White Crime

White Crime Rates

Like members of all other races and ethnicities, White Americans engage in crime. However, the patterns of White offending differ from those of other racial and ethnic groupings. Whereas Whites engage in low-level property, drug, and various public order offenses (like driving under the influence) at rates roughly comparable to other races and ethnicities, the racial patterns diverge widely when trends in violent crime are examined. The Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports show that, on average, Whites engage in proportionately less “street crime” of virtually all categories, especially violent crime. A salient example is murder. In 2006, approximatly 5,000 Whites and 5,000 African Americans were arrested for homicide, which is remarkable considering that Whites constitute the largest share of the U.S. population (about 75%).

Some have argued that a backdrop of oppression and deprivation that has historically crippled African Americans' social development was absent from White society, and that relative historic privilege for most Whites and a dearth of the social conditions (poverty, lack of education, discrimination) that explain crime account for these striking differences. But the fact remains that, by some measures, Whites commit crime at a far lesser rate than African Americans. Such statistics on White crime, taken at face value, have been misused to support arguably racist contentions that Whites are inherently less criminal than African Americans and other racial and ethnic groups. However, this simplistic understanding, based on modern statistics covering narrow definitions of crime, ignores the crucial role of history and culture in shaping current racial patterns of crime commission. It also fails to acknowledge that a broad understanding of White crime must include historic and definitional clarifications that paint a very different picture than the limited one portrayed by modern official statistics.

Some would argue that the idea of White crime should include a critical examination of historic, large-scale injustices, such as the European conquest of the western hemisphere from indigenous populations and the forced transportation of Black Africans, both of which resulted in the death and/ or enslavement of millions. This could be a compelling argument, as some of the crime types discussed in this entry are a distant echo of this era in which Whites' abuse of minorities was widespread. Indeed, one of the difficulties in defining and interpreting the idea of White crime is that many wrongs historically committed by Whites were not, at the time, defined as crimes at all. For example, although modern criminal statutes specifically outlaw kidnapping and false imprisonment, millions of Black Africans were captured and brought to the Americas as slave labor. Not only were these acts tolerated under the law, but they were specifically sanctioned and defended by it. Technically then, the captain of the slave ship, the trafficker in human flesh at the auction, and the owner and driver of slaves were not criminals under the laws of their day, even though they seem so by our modern sensibilities.

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