that they are ready for violence if necessary.
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