African Americans, and African American males in particular, have an ethnic stereotype in which they are portrayed as dangerous criminals.Gabbidon, Shaun L. (ed.); Greene, Helen Taylor (ed.); Young, Vernetta D. (ed.). (2001). African American Classics in Criminology and Criminal Justice . SAGE Publications. p. 349. .Edles, Laura Desfor (2002). Cultural Sociology in Practice . Wiley-Blackwell. p. 124. . This stereotype is associated with the fact that African Americans are proportionally over-represented in the numbers of those that are arrested and convicted for committing crimes. It has appeared frequently in American popular culture,Vera, Harnan; Feagin, Joe R. (2007). Handbook of the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations . Springer. p. 125. . reinforcing the negative consequences of systemic racism.
History The criminalization of black males has a long history in the US, which includes both legal and informal social laws that can lead to death or incarceration. Three sociohistorical threats to black male identities that speak to principles of race consciousness, primacy of racialization, and ordinariness of racism. First, the prison industrial complex created the convict lease system. This involved arresting many of the recently freed men and women for minor violations and punishing them with hefty fines, long prison sentences, and working on former slave plantations.
The second threat to black males was socially sanctioned lynchings. Lynchings were systematically used to intimidate and control the black community, as well as position black people as social problems. They also were one way that black male deaths were deemed as "justifiable homicides". Of the more than 4700 people lynched between 1881 and 1968, 72% were black. Their deaths, which occurred by being burned, shot, hanged, castrated, and/or tortured, were often part of public events and documented in scores of photos and postcards. In most incidents, no person was brought to justice for these deaths.
Into the post-civil rights era, the third threat allows police officers to use legal authority to regulate black male bodies through traffic stops, stop and frisk, and zero-tolerance policies. These policies create legal entrapment, which systematically ensnares black males into the criminal justice system. There is a litany of legal cases to support policing activities and practices. Some of these cases give legal authority for police to stop, question, pursue, and arrest individuals without probable cause or the presence of suspicious behaviors, even during minor traffic violations. These cases demonstrate how policing behaviors across the USA are legally structured to produce institutional entrapment that often disproportionately target and affect black males. They also raise the question of civil rights violations and direct racial biases.
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, Amii Barnard alleges that 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. A law introduced in Pennsylvania in 1700 illustrates the fear of a dangerous African American man within the slave holding society- it mandated that should a black man attempt to rape a White woman, the perpetrator will be castrated or punished to death.
Carter et al. argues that this criminal stereotype contributed to lynching in the United States that mostly targeted African American males in the south. Ida B. Wells, the well-known anti-lynching activist, published the pamphlet entitled the "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases" from 1892 to 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. 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.
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". In the late 1990s, Melissa Hickman Barlow argued that the perception of African American males as criminals was so entrenched in society that she said "talking about crime is talking about race". Between 2005 and 2015, the gap in the incarceration rate between blacks and whites declined while still remaining high. The rate of incarceration for blacks declined -2.0% per year, for Hispanics it declined -2.3% per year, while for whites it declined only -0.1% per year. Blacks today continue to be incarcerated at a rate over 2.1 times Hispanics and 5.6 times whites. The disparity varies widely by state and region.
Perceptions Katheryn Russell-Brown in her book The Color of Crime: Racial Hoaxes, White Fear, Black Protectionism, Police Harassment and Other Macroaggressions (1998) refers to the stereotype as the "criminal black man", because people associate young black men with crime in American culture. She writes that the black male is portrayed as a "symbolic pillager of all that is good". Russell-Brown refers to the criminal black man as a mythSee, Letha A. Lee (2001). Violence as Seen Through a Prism of Color . Haworth Press. p. 14. and suggests that the stereotype contributes to "racial hoaxes". She defines these as "when someone fabricates a crime and blames it on another person because of his race, OR when an actual crime has been committed and the perpetrator falsely blames someone because of his race". Stuart Henry and Mark Lanier in What Is Crime?: Controversies Over the Nature of Crime and What to Do about It (2001) refer to the criminal black man as a "mythlike race/gender image of deviance".Henry, Stuart; Lanier, Mark. (2001). What Is Crime?: Controversies Over the Nature of Crime and What to Do about It . Rowman & Littlefield. p. 159. .
Moreover, according to Hugenberg and Bodenhausen in Ambiguity in social categorization: The role of prejudice and facial affect in race categorization, people perceive black faces as angry more often than they perceive white faces as angry. On top of this, angry faces are more commonly categorized as belonging to black people rather than white people. Even what people are wearing can determine what race people classify them as.
Perpetuation of negative images 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 image. 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, Republican opponents of Dukakis used the case of Willie Horton to attack the Democrat's stand on law enforcement, suggesting that people would be safer if led by Republicans. She says that such politicians used Horton as a collective symbol of African American male criminality. Some argue that the ad Republicans used of an intimidating-looking mug shot of murderer Willie Horton created fear in white Americans minds. The message was clear: African Americans are violent and should not have prison furloughs or rehabilitation. This led to the victory of Republican George H.W. Bush.
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 says coverage and reception of accusations of crimes by sportspeople differed depending on the race of the individual.Raney, Arthur A.; Bryant, Jennings. (2006). Handbook of Sports and Media . Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. p. 531. .
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.Hoberman, John Milton (1997). Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. xxvii. .
A number of studies have concluded that the news systematically portrays black Americans as criminals and whites as victims of the crime. For example, a study found that in news programs broadcast in the Los Angeles area, blacks were overly represented as perpetrators of crime and underrepresented as victims of crimes on television news, compared to actual crime statistics. This is in stark contrast to how, compared to actual crime statistics, whites were found to be underrepresented as perpetrators and overrepresented as victims of crime in television news stories.
The media is viewed as a source of social learning that essentially teaches, reinforces, and cultivates certain ideas about Blacks. A study examining the news reports from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today covering the effects of Hurricane Katrina showed that in 80% of the captions for photographs where the word "looting" was used to describe the actions of the evacuees pictured, the photos showed Black evacuees, suggesting that the Black evacuees were criminals. By contrast, similar images of white people were often captioned without explicitly judgemental words, instead using phrases such as "finding food."
According to Sanders in Category inclusion and exclusion in perceptions of African Americans: Using the Stereotype Content Model to Examine Perceptions of groups and individuals, African Americans on television and in movies are most likely to play roles related to crime, sports, and entertainment stories rather than roles in which they make a valuable contribution to the nation. This omission of positive traits in African Americans on television has a powerful effect on viewers. Sanders refers to this as "stereotyping by omission". It is very common for African Americans to be portrayed as threatening and violent gang members criminals and drug dealers.
Police killing black males Keon L. Gilbert and Rashawn Ray in Why Police Kill Black Males with Impunity: Applying Public Health Critical Race Praxis to Address the Determinants of Policing Behaviors and "Justifiable" Homicide in the USA examine trends from 1960 to 2010 of death by legal intervention by race and social class and determine that high-income blacks are just as likely to be killed by police officers as low-income blacks. However, it has been reported that black cops were found to be more likely to kill black civilians at the same rate as white cops were.
Consequences