Structural Violence: You Don’t Need a Gun to Kill

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By Chaddrick Thomas


Not all violence bleeds.


Some violence shows up as eviction notices.

Empty fridges.

Unpaid medical bills.

Over-policed schools and underfunded ones.

Whole communities built like cages—and called “neighborhoods.”


This is structural violence:

The kind that doesn’t make headlines but shortens lifespans.

The kind that doesn’t leave bruises but breaks futures.

The kind this country is built on.

Fanon Said It Best


Frantz Fanon warned that oppression doesn’t always come with a gun.

It comes with laws. Schools. Banks. Hospitals.

He saw colonial systems that didn’t just dominate through force, but through design.


And America?

We’ve mastered it.

Structural Violence Is the System as Weapon


This violence is built into the blueprint:

  • Redlining: Decades of denying home loans and wealth to Black families, creating cycles of poverty.

  • Healthcare inequality: Black mothers dying during childbirth at triple the rate of white women.

  • Education apartheid: Public schools in low-income areas gutted while private schools thrive.

  • Environmental racism: Lead in the water. Smog in the air. Cancer in the soil.

  • Prison pipelines: Schools with metal detectors. Cops in classrooms. Truancy as a chargeable offense.


No one pulled a trigger. But people still died.

We’ve Been Trained Not to See It


We don’t call it violence because it looks like paperwork.

Like policy.

Like “that’s just the way things are.”


We’ve been conditioned to believe that violence is only physical.

But if a system keeps you hungry, sick, trapped, and voiceless—

That’s violence, too.

And It’s Intentional


Structural violence isn’t a byproduct—it’s a blueprint.

It’s how systems maintain control without getting their hands dirty.

  • Blame the victim.

  • Erase the history.

  • Make suffering seem like a personal failure instead of a political design.


This is why poverty gets criminalized.

Why survival gets punished.

Why being poor in America is treated like a crime.

CALL TO ACTION: Expose the Invisible

  1. Call it what it is. Don’t let people soften it with words like “inequity” or “disparity.” It’s violence.

  2. Map it out. Show how policies and institutions lead directly to suffering.

  3. Center the lived experience. Let those living in the fire speak—don’t just quote the data.

  4. Disrupt it. Organize. Build mutual aid. Create systems of care where the state refuses to.

Next Up: “The Criminal Justice Subculture: Law With a Fist Behind It”

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