Question

• Is racism predictable?
• What factor plays a larger part in the prevalence of racist attitudes, is it the education level or geography/neighborhood? Why?
• What are the solutions to solve the problem of racism?

Answer 1

Racial discrimination persists and profoundly affects the life chances and routine situations of everyday life for racial minorities in the United States (Essed 1991; Feagin 1991). Despite the persistence of racism, the influence of racial discrimination on social behaviors remains extremely underdeveloped (Brown 2008). Criminal behavior is no exception. Although scholars have long been interested in explaining racial disparities in street crime—the idea that racial discrimination might be implicated in offending was presented as early as 1899 by Du Bois (“In the case of the Negro there were special causes for the prevalence of crime … he was the object of stinging oppression and ridicule, and paths of advancement open to many were closed to him.” [p. 241])—until very recently the idea that personal experiences with racial discrimination are directly implicated in the etiology of offending has been largely unexplored. This neglect is all the more remarkable given the evidence that African Americans, particularly males, engage in more street crime than do whites (Hawkins et al. 2000).1

Early sociological explanations of African Americans’ higher rate of offending centered not on the structural constraints imposed by racial stratification, but on the existence of ostensibly unique aspects of minority culture that subvert conventional behavior and encourage crime and violence (e.g., Miller 1958; Wolfgang and Ferracuti 1967). More recent structural perspectives explicitly incorporate racialized structural constraints, even institutional discrimination, and, yet, the proximal mechanism explaining offending among African Americans in these accounts remains deviant or dysfunctional cultural adaptations (Anderson 1999; Massey and Denton 1993; Oliver 1994; Sampson and Wilson 1995).

The (re)ascendance of strain theory in criminology and critical race theory in sociology has spawned a new approach that emphasizes the salience of racial inequality in micro-interactions. Recent studies, which focus on African Americans, point to interpersonal racial discrimination as an important risk factor for offending (e.g., McCord and Ensminger 2003; Simons et al. 2003; Unnever et al. 2009). This micro-level approach complements existing macro-level explanations of racial disparities in crime by identifying a race-specific interactional risk factor, thereby shedding light on within-place and within-race differences in offending. After all, there is significant variation in individual offending even in the most highly disadvantaged, segregated communities.

In the present study, we seek to build on this nascent literature in two ways. After replicating the finding that interpersonal racial discrimination increases offending among African American males—a group long subject to pernicious discriminatory treatment and viewed as “symbolic assailants” (Skolnick 1966)—we turn our attention to explicating how and why personal experiences with racial discrimination might influence offending. Although contributing to knowledge in important ways, past studies have been limited by one or more of the following: using a single-item measure of discrimination (e.g., Unnever et al. 2009); omitting intervening mechanisms (e.g., McCord and Ensminger 2003); or examining subsets of offending (e.g., aggression; Simons et al. 2006) or behavioral problem scales that combine measures of illegal and problematic behavior (e.g., lying to parents or teachers, staying out past curfew; Simons et al. 2003). The first goal of our study is to develop a theoretical model linking interpersonal racial discrimination to an increased risk of law violation. In doing so, we identify three social psychological mechanisms—emotional distress, relational frames, and beliefs about the legitimacy of conventional norms—to develop an explanatory process model.

The study’s second goal involves a consideration of African American culture but takes a decidedly different approach to culture than that mentioned above. We consider one way that African American culture shapes resilience to racial discrimination through ethnic-racial socialization—a class of adaptive and protective practices utilized by racial/ethnic minority families to promote functioning in a society stratified by race and ethnicity (Hughes 2003). In recent years, research has shown that these socialization practices are important to understanding African Americans’ resilience to racial discrimination (e.g., Fischer and Shaw 1999; Neblett et al. 2008). To date, research has not explored whether ethnic-racial socialization provides resilience to the criminogenic effects of racial discrimination; addressing this lacuna is a primary contribution of the present study. Drawing on extant work, we develop arguments to suggest that ethnic-racial socialization practices provide African American youth with competencies to facilitate noncriminal coping responses to racial discrimination. We argue that differences in the type and amount of ethnic-racial socialization help explain why most African Americans do not respond to racial discrimination with offending.2

In summary, the present study attempts to overcome gaps in our understanding of the race-crime linkage by taking a micro-level approach that integrates theory and research from sociology, criminology, and African American studies as well as insights from critical race theory to specify a model of racial discrimination, ethnic-racial socialization, and crime among African American youth. In doing so, we highlight race-specific risk and resilience factors and emphasize a fundamental tenet of critical race theory: “Racial stratification is ordinary, ubiquitous, and reproduced in mundane and extraordinary customs and experience, and critically impacts the quality of lifestyles and life chances of racial groups” (Brown 2003:294).

In the following pages, we discuss the theory and research undergirding our proposed model and test our hypotheses using several waves of data from a sample of roughly 300 African American male adolescents from the Family and Community Health Study (FACHS), a survey of black families from Iowa and Georgia. The FACHS is unique; it is the largest in-depth panel study of African Americans in the United States. It overcomes several limitations of previous studies, which tended to focus on poor African Americans living in disadvantaged segments of large cities and thus overlooked the diversity of the African American community and provided a limited and sometimes stereotypical view of this population. The FACHS examines black families in a variety of settings and includes respondents from a range of socioeconomic situations from the very poor to the upper middle class. With its developmental focus and wealth of familial information, the FACHS is particularly well-suited for testing the processes under consideration in the present study.3

RACE, DISCRIMINATION, AND CRIME

Racial disparities in street crime have long engaged the interest of sociologists and criminologists. Although differences are magnified by racial biases in the criminal justice system (Tonry 1995), research indicates that relative to whites, African Americans engage in significantly higher rates of street crime (e.g., Hawkins et al. 2000). Early sociological explanations located the source of higher offending among African Americans in autonomous deviant (black) subcultures, which condoned or encouraged crime, especially violence (Curtis 1975; Miller 1958; Wolfgang and Ferracuti 1967). Although dominating race and crime scholarship for a number of years, this “kinds-of-people” approach was shown to be inadequate, in large part, for its neglect of structural influences (Hawkins 1983).

For a number of years after the demise of cultural deficit explanations, the study of race and crime was “mired in an unproductive mix of controversy and silence” (Sampson and Wilson 1995:37). The classic works of Blau and Blau (1982), Sampson (1987), and later Massey and Denton (1993) and Sampson and Wilson (1995), among others, reignited scholarly research on racial disparities and crime, and replaced the cultural emphasis with a nuanced structural approach. Although differing in several important ways, these explanations all examine the study of race and crime from contextual lenses, focusing on variations in crime rates across communities that vary in ethnic-racial composition and levels of inequality. Here, race is “a marker for the constellation of social contexts” in which individuals are embedded (Sampson and Bean 2006:8). These “kinds-of-places” perspectives emphasize racialized structural forces, such as unemployment and housing discrimination, which converge to produce hypersegregated, economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. The social isolation and concentrated disadvantage of these communities impairs social organization, which weakens the control of crime and is conducive to the emergence of a deviant culture either encouraging or tolerating criminal behavior (Anderson 1999; Massey and Denton 1993; Sampson and Wilson 1995).4 High crime rates in areas with high concentrations of African American residents are the result.

Over the past few decades, a wealth of research has tested these structural explanations (for reviews, see Peterson, Krivo, and Browning 2006; Sampson and Bean 2006). This research shows that racial segregation and concentrated disadvantage play important roles in explaining differences in crime rates across racialized space, and ethnographic work has identified and described the existence of cultural codes or cognitive landscapes, ostensibly adaptations to structural disadvantages (Anderson 1999; Oliver 1994). Despite the considerable scholarly attention to the topic, however, we still do not fully understand the link between race and crime (Oliver 2003; Peterson, Krivo, and Hagan 2006). Indeed, after finding “large, unexplained racial differences” in rates of offending, Krivo and Peterson (2000:557) argued that “new thinking and empirical analyses are required to gain a fuller understanding of the sources of this sizeable racial differential.”

We argue that macro-level approaches, which dominate the scholarly discourse on race and crime, are inadequate because they do not account for the way that race influences micro-interactions. A comprehensive explanation of race and crime must go beyond macro-level social facts to address the practice and lived reality of racism. Given their macro-level foci, existing explanations of the race-crime linkage overlook a key micro-level risk factor associated with race: interpersonal racial discrimination—the blatant, subtle, and covert actions, verbal messages, and paraverbal signals that are supported by white racism and malign, mistreat, or otherwise harm members of racial minorities (Essed 1991; Feagin 1991).5 In general, racial discrimination has not played a central role in explanations of black offending, and, when incorporated, has usually been limited to its institutional form. We posit that fertile ground for new thinking about race and crime involves moving a consideration of interpersonal discrimination to the fore, emphasizing the salience of race as a marker for racialized micro-level interactions, a “kinds-of-situations” approach.