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White People Commit The Most Heinous Crimes. by marksonteewhy: 11:31am On Jan 01, 2016 |
Underlying much of that subconscious racial bias is the most
enduring, corrosive racial stereotype in America: the black-
as-criminal mindset. Historian David Levering summarizes
it: “Whites commit crimes but blacks are criminals.” While
whites can and do commit a great deal of minor and major
crimes, the race as a whole is never tainted by those acts.
But when blacks violate the law, all members of the race are
considered suspect. used to anchor a show on Court TV,
and when we heard about a new arrest for some horrific
crime, my African American co-host would whisper, “Please
don’t let him be black.” It would never enter my mind to
wish that a bad guy not be white, because no matter how
sick the crime, other members of the white race are not
impugned.
Remember Zimmerman’s false syllogism? A few blacks
committed burglary, Trayvon was black, therefore Trayvon
was a criminal. Similar logic is used daily in the
assumptions police and citizens make about African
Americans, especially young males.
The black-man-as-criminal stereotype runs deep. The
archetype is so prevalent that the majority of whites and
African Americans agreed with the statement “blacks are
aggressive or violent” in a national survey. In support of
these findings, other research indicates that the public
generally associates violent street crime with African
Americans. Other nationwide research has shown that the
public perceives that blacks are involved in a greater
percentage of violent crime than official statistics indicate
they actually are.
Notice how the reasoning about race runs right to insulting
conclusions (blacks are criminals), but never to positives,
which would be equally (il)logical. No one thinks:
1. Barack Obama is our president, and he’s African American.
2. That kid walking down the street is African American.
3. He’s probably a future president!
The standard assumption that criminals are black and blacks
are criminals is so prevalent that in one study, 60 percent of
viewers who viewed a crime story with no picture of the
perpetrator falsely recalled seeing one, and of those, 70
percent believed he was African American. When we think
about crime, we “see black,” even when it’s not present at
all.
Where did this insulting stereotype come from? The black-
as-criminal image has been with us at least since the
nineteenth century, when explicit racism portrayed African
American slaves’ essential nature as ignorant and savage, in
need of the “civilizing” influence of the white man. At that
time little black crime actually occurred, as slaves’ lives were
rigorously controlled, and they could be and often were
swiftly put to death for perceived offenses against the slave
owners, who acted as judge, jury, and executioner. As Chief
Justice Roger B. Taney said in the famous 1857 Dred Scott v.
Sanford decision about the Founding Fathers’ mindset in
drafting the Constitution:
Blacks had no rights which the white man was bound to
respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be
reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold
and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and
traffic, whenever profit could be made by it.
In contrast, white slavers, who should have been the real
criminals, imprisoned African Americans on their
plantations, forcing them to live short, harsh lives in
extreme poverty, working without any compensation,
constantly subjecting them to regular beatings and threats of
violence. Female slaves were often raped by white male
slave owners. Well into the twentieth century lynchings of
blacks in the southern United States were not only common
but were social events where white families would bring the
children and a picnic lunch, and take pictures of the hanging,
to be made into commemorative postcards. On average, an
African American man, woman, or child was hanged,
generally by a white mob, once a week, every week between
1882 and 1930, as police actively participated or stood by
and condoned the murders. Lynchings continued until the
1950s, as thousands of black Americans were hanged for
offenses like “disputing with a white man.” (A much smaller
number of whites were lynched as well, often for taking the
side of a black person.)
Though the United States was founded as a slave nation,
with the subjugation of African Americans written into our
constitution, and though our history brims with centuries of
repulsive acts of viciousness perpetrated by whites against
millions of African Americans, no white-as-criminal trope
ever took hold. This can only be attributed to the triumph of
propaganda over reality.
What about more recently? Most of us see our history of
slavery, Jim Crow, and lynchings as shameful and repellent,
yet still believe the black-as-criminal attitude is justified
based on current crime fears. Is it?
It depends on what we choose to fear. How about serial
killers? What criminal is more terrifying than a madman
killing again and again, escaping the law? America’s most
notorious serial killers, striking fear as their body counts
mount, have almost always turned out to be white, and
gruesome beyond imagining. Albert DeSalvo, the Boston
Strangler, terrorized his city in the 1960s, sexually assaulting
and murdering thirteen women. David Berkowitz, New York
City’s “son of Sam,” killed six and wounded seven in the late
1970s, terrifying the city until his apprehension.Ted Bundy,
who called himself “the most coldhearted son of a bitch
you’ll ever meet,” confessed to thirty murders in the 1970s.
He was on the loose, killing women in Washington, Idaho,
Utah, and Colorado for years before he was apprehended.
Chicago serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who dressed as a
clown and performed at children’s hospitals, murdered
thirty-three teenaged boys and young men in the 1970s,
burying twenty-seven in the crawl space under his house.
He described his sexual release in committing murder as
“the ultimate thrill.” Gary Ridgeway, Washington State’s
Green River Killer, was convicted of killing forty-eight girls
and young women but admitted to ninety murders during
the 1980s and 1990s. He returned to the corpses he left
along the river to have sexual intercourse with them. Ted
Kaczynski, the Unabomber, killed three and terrorized many
others, sending mail bombs with his anti-technology screeds
to universities and airports for seventeen years, until 1995.
Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee Cannibal, raped, murdered,
and dismembered seventeen men and boys over thirteen
years, until 1991. Dennis Rader, known as BTK for his
signature “bind, torture, and kill” modus operandi, killed ten
in Wichita, Kansas and was on the loose for decades until his
2005 apprehension.
Though each of these men was white, striking again and
again in towns and cities across the United States, garnering
intense media coverage of their crimes and captures, no
fear of white men emerged. Their murders were considered
individual acts for which they alone were responsible.
Prominent American organized crime families have long
been run by white men like John Gotti, widely reputed to be
responsible for at least thirty murders, including executions
he ordered of members of his own crime family who he
suspected of being informants. James “Whitey” Bulger killed
at least eleven of his organized crime associates and did not
face justice until he was 84 years old. He was sentenced to
life in prison in late 2013. The judge sentencing him
pronounced “the scope, callousness, and depravity of [his]
crimes are almost unfathomable.” Yet none of us looks at
white men with concern that they are mob bosses.
Rampage killers are often in the news. Nearly every one
who has murdered a large number of people in one horrific
event has been white. American bomber Timothy McVeigh
took 168 lives at the federal building in Oklahoma City in
1995, many of them preschoolers at day care, in the worst
incident of domestic terrorism until 9/11. Dylan Klebold and
Eric Harris, the Columbine high school killers, shot thirteen
of their fellow high school students, then took their own
lives in 1999. Adam Lanza killed his mother, then a
classroom full of six- and seven-year-olds and six school
personnel before killing himself at Newtown Elementary
School in Connecticut in 2012. Earlier that year James
Holmes shot 12 moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado. All these
men are white, as is the case for virtually all shooters on the
long and growing list of mass killings in America. (The major
exception is not an African-American but Korean student
Seung-Hui Cho, who committed the worst mass shooting in
our history, killing thirty-three people at Virginia Tech
University before turning his gun on himself in 2007.) Yet
even though these shocking events generate round-the-clock
media attention for days or weeks afterwards, that level of
attention does not scare anyone away from white men.
Shocking cases of white women killing their own children
occur regularly. In 1995, Susan Smith murdered her two
sons, then told police an African American man did it. (So
prevalent is the black-as-criminal stereotype that racial
hoaxes are common and often effective in distracting
attention.) Andrea Yates drowned all five of her young
children in 2001. In one of the highest profile cases of the
last few years, Casey Anthony was tried (and acquitted) for
the murder of her daughter Caylee. No one concludes white
women are baby killers.
Every American presidential assassin – the killers of
presidents Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William
McKinley, and John F. Kennedy -- has been white, as was the
killer of JFK’s assassin, and the murderers of Martin Luther
King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Ronald Reagan’s attempted
assassin was white, and so were all those who made
attempts on the lives of presidents Theodore Roosevelt,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Gerald Ford (Ford’s two attempted
killers diverged not on racial but on gender lines, as both
were white women).
In our nation’s history, so many of the sickest, most
appalling crimes have been committed by whites. Yet no
matter how sadistic the crime, no matter how young the
victims, no matter how much fear is engendered in a
community, no matter how much media attention and
public discussion the crimes of whites engender, the race
itself is never sullied. One does not look at a white man or
woman and feel concern that pale skin enhances the
likelihood that he or she is an assassin, a bomber, a
murderer.
It is the black-as-criminal stereotype that endures,
sometimes buried, sometimes expressed in private to
trusted confidants, and other times stated openly by those
who do not fear being called racist. President Obama, in his
remarks the week after the Zimmerman verdict, noted that
African American men are disproportionately involved in the
criminal justice system, finding common ground with those
who fear black criminals. During the Zimmerman case,
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen spoke for many
when he openly wrote of his fear of African American men.
Conservative author Ann Coulter said that fear of black
males is justified because they commit so much crime. Even
civil rights leader Jesse Jackson admits, “There is nothing
more painful to me … than to walk down the street and hear
footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around
and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
Most everyone in the debate about the black-as-criminal
stereotype, then, accepts as fact that African American males
commit a grossly disproportionate amount of crime. On the
right, this is generally used as evidence justifying anxiety
about African Americans on the streets, in stores, or near
white homes. On the left, root causes of crime are examined
(failing schools, poverty, joblessness) in an effort to explain
and reduce the numbers. But few scrutinize the numbers
themselves to see who really is committing serious crimes in
America, to determine based on reason and logic whether
suspicions of African Americans actually make sense.
Let’s look at run-of-the-mill crimes today. Who’s committing
them? Who should be feared? Again, it depends on what
categories of offenses we choose to fear. Whites are
disproportionately arrested for some crimes, such as arson,
driving under the influence, and vandalism. That is, even
with the focus of police resources on black communities,
whites are convicted of these offenses at numbers greater
than their percentage of the population. Drunk driving is a
real menace, killing over 10,000 Americans per year,
according to the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration data. Yet no one eyes a white driver next to
him on the road and says, “A-ha, light-skinned guy, he’s
probably drunk, I’m calling the police.” The statistics don’t
matter. Our perceptions do.
How much crime overall is committed by African Americans?
You’d be surprised at how difficult it is to strip away
