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African Americans

The fundamental contradiction in American sociopolitical and economic history is race. Race theory has been used to perpetuate a caste system in America. An integral postulate of this theory asserts that there is a direct correlation between African American identity and criminal behavior. This entry presents a brief historical look at the issue of race and crime as it relates to African Americans, examines some of the erroneous and pejorative opinions on African American identity, and reviews African American experience and the historical evolution of African American identity. The entry concludes with a discussion of African Americans as perpetrators and victims of crime and contemporary views of African American criminology.

Historical Perspective

There are two primary considerations in any discussion of African Americans and crime: (1) African American identity and (2) the depiction of African Americans as criminals and as victims. Historic racial attitudes in the United States have characterized African Americans as being predisposed to criminal activity because of culture, immorality, psychological and genetic inferiority, and religious theology and ideology; for example, the mark of Cain and the curse of Ham. One of the results of these attitudes has been the disparate treatment of African Americans by judicial and/or extrajudicial processes. The rights heralded by the Declaration of Independence and the privileges and immunities provided for by the U.S. Constitution were not originally intended for African Americans. Richard Bardolph, in his work The Civil Rights Record: Black Americans and the Law, 1849–1970 (1970), carefully chronicled, as have many other scholars, the relegation of African Americans to an inferior legal and social status in American society. The American legal system operates as two systems, one for White citizens and another for African Americans as exemplified in the State v. Celia (1855), Dred Scott v. Sanford (1858), and the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decisions. The disproportionate presence of African Americans in the criminal justice system is partially attributable to the racial legacy in the legal system. There are some, however, who believe that the correlation between African Americans and crime is the result not of a “White conspiracy” or racist criminal justice system, but of the socioeconomic condition and/or cultural behavior of African Americans. Other academics and policy analysts simply conclude that African Americans appear in crime statistics more often than others because they commit more of the crimes that are documented.

The debate over African American criminology is centuries old. Dispelling the pejorative notions of Black crime was an important part of the “uplift the race” advocacy in the 19th and 20th centuries. African American religious leaders, reformers, and academics used every medium and opportunity to argue against a direct correlation between race and crime, and more specifically, between their race and crime. Among these advocates were prominent African American sociologists W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, Kelly Miller, and Ira de Augustine Reid. In response to a dominant society that believed otherwise, they asserted that the alleged correlation between race and criminal behavior was spurious.

African American Identity

For the greater part of African American history, African American identity was created and controlled by non-African Americans. As a condition of their servitude and suppression, the majority of African Americans were kept illiterate. Thus for many years they were either unable or prohibited from asserting their identity within the dominant society. It is not that African Americans lacked awareness of their history and personality beyond what White people thought; it is simply that Whites controlled the intellectual products, be they government records, literature, sermons, or scientific treatises. The portrayal of African Americans in these items was through the eyes of a domineering and hostile society.

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