DRIVING WHILE BLACK: BIAS PROCESSES AND RACIAL DISPARITY IN POLICE STOPS*

We estimate the degree of racial disparity in police vehicular stops separately for local and state police in North Carolina in the year 2000. We introduce four mechanisms that might produce racial disparities in police stops—racial profiling, race sensitive police deployment, cognitive bias and stereotyping, and prejudice. We then model the relative odds of police vehicle stops as a function of race, driving behavior, and other demographic statuses separately by police organization type, with controls for omitted variable bias at both the driver and spatial level. We find only weak evidence of racial disparity in stops by officers of the state highway patrol but stronger evidence in those made by local police officers.     

‘There’s just places ya’ don’t wanna go’: the segregating impact of hate crime against Native Americans

Between 1999 and 2001, I interviewed or surveyed nearly 300 Native Americans in seven states, in an effort to uncover insights into the prevalence, dynamics, and local contexts of hate crime as experienced by Native Americans living in remote, rural reservations. One of the predominant themes that emerged revolved around one of the most damaging effects of the ongoing racial harassment and violence that threatens them on a daily basis. What I have observed is that hate crime has become an institutionalized mechanism for establishing boundaries, both social and physical. It reinforces historical patterns of withdrawal and isolation, in short, segregation. Through violence, the threat of violence, or even through the malevolent gaze, Native Americans are daily reminded that there are places in which they are not welcome. For too many American Indians, the perception, if not the reality of ‘what’s out there’ has its intended effect of keeping people in their place.     

ISSUES OF RACE,ETHNICITY, SOCIO-ECONOMIC POSITION AND SPATIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT IN SOUTH AFRICA: HOW SPATIAL ACCESS AND EXPRESSION STILL PERPETUATE NOTIONS OF DIFFERENCE,SEPARATION AND UNCERTAINTY AMONGST THE SOUTH AFRICAN COLOURED1 POPULATION

ABSTRACT

While the Native Land Act [Act 27 of 1913] and the Native Trust and Land Act [Act 18 of 1936] dispossessed black South Africans of their land physically, the insidious Group Areas Act [Act 41 of 1950] and the Population Registration Act [Act 30 of 1950] reified perceptions of race and ethnicity in the context of phenotype, culture, language and even religion. Although these Acts were repealed the legacy remains part of the South African psyche still. Such perceptions are evident in the Coloured communities where the Population Registration Act classified and defined the group as a singular unit while the Group Areas Act segregated and confined them, and restricted their association within the group almost exclusively. This meant that education, access to information, socialising, and religious assembly and to a limited extent employment were restricted mostly to these designated segregated areas. Limited interaction between various legislated groups, even within the Coloured group itself reinforced the socio-economic racial hierarchy and the prejudices linked to economics. The combination of these Acts created an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ hostility further (re)enforcing notions of separateness and difference. The article seeks to examine social and racial interpretation (based on income and spatial realities) of the Coloured population in the Eastern Cape and how the group perceives its primary identity and allegiance in terms of ethnicity or national identity as salient in the current socio-political environment. The objectives are first to assert that legislated segregation created rigid jingoist structures of ethnic and racial identities that will take longer to dismantle than the Acts of separation had and secondly that national identity can be salient amongst a minority group irrespective of socio-economic position. The conclusion highlights that the social and identity Acts, spatial acts, regarded once as a legislated absolute, reduced the Coloured communities specifically, to regard themselves as different yet the same, inferior and superior, marginalised yet included, but that this is not incompatible with nation building.     

Examining Racial Disparities in Drug Arrests

The War on Drugs popularized a set of policies and practices that dramatically increased the number of drug arrests, particularly for low-level drug offenses. The War’s tactics have affected Americans of every race; however, minorities have been most dramatically affected. There are several explanations for the observed racial disparity in drug arrests, but relatively little research directly tests these explanations. In this study, we test three common explanations of racial disparities in drug arrest rates. We find that racial disparities in drug arrests cannot be explained by differences in drug offending, nondrug offending, or residing in the kinds of neighborhoods likely to have heavy police emphasis on drug offending. Our findings are most consistent with explanations focusing on racial bias in drug sanctions.     

THE SOCIAL SOURCES OF AMERICANS' PUNITIVENESS: A TEST OF THREE COMPETING MODELS*

The sustained movement to “get tough” on crime, especially through mass imprisonment, has prompted several prominent efforts to explain the public's harshness toward crime. From the extant literature, we demarcate the following three competing theories of public punitiveness: the escalating crime-distrust model, the moral decline model, and the racial animus model. Controlling for other known predictors of crime-related opinions, we test the explanatory power of these perspectives to account for support for the death penalty and for a punitive crime-control approach. Our analysis of a national sample of respondents surveyed in the 2000 National Election Study reveals partial support for each model. Racial animus, however, seems to exert the most consistent effect on public sentiments. This finding suggests that racial resentments are inextricably entwined in public punitiveness and thus should be incorporated into any complete theory of this phenomenon.     

Sex,Gender, Multidimensional Value Space,and Social Cultural Resistance—Afrocentrism

This article examines the applicability of the theory of multidimensional value space by Lynn A. Curtis and the theory of social cultural resistance—Afrocentrism by Daniel E. Georges-Abeyie for explaining so-called Black crime and Black juvenile delinquency in general and Black female crime and Black female juvenile delinquency in particular. It notes that the increase in so-called Black crime and Black juvenile delinquency in general and Black female crime and Black female juvenile delinquency in particular may be illusion, not fact. This article notes that perception, at times illusion, may have, and frequently does have, real outcomes, including criminal justice outcomes and delinquency outcomes. It notes that the so-called Black racial monolith is a fiction that race and ethnicity are distinct entities, as are sex and gender that the so-called Black racial monolith consists of distinct Black ethnic identities. The article notes that Black crime, female and male, and adult and juvenile delinquency may be manifestations of primary psychopathy, secondary psychopathy, and dyssocial psychopathy, as noted in the theory of social cultural resistance—Afrocentrism.     

‘Whiteness,’ criminality,and the double standards of deviance/social control

White criminality is increasingly defined and controlled via the medical model. This is made possible by the white racial frame, which constructs ‘whiteness’ as normative and white deviance as individual aberration or mental illness. Conversely, the white racial frame constructs Blackness as synonymous with criminality. Media depictions of crime and criminals play a central role in furthering this framing, which provides the underlying legitimation for disparities in social control. The result is double standards of definition and control which medicalize whiteness and criminalize Blackness. This differential framing of whiteness and Blackness provides the foundation for the expansion of both the medical and prison industrial complexes, which are characterized by real racial differences despite comparable patterns of deviance across racial lines.     

风水及文化积累的局限——旧金山华人移民的文化认同

20世纪80年代以来,移居美国的香港华人极力想要在美国积累文化资本和经济资本,开始在旧金山的湾区购买房地产。他们带去“风水”的文化逻辑,即在他们认为会给他们带来好运的地方进行房地产投资。这一行为在当今这样一个跨国时代的背景下,向皮埃尔.布迪厄提出的文化资本积累的观点提出了挑战。新的移民也许可以获得文化资本,但却难于把它转变为社会资本,因为在象征资本和种族认同之间产生了一种不协调,也因此造成了他们在东道社会中社会地位低下的原因。所以,文化资本积累上的局限对移民来说是十分明显的。