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Lead section of Criminal stereotype of African Americans:

The criminal stereotype of African Americans in the United States is a generalized representation of African American males as dangerous criminals. Although stereotyping African Americans as criminals has its roots from slavery and colonialism, the stereotype of African Americans shifted from the earlier "petty thief" to the much more damaging stereotype of "thug", "rapist" around 1970s and early 1980s. The stereotype of the African American man as a criminal is commonly reflected in the media, in politics and even in daily interactions. This negative criminal stereotype has been said to lead to the rise of racial profiling, police brutality and harsher judgments of guilt and punishment for African American defendants in trials.

Improvements to Criminal stereotype of African Americans:

  1. "Fix" neutrality of the viewpoint in the article- according to the talk page, wikipedia editors are disputing about whether the stereotype does have some factual basis to it. Perhaps including more information about this in the history section would help to "neutralize" it. Also I believe we need to discuss "War on Drugs". (DONE)
  2. The history section should also briefly trace the history and evolution of other Stereotypes of African Americans. (DONE)
  3. Including a consequences page- the article does mention racial profiling as a consequence, and there are wikipedia pages dedicated to racial profiling like "shopping while black" etc, but I could include, briefly, some information that directly connects the criminal stereotype to other consequences like tougher jail sentences and racial profiling. Also, I should discuss social psychological research on this stereotype and how this stereotype could has influenced daily interactions with others (microaggressions), stereotype threat, police brutality, and how this stereotype is portrayed/influenced in other countries. (DONE)
  4. Expanding on the perceptions section by not only expanding on references in popular culture but also how the media has played a role in encouraging this stereotype (perhaps changing it to a Role of the Media section instead?). Also I should include references from politics and other platforms.

What I've changed

The criminal stereotype of African Americans in the United States is an ethnic stereotype according to which African American males are stereotyped to be dangerous criminals. The figure of the African-American man as a criminal is perpetuated in American popular culture and it is associated with racial profiling, police brutality, race segregation and harsher judgments of guilt and punishment for African American defendants in trials.

African Americans and Crime Statistics[edit]

The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports reports that although whites are arrested for the majority of all crimes, African Americans are most likely to be overrepresented in arrests. For example, in 1993, African Americans comprised 31 percent of total arrests yet constituted 12 percent of the population. An early study published in 1993, found that in 1979, 80% of the racial disparity in prison populations was accounted for by African Americans committing more crime, but by 2008, another study by Michael Tonry and Matthew Melewski found that this percentage had decreased to 61%.[1]

Specifically, African Americans are consistently arrested for violent crimes. In 1993, African Americans accounted for 45 percent and 50 percent of crimes for murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. In general, African Americans are approximately six times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes than are whites. African Americans are also most overrepresented in robbery, comprising 62 percent of arrestees in 1993.

For drug related offenses, from 1965 through the early 1980s, African Americans were approximately twice as likely as whites to be arrested. However, with the War on Drugs in the 1970s, African American arrest rates skyrocketed, while white arrest rates increased only slightly. By the end of the 1980s, African Americans were more than five times more likely than whites to be arrested for drug-related offenses[2]. Blumstein argues that as national self report data showed that drug use was actually declining among both African Americans and Whites, it is highly unlikely that these race differences in arrest rates represent "real" patterns of drug use. Instead these crime statistics reflect the government's targeting of only specific types of drug use and trafficking[3]. Michelle Alexander furthers the argument that the the disproportionate mass incarceration of African Americans in drug-related offenses is caused by racial bias within the criminal justice system, terming this phenomena as "The New Jim Crow", in a book of the same name.

Scholars have argued that these official arrest statistics do not reflect actual criminal behavior as the criminal stereotype that African Americans influences the decisions to make arrests. Specifically, because the stereotype of African American is pervasive and embedded in society, police officers unconsciously believe that African Americans are dangerous and are therefore more likely to arrest African Americans[4].

Instead, self reported crime statistics have been used to overcome the criticism that the official arrest statistics are biased. Many studies found little or no differences in self-reported offending among juveniles of different racial and ethnic group, with many scholars suggesting that institutionalized racism within the criminal justice system is the cause for the disproportionate arrest rates of African Americans[5]. However, Hindelang found that black males were least likely to self-report offenses recorded by the police with 33 percent of total offenses and 57 percent of serious offenses known to police not being self-reported by African American males[6], suggesting some caution in concluding that self reported crime statistics accurately portray the actual rate of crime behavior.

