In this new edition, each chapter is updated and revised, and two new chapters have been added. Enriched with twenty-five new cases, the explosive and troublesome chapter on "Racial Hoaxes" demonstrates that "playing the race card" is still a popular ploy.
The Color of Crime is a lucid and forceful volume that calls for continued vigilance on the part of journalists, scholars, and policymakers alike. Through her innovative analysis of cases, ideological and media trends, issues, and practices that resonate below the public radar even in the new century, Russell-Brown explores the tacit and subtle ways that deviance is systematically linked to people of color.
Her findings are impossible to ignore. Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.
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Institutional Login. LOG IN. In this Book. Additional Information. Table of Contents. Cover Download Save contents. Contents p. Acknowledgments p. Introduction pp. Media Messages pp. In , the same year that Taylor's data comes from, the poverty rate among blacks was three times that of whites. In addition, nearly 40 percent of black children grew up in poverty. So while it is true, for instance, that blacks rob whites far more than vice versa, that is hardly a surprise — whites, after all, own nearly 10 times the wealth that blacks do on average.
They also own far more businesses. Thus, it is only natural that any rational robber would select whites over blacks as victims. It would truly have been a "startling conclusion" if the facts had shown that whites attacked blacks more than the other way around. That poor people are more prone to criminality at the expense of the wealthy is utterly unsurprising.
Selection Bias and Reality Taylor's decision to simply ignore these well-documented criminological findings is not his report's only flaw. Another major error — a cardinal sin in the science of statistics — is "selection bias. Selection bias may best be understood by example.
Say a researcher wants to identify the leading causes of death, then decides to answer that question by examining data on drowning deaths — even though drowning accounts for only a small percentage of all deaths. By looking only at drowning, the researcher might conclude that children are at very high risk of this type of death and that swimming in pools is the highest-risk activity one could engage in. Ignored in this analysis would be the impact of disease and traffic accidents, for instance, which rank far higher as causes of death in the general population than drowning.
Similarly, by concentrating only on interracial crime, Jared Taylor paints a severely distorted picture of crime and victimization patterns in the United States today. What Taylor actually does is consider only a subset of data on crime — statistics on interracial crimes between blacks and whites from the National Crime Victimization Survey NCVS.
For crimes of violence — the crimes Taylor focuses on — that data covers just 16 percent of the crimes committed in The result is a skewed view of the impact of race on crime that suggests that whites ought to be terrified of blacks who, in Taylor's view, present a serious threat to society.
Missing the Forest for the Trees But this analysis completely overlooks the larger — and far more scientifically defensible — pattern in the data: Most crime is intra-racial black-on-black and white-on-white , not interracial.
In fact, the NCVS data show that 73 percent of white violent crime victims were attacked by whites, and 80 percent of black victims were targeted by blacks. This pattern is even clearer in the category of murder.
According to a government report, 94 percent of black murder victims, as well as 85 percent of white murder victims, were slain by members of their own race. Thus, the larger reality, that danger comes mainly from one's own race, is utterly ignored by Taylor, who for reasons of his own is interested only in interracial crime.
So while it is true that blacks victimize whites in interracial violent crime more than vice versa, that is, for the reasons described above, no surprise. As the authors of a recent book, The Color of Justice: Race, Ethnicity and Crime in America, point out: "Some researchers have challenged the assertion that crime is predominantly intra-racial, pointing to the fact that a white person has a greater likelihood of being victimized by an African American offender than an African American has of being victimized by a white offender.
Although this is true, it does not logically challenge the assertion that crime is predominantly an intra-racial event. Remember the NCVS reveals that the typical offender is white.
Throughout the report, Taylor makes similar errors in analysis. Another instructive example is his treatment of interracial hate crime. Misinterpreting Hate Crimes Taylor looks to statistics on hate crime to make the point that blacks are far more likely to attack whites for racial reasons than the other way around — even though, as Taylor himself acknowledges, hate crime statistics are widely known to be seriously flawed because of reporting errors.
Through a combination of strange methodology and mathematical miscalculation, he ends up overstating his case. First, Taylor excludes hate crimes based on religion, sexual orientation and disability. Then, using the remaining motivation categories of race and ethnicity, he says that 63 percent of these crimes were committed by whites, less than their 72 percent proportion of the population would suggest; and 19 percent were the work of blacks, even though blacks account for only 12 percent of Americans.
These numbers are deceptive. If one looks at all hate crimes and all ethnic groups, the data show that whites are responsible for 75 percent of all hate crimes — higher than their proportion in the population — while the black rate remains at 19 percent.
Corrected for population, these numbers mean that blacks are 1. Whites, too, commit more hate crimes than all other races combined, but only slightly more so. Taylor also asserts that "millions of ordinary interracial crimes" should really be considered hate crimes — an insupportable conclusion. Hate crimes are not simply crimes committed between persons of different races. They are crimes that are motivated by the race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or other group characteristic of the victim.
A black man's robbery of a store owned by a white businessman is not a hate crime unless the offender, motivated by animus toward whites, chose the store simply because the owner was white. Racial Profiling Defended Ultimately, Taylor's article concludes blacks are so much more likely to commit crimes than whites — "blacks are as much more violent than whites as men are more violent than women" — that police officers are justified in stopping them more often as they drive.
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