Interpreting “Percent Black”

Abstract

Time series analysis is employed to assess the relationship between “percent Black” and violent crime in Washington D.C. over a 40-year period. Race-disaggregated violent crime arrest data are also examined. It is concluded that while there is some indication of a positive relationship between violent crime and “percent Black” over time, that relationship is not robust when disaggregated by race and crime type and may be limited to Black robbery offending. Further, it appears that “percent Black” may be serving as a proxy for other social problems. An exploration of possible correlates of racial disparity in violent arrests suggests that they are associated with a variety of factors, including social problems and their disparities.     

Race and Ethnic Differences in Punishment and Death Sentence Outcomes

Abstract

A review of the capital punishment literature shows evidence of differential treatment of defendants at two separate levels: commutations and executions. However, since most prior studies have followed a dichotomous approach, little is known about other death sentence outcomes, that is, sentence declared unconstitutional, sentence overturned, and conviction overturned and Latino/a defendants have either been excluded or treated as a monolithic group. Hence, little is known about death sentence outcomes for Latinos/as, whose experiences differ from those of African Americans and Caucasians. The main objective of this study, then, is to expand on the existing data by analyzing death sentence outcomes data for California, Florida, and Texas between 1975 and 1995. Logistic regression, controlling for time under the sentence of death, prior felony convictions, age at the time of the offense, marital status, and education, shows that disparities in death sentence outcomes is not a phenomenon of the past or restricted to commutations and executions. The findings suggest that race and ethnicity and several legal variables still play a role in the legal decision-making process.     

THE RACE/ETHNICITY DISPARITY IN MISDEMEANOR MARIJUANA ARRESTS IN NEW YORK CITY

RESEARCH SUMMARY: This article examines the growth in marijuana misdemeanor arrests in New York City (NYC) from 1980 to 2003 and its differential impact on blacks and Hispanics. Since 1980, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) expanded its use of arrest and detention for minor offenses under its quality-of-life (QOL) policing initiative. Arrest data indicate that during the 1990s the primary focus of QOL policing became smoking marijuana in public view (MPV). By 2000, MPV had become the most common misdemeanor arrest, accounting for 15% of all NYC adult arrests and rivaling controlled substance arrests as the primary focus of drug abuse control. Of note, most MPV arrestees have been black or Hispanic. Furthermore, black and Hispanic MPV arrestees have been more likely to be detained prior to arraignment, convicted, and sentenced to jail than their white counterparts. POLICY IMPLICATIONS: In light of the disparities, we recommend that the NYPD consider scaling back on MPV enforcement and reducing the harshness of treatment by routinely issuing Desk Appearance Tickets when the person is not wanted on other charges, so that most MPV arrestees would not be detained. Furthermore, we recommend that legislators should consider making smoking marijuana in public a violation and not a misdemeanor. Lastly, we suggest ways that NYC could monitor the effectiveness of these policy modifications to assure that the city continues to meet its goals for order maintenance.     

Juvenile perpetrators of race/ethnicity-based bias crimes

Most bias crime literature focuses on adults despite the fact that youth account for a large proportion of prejudice-motivated violence. The LA County Commission on Human Relations data for all bias crimes from 2002-2008 was used to examine similarities and differences between adult and youth suspects of bias-motivated crimes. Findings showed youth victims of racial bias crimes were 12 times more likely to be targeted by youth suspects and over five times more likely to commit property offenses. Public places were nearly three times more likely than resident places to be the location of the bias crime by youth suspects. Female perpetrators of racial bias crimes were two times more likely to be youths. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Teaching “Narratives of Slavery” in Charleston,SC – Slavery Central

This essay describes a graduate course entitled “Narratives of Slavery” taught in Charleston, SC in spring 2014, in which I sought to recenter the dominant (national) discourse on slavery by stressing the local and insisting on our (the class’s) implication with the structures of things past, both the physical structures of the city of Charleston, and all of the legal, financial, historiographical, and ideological structures of the Atlantic World that continue to shape our contemporary reality. The course attempted to critically analyze the process and the consequence of narrativizing slavery – how we write slavery into (and out of) being; how we use narratives of slavery for the purpose of abolition and emancipation; what happens when we write particular narratives of slavery; what gets written out of the history of slavery when particular narratives become dominant; how contemporary narratives of slavery feed into and compare with historical accounts; how historical accounts feed into historical fiction, and how all these things play out in the postcolonial here and now of the American South in the age of Obama (and anti-Obama). In addition to offering a set of critical readings of texts, notably Zakes Mda’s neo-slave narrative Cion, the essay also presents some of the students’ thoughtful and moving responses to the texts and to Charleston’s evolving memorial landscape. The essay’s claim that we must read and discuss slavery and race in ways that do not reify or ossify either of those two terms was given even more urgency by the horrific mass shooting of 17 June 2015.     

