Black Ethnic Monolith

The Concepts of Race and Ethnicity

Criminologist and social-cultural-political geographer Daniel E. Georges-Abeyie in 1989 challenged die concept of a “Black ethnic monolith” that equates the social reality of alleged Negroid racial identity with ethnic identity. He noted that a realistic study of Black/Negroid crime, Black/Negroid crime victimization, and the criminal justice processing of Blacks/Negroids must be cognizant of die ethnic diversity that exists within the African Diaspora of North America (i.e., die result of enslavement and forced immigration of Africans to die Americas). An additional consideration is that die African Diaspora of North America included numerous cultural groups widi shared cultural [Page 62]experiences, varied social interaction patterns, and distinct spatial locations and identities. Thus, race is a false biological delineator. In fact, the false biological delineator of race also frequently alleges mental characteristics associated with intelligence, temperament, morality, predisposition, and mood. Hence, it can be concluded that the false biological delineator of race for Negroid North Americans has become the equivalent of ethnicity in the minds of Whites and of non-Whites, including so-called Blacks, or Negroids, thereby resulting in the concept of a “Black ethnic monolith.” Georges-Abeyie also concluded that Negroid North Americans frequently exhibited the multidimensional value space of dominant cultural mores and norms, subcultural mores and norms, and contracultural mores and norms first noted by Lynn A. Curtis in 1975. Similar to Curtis, Georges-Abeyie believed that the representatives of the dominant culture criminalized some of the Negroid North American sub-cultural and contracultural norms.

The concept of a Black ethnic monolith at its very core is faulty in that the social-cultural delineations of race and ethnicity are not equivalent. Although there is no single widely accepted, much less universally accepted, definition of race, race is theoretically a biological delineator—a false one that the American Anthropological Association has rejected since 1998. It is also a questionable biological concept that geographers critique and tend to replace with the spatial concept of “geographic races” (i.e., persons in close residential proximity with similar, not identical, genetic-based physical characteristics). Similar to race, there is no single accepted, much less universally accepted, definition of ethnicity. However, social scientist Milton Gordon's classic 1964 study of assimilation in North American life coined one of the most enduring definitions of ethnicity. Gordon's work focused on European Americans. Gordon noted that ethnicity was the intersection of race, religion, and national origin. Gordon's concept of ethnicity included a questionable biological component as well as a spatial component and a cultural component (i.e., learned behavior and beliefs [norms and mores]). The problem with the European-oriented ethnic delineator typically utilized by European-oriented social scientists or those influenced by them is threefold when discussing the disproportionality of Negroid North American criminality.

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