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Race and Crime
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20708 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
4,182 Words |
| Author
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Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese directs the Institute for Women's
Studies at Emory University and has recently published
Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism
(University of North Carolina Press, 1991). |
Two young men arrive on the campus of a southern university to visit a female friend. Within minutes of (legally) parking their car, they are accosted by the campus police, who insist on searching their backpacks and grill them about their reasons for being on the campus at all. The young men are black.
On the campus of a northeastern college, a young woman who has been raped gives the police a description of her assailant. The college administration allows the reconstructed likeness to be published in the local paper to help apprehend the alleged rapist. The campus erupts, charging the administration with racism. The alleged rapist is black.
In Boston, a wounded man, whose wife has been murdered, leads the police into a long search for the black mugger whom he claims committed the crimes. No one thinks to challenge his account. Only much later do the police receive information that the man had murdered his wife and wounded himself to disguise his act? The man is white.
The beating of Rodney King, the virtual exoneration of the Police who beat him, and the ensuring conflagration of Los Angeles have returned the disturbing relations among race, racism, and crime to the center of the uneasy consciousness of a terrified nation. That a relation exists is hard to doubt. The nature of the relation is another matter, and one that discourages complacent pieties on any side.
The numbers tell a disturbing story. Black Americans account for 12 to 13 percent of our population. Black Americans account for something more than 40 percent of criminal offenders. More than 60 percent of those arrested for robbery are black, as are nearly 55 percent of those arrested for murder and manslaughter, 43 percent of those arrested for rape, and 30 percent of those arrested for burglary. For these and related crimes, the black share of total arrests numbers two or five times what the percentage of blacks in the population would lead one to expect.
These numbers confirm that, in relation to the size of the black population, black Americans are more likely to commit, and much more likely to be arrested for, violent crimes than white Americans. In absolute terms, in 1990, blacks committed more than half (53.9 percent) of all murders and, in 1989, they committed 63.9 percent of all robberies and 24.3 percent of all rapes. Sadly, black crime takes its heaviest toll on black Americans themselves. Notwithstanding the attacks on Korean businesses,
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