Scottsdale, Arizona

Scottsdale surfaces as an emblem of insulated suburban life — sun-bleached streets, manicured lawns, and a civic calm that reads as protection rather than exposure. Leo summons the name as a rhetorical boundary: a place where the weapons tearing through Black neighborhoods do not travel, a sanitized byway of affluence and distance that sharpens the moral indictment of political compromise. The city functions less as mapped terrain than as a social mirror, its bright ordinariness amplifying the grief and urgency felt elsewhere.