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A man with Sterling’s arrest record would have been all but locked out of the legitimate economy. Men with criminal records constitute a third of the unemployed males between ages twenty-five and fifty-four. Sterling earned his living the way untold numbers of men in such circumstances do: vending on the streets. His death immediately recalled that of Eric Garner, who sold loose cigarettes on the street in Staten Island and also died at the hands of police officers. These men are a familiar sight in black communities: They pop into the local barbershop hawking music and movies. They stand outside the subway station selling socks and pantyhose. On rainy days they are the convenient purveyors of cheap umbrellas. This is a pedestrian labor force populated by men for whom hustles have taken the place of jobs. All informal economies carry the whiff of danger. A black man is thirteen times more likely to be murdered in this country than a white person; eighty-four per cent of the time it involves a firearm. But no amount of statistical palm-reading can foretell the risks borne by a black man with a criminal record who frequents poor neighborhoods and is known to conduct cash transactions. The gospel of the gun as a tool of self-protection is directed at middle-class whites, but it is most applicable to precisely the populations among whom they are most heavily prohibited—people who are poor and black.
full: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-police-killing-in-baton-rouge
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