Minority Group Threat

An inspection of arrest, sentencing, and incarceration statistics in the United States discloses substantial racial disparities. African Americans, in particular, are overrepresented in each of these areas. While the disproportionate representation of African Americans and other minorities is beyond dispute, explanations for this disparity are frequently debated in academic circles. One prominent explanation for the racial disparity found in criminal justice statistics utilizes a conflict perspective. According to this theoretical perspective, crime is socially defined, and the behaviors that are designated as violations of the criminal code tend to reflect the interests of the more powerful groups within society. Moreover, societal elites influence the ways in which the laws are implemented. Conflict theory therefore suggests that when relatively powerless groups in society are seen by the powerful as posing a threat to the status quo, formal social control agents may be deployed to repel these threats to the social order. Consequently, much of the racial disparity found in the criminal justice system reflects this bias, according to the conflict perspective.

In the United States, where Whites have historically wielded power over other racial/ethnic groups, it is possible to view Whites as the dominant group (or societal elite) and non-Whites as the subordinate group. An historical overview of the U.S. legal system discloses the privileged status of Whites. According to Chief Justice Roger Taney in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), under slavery African Americans “had no rights which the White man was bound to respect.” Indicative of this was the legal system, which often drew distinctions between African Americans and Whites. During the antebellum period in South Carolina, for example, slaves who murdered their masters could be burned alive. Further evidence of the lowly position of the African American in early American history can be found in statutes that until 1821 classified the murder of a slave as a misdemeanor. After the Civil War, Black codes quickly replaced the slave codes, and the “separate but equal” doctrine applied to Black/White relations until Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. In the postslavery South, the law continued to differentiate between African Americans and Whites. African Americans were subjected to more capital offenses than their White counterparts, while White victims continued to be more highly valued by the legal system than African American victims. The harshest penalties of the criminal justice system were typically reserved for cases involving the rape of a White woman by an African American man. In contemporary society the greater value placed on White lives is epitomized by capital trials in which homicides involving White victims are significantly more likely to elicit a death penalty response than those involving African American victims.

Borrowing from the conflict perspective, Hubert Blalock posits that perceived threat can be influenced by a fear of competition over economic resources. Thus the economic well-being of Whites may be perceived to be in jeopardy as non-Whites are better able to compete for jobs, positions, and economic resources. Blalock also argues that the White majority may perceive a threat to their political power as the proportion of non-Whites increases. This fear, in turn, heightens the probability of discriminatory behavior and leads to greater inequality. Nevertheless, the relationship between racial composition and use of social control by Whites should be curvilinear; discriminatory behavior should decline after the non-White population becomes a numerical majority, since this enables the non-White population to influence the political process that resulted in its subordination. This approach to comprehending race relations in the United States has been termed power threat by Blalock and social threat by Allen Liska. Other scholars have employed the terms minority group threat or racial threat to describe this approach.

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