History

According to some scholars, the stereotype of African Americans males as criminals was first constructed as a tool to "discipline" and control slaves during the time of slavery in the United States. For instance, out of fear of the fugitive slaves staging a rebellion, slaveholders sought to spread the stereotype that African American males were dangerous criminals who would rape the "innocent" and "pure" white women if they had the opportunity to[7][8]. A law introduced in Pennsylvania in 1700 illustrates the fear of a dangerous African American man within the slaveholding society- it mandated that should a black man attempt to rape a White woman, the perpetrator will be castrated or punished to death[9].

Carter et al. argues that this criminal stereotype contributed to Lynching in the United States that mostly targeted African Americans in the south[10]. Ida B. Wells, the well-known anti-lynching activist published the pamphlet entitled the "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases" from 1892-1920 reporting that contrary to the notion that lynchings occurred because African American males had sexually abused or attacked white women, fewer than 30% of reported lynchings even involved the charge of rape. She also followed up with an editorial that suggested that, most sexual liaisons between black men and white women were consensual and illicit[11]. The criminal stereotype of African Americans as potential rapists at that time is also illustrated in the controversial media portrayal of African American men in the 1915 American epic film, The Birth of a Nation[12].

According to Marc Mauer however, although African Americans have been consistently stereotyped as "biologically flawed" individuals who have a general tendency towards crime, the depiction of African Americans as criminals became more threatening only in the 1970s and early 1980s- with the evolution of the stereotype of African American males as "petty thieves" to "ominous criminal predators"[13]. In contemporary times, Barlow has argued that the perception of African American males as criminals is so entrenched in society that “talking about crime is talking about race”[14].

Perpetuation of the image by popular culture

Linda G. Tucker in Lockstep and Dance: Images of Black Men in Popular Culture (2007) argues that the representations in popular culture of criminal African American men help perpetuate the stereotype. She writes that the portrayal of crime by conservative politicians during heated campaigns is used as a metaphor for race: they have recast fears about race as fears about crime. For instance, she writes that Republican opponents of Dukakis used the case of Willie Horton, a black man who raped and beat a white woman, as a "collective symbol of black male criminality", used to attack the Democrat's stand on law enforcement, suggesting that people would be safer if led by Republicans.

An accumulating body of research has provided evidence that television news commonly depicts African Americans as criminals while portraying Whites as officers and victims.

The criminal African American man appears often in the context of athletics and sports. Arthur A. Raney and Jennings Bryant discuss this in Handbook of Sports and Media (2006). They cite Beyond the Cheers: Race as Spectacle in College Sport (2001) by C. Richard King and Charles Fruehling Springwood, which examines the connection between race, crime, and sports. They study the ways in which "criminality indelibly marks the African American athlete". Raney and Bryant argue that the coverage and reception of accusations of crimes by sportspeople differed depending on the race of the individual.

John Milton Hoberman in Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race (1997) blames entertainment and advertising industries for propagating the negative stereotypes, namely, for "the merger of the athlete, the gangster rapper, and the criminal into a single black male persona ... into the predominant image of black masculinity in the United States and around the world", which has harmed racial integration.

The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post showed photographs of Black Americans more than 80% of the time with “looting” mentioned in the captions 

Consequences of the criminal stereotype of African Americans

There is evidence whites overestimate the differences between the rates at which whites and blacks commit some crimes. A 2012 study found that white Americans overestimated the percent of burglaries, illegal drug sales, and juvenile crimes committed by blacks by between 6.6 and 9.5 percentage points.

A report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission stated that the sentences of black men were on average 19.5% longer than the sentences of white men from December 2007 to September 2011. Although the report did not attribute racism to the difference in sentencing decisions, the report did write that the judges “make sentencing decisions based on many legitimate considerations that are not or cannot be measured.” Another similar study examining 58,000 federal criminal cases concluded that African-Americans’ jail time was almost 60% longer than white sentences while Black men were on average more than twice as likely to face a mandatory minimum charge as white men were, even after taking into account arrest offense, age and location. Supporting this claim, mock trials that experimentally manipulate the race of the defendant, African-Americans have been found to receive harsher judgments of guilt and punishment than white defendants in otherwise identical cases. In experiments in which black and white figures perform identical acts, the black figure’s behavior is usually seen as more threatening and predatory than the white figure’s behavior (Duncan 1976; Sagar and Schofield 1980). Likewise, in surveys asking about fear of strangers in hypothetical situations, respondents are more fearful of being victimized by black strangers than by white strangers (St. John and Heald-Moore 1995, 1996).

