Discrimination Against Racial and Ethnic Minoroties 1-Race and Crime

Discrimination against Racial and Ethnic Minorities

In 2016, while many us do not feel personally racist, prejudiced or bigoted we are still encountering a great amount of discrimination in our nation. Whereas prejudice refers to attitudes, discrimination refers to actions or practices that result in differential treatment of categories of individuals.

Individual versus Institutional Discrimination (Mooney, Linda, Knox, David, and Schacht)

Individual discrimination occurs when individuals treat other individuals unfairly or unequally because of their group membership. Individual discrimination can be overt or adaptive. In overt discrimination, individuals discriminate because of their own prejudicial attitudes. For example, a white landlord may refuse to rent to a Mexican American family because of prejudice against Mexican Americans.

In adaptive discrimination, the injustice occurs due to the discrimination of others. The landlord may refuse the Mexican American family due to the discrimination of other tenants and for fear that they would move.

Institutional discrimination refers to institutional policies and procedures that result in unequal treatment of and opportunities for minorities. Institutional discrimination is covert and insidious and maintains the subordinate position of minorities in society. For example, when schools use standard intelligence tests to decide which children will be placed in college preparatory tracks, they are limiting the educational advancement of minorities whose intelligence is not fairly measured by culturally biased tests developed from white middle-class experiences. And the funding of public schools through local tax dollars results in less funding for schools in poor and largely minority school districts.

Race and Crime

Institutional discrimination is also found in the criminal justice system, which disproportionately incarcerates people of color. Because the "War on Drugs" has been waged predominately in poor communities of color, most people arrested for drug offenses are black or Latino, even though people of color are no more likely to use or sell drugs than whites (Alexander 2010). Millions of people of color are labeled as felons for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses.

Race is a factor in who gets arrested. Minorities are disproportionately represented in the official statistics. For example, African Americans represent about 13 percent of the population but account for 38.5 percent of all arrests for violent index offenses, and 29.3 percent of all arrests for property index offenses (FBI 2013). They have 3.7 times the arrest rate for possession of marijuana, are six times more likely to be admitted to prison and, if admitted to prison for a violent crime, receive longer sentences than their white counterparts (ACLU 2013; Hartney & Vuong 2009).

Nevertheless, it is inaccurate to conclude that race and crime are casually related. Thus, the high rate of arrests, conviction, and incarceration of minorities may be a consequence of individual and institutional bias against minorities. For example, racial profiling---the practice of targeting suspects on the basis of race---may be responsible for their higher arrest rates. A survey of Seattle residents lends support to such contention (Drakulich 2013). The results indicate that "...crime stereotypes about racial and ethnic minorities are associated with reduced perceptions of neighborhood safety and increased anxieties about victimization..." among white respondents (p. 322)

References

Mooney, Linda, Knox, David, and Schacht, Caroline 2015. Understanding Social Problems. Cengage Learning: Boston, MA.

Alexandaer, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press

FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation). 2013. “Crime in the United States, 2012.” Annual Uniform Crime Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). 2013 (June). The War on Marijuana in Black and White. Available at www.aclu.org

Hartney, Christopher, and Linh Vuong. 2009. Created Equal: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the U.S. Criminal Justice System. Oakland, CA: National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

Drakulich, Kevin M. 2013. “Strangers, Neighbors, and Race: A Content Model of Stereotypes and Racial Anxieties about Crime.” Race and Justice 2(4):322-355.