Holistic Representation: A Randomized Pilot Study of Wraparound Services for First‐Time Juvenile Offenders to Improve Functioning,Decrease Motions for Review,and Lower Recidivism

Mental health diagnoses, substance abuse issues, and school problems are often cited as contributors to adolescents’ involvement with the juvenile justice system. Yet, few youth receive assessment, evaluation, or intervention prior to their involvement with the juvenile courts. This pilot study evaluated whether providing a randomized trial of wraparound forensic social work services in addition to court‐appointed legal services would improve functioning, decrease motions for review, and lower recidivism for first‐time juvenile offenders. Findings indicate statistically significant improvement for youth receiving wraparound services on six out of eight measures. A case study example is provided and implications for service provision are explored.     

Legitimating Racial Discrimination: Emotions, Not Beliefs, Best Predict Discrimination in a Meta-Analysis

Investigations of racial bias have emphasized stereotypes and other beliefs as central explanatory mechanisms and as legitimating discrimination. In recent theory and research, emotional prejudices have emerged as another, more direct predictor of discrimination. A new comprehensive meta-analysis of 57 racial attitude-discrimination studies finds a moderate relationship between overall attitudes and discrimination. Emotional prejudices are twices as closely related to racial discrimination as stereotypes and beliefs are. Moreover, emotional prejudices are closely related to both observed and self-reported discrimination, whereas stereotypes and beliefs are related only to self-reported discrimination. Implications for justifying discrimination are discussed.

Race and Assisted Housing

This article explores racial disparities between assisted housing outcomes of black and white and white households with children. We compare the assisted housing occupied by black and white households with children, and examine whether young adult education, employment, and earnings outcomes in 2011 differ between blacks and whites who spent part of their childhood in assisted housing in the 2000s. We use a special version of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) that has been address-matched to federally assisted housing, and the PSID’s Transition to Adulthood supplement, along with geocode-matched data from the U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey (ACS), CoreLogic real estate data, and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Statistical methods include difference in means, logit and general linear models. We find no evidence of racial disparities in the type of assisted housing program, the physical quality of project-based developments, or the management of public housing developments in the 2000 decade. But black households with children are more likely to live in assisted housing that is located in poorer quality neighborhoods. Multivariate tests reveal that the worse outcomes of black young adults compared with whites disappear once socioeconomic differences are taken into account. The discrepancy in assisted housing neighborhood quality experienced by black and white children makes no additional contribution to predicting young adult outcomes. Nonetheless, black children living in relatively better assisted housing neighborhoods tend to have better outcomes in young adulthood than those who live in poorer quality assisted housing neighborhoods. We discuss sources of racial disparity in neighborhood quality, and the policies enacted and proposed to address it.     

Racial structural solidarity

Abstract

Effective political action against racial injustice requires a conception of solidarity based on the social and material reality of this form of injustice. I develop such a notion of solidarity by extending Iris Young’s notion of ‘gender as seriality’ to race. This notion of solidarity avoids the problems encountered by Shelby’s ‘common oppression view’ and Gooding-Williams’s non-foundational view. On Shelby’s ‘common oppression’ view, solidarity is based solely on the victims’ shared condition of oppression. According to Shelby, all victims of racial oppression can be reasonably expected to endorse a set of principles that will move them to common action. Gooding-Williams sheds doubt on the idea that such shared principles exist and defends instead a view of politics as action-in-concert, marked by reasonable disagreement, and a non-foundational view of solidarity constituted through the controversy of politics rather than given in virtue of pre-political commitments or interests. I argue that the problem with such a notion is that it is unable to link the material and social reality of the unjust structures to the forms of political action that would effectively transform social reality. My notion of ‘structural racial solidarity’ would avoid these problems.     

Only Contradictions on Offer

Segal addresses feminism's future at a time when political energies are apparently in decline. She explores the contradictory models of feminism operating in political and media representations: the dominance of gender questions and gender anxieties, including the marked concern with models of 'proper' masculinity, inevitably implicates feminists in the political arena. The decline in political engagement among feminists is in any case disturbing, because women without power have been made the central targets of neo-conservative social policies in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, with the female 'welfare dependent' becoming particularly demonized. The failure of feminists to address such issues results from the decline of socialist feminisms, and a general failure within feminism to make class and race differences, and the inequalities that result from them, the central plank of its theories and politics. Segal calls attention to the divorce between feminist theory and feminist activism, and argues that the politics of the academy have largely contributed to a disciplinary specialization which militates against feminism's productive interdisciplinarity. While the literary paradigms that now dominate feminist thought have produced rich models for subjectivity and identity, the decrease in social science contributions to the field has led to a lessening of attention to existing social relations. Segal insists upon the necessity of a continuing engagement with cultural questions, but argues that these need to be combined with a commitment to radical social transformation if feminisms, in all their complexity and multifariousness, are to have a future.