Wiliam and his colleagues found that exposure to Black rather than White suspects led to increased support for the death penalty, three-strikes legislation, and the endorsement of dispositional factors as the cause of criminal behavior (Gilliam & Iyengar, 1998Gilliam, F. D. and Iyengar, S. 1998. The superpredator script. Nieman Reports, 52(4): 45–46., 2000; Gilliam et al., 1996Gilliam, F. D., Iyengar, S., Simon, A. and Wright, O. 1996. Crime in Black and White: The violent, scary world of local news. Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 1: 6–23.[CrossRef]).

Considering that Blacks are disproportionately more likely than Whites to be targeted by the police as suspects (Weich & Angulo, 2002), interrogated (Feld, 1996; Leo, 1996; Wald, Ayres, Hess, Schantz, & Whitebread, 1967), and wrongfully convicted (Parker, Dewees, & Radelet, 2001), it is surprising that researchers have only recently questioned whether there are racial disparities in false confession rates, too. Results indicate that there are. In Redlich, Summers, and Hoover's (2010) sample of mentally ill offenders, minorities (including Blacks and members of other racial/ethnic groups) were more likely than Whites to self-report having confessed and/or pleaded guilty falsely, even after controlling for age and the severity of offenders' mental disorders and symptomatology

The percentage young black men in a neighborhood is positively associated with perceptions of the neighborhood crime level, even after controlling for two measures of crime rates and other neighborhood characteristics. This supports the view that stereotypes are influencing perceptions of neighborhood crime levels.

xperiment 1 showed that priming the “Black criminal” stereotype through exposure to photographs of Blacks looting after Hurricane Katrina reduced policy support for Black evacuees-in-need but did not influence support responses toward White evacuees-in-need.

 Rand (2000) noted that Black witnesses might be aware of stereotypes related to criminality and dishonesty when facing a panel including White jurors. As such, Black witnesses might be motivated to control their demeanor to counter stereotypes and appear truthful. Rand suggested, however, that because Black witnesses try so hard to appear truthful, they might actually appear nervous and, ironically, less credible to White jurors. 

Resources:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1043986207306870

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2111769.pdf

  1. ^ Mauer, M. (19 August 2011). "Addressing Racial Disparities in Incarceration". The Prison Journal. 91 (3 Suppl): 87S–101S. doi:10.1177/0032885511415227. S2CID 26886980.
  2. ^ Department of Justice (1993). "UCR Statistics".
  3. ^ Blumstein, Alfred (1993). "Making Rationality Relevant". Criminology. 31.
  4. ^ Irwin, John (1985). The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520277342.
  5. ^ Sampson; et al. (1997). "Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Crime and Criminal Justice in the United States" (PDF). Crime and Justice. 21: 311–374. doi:10.1086/449253. S2CID 215513875. {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |last= (help)
  6. ^ Hindelang, Michael (1981). "Variations in Sex-Race-Age-Specific Incidence Rates of Offending". American Sociological Review. 46. doi:10.2307/2095265. JSTOR 2095265.
  7. ^ Barnard, Amii (1993). "Application of critical race feminism to the anti-lynching movement: Black women's fight against race and gender ideology". UCLA Women's Law Journal. 3. doi:10.5070/L331017574.
  8. ^ Asante; et al. (1998). The African-American atlas: Black history and culture—An illustrated reference. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0028649849. {{cite book}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |last= (help)
  9. ^ State of Pennslyvania (1896). The statutes at large of Pennsylvania from 1682 to 1801. Harrisburg.
  10. ^ Carter; et al. (2017). "You Can't Fix What You Don't Look At: Acknowledging Race in Addressing Racial Discipline Disparities". Urban Education. 52. doi:10.1177/0042085916660350. S2CID 148113850 – via SAGE. {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |last= (help)
  11. ^ Schechter, Patricia. "The Anti-Lynching Pamphlets of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1920". Illinois During the Gilded Age.
  12. ^ Armstrong, Eric. "Revered and Reviled: D.W. Griffith's 'The Birth of a Nation'". The Moving Arts Film Journal.
  13. ^ Marc, Mauer (1999). Race to incarcerate. New York: The New Press. ISBN 978-1-59558-022-1.
  14. ^ Barlow, Melissa (1998). "Race and the Problem of Crime in "Time" and "Newsweek" Cover Stories, 1946 to 1995". Social Justice. 25 (2 (72)): 149–183. JSTOR 29767075 – via Jstor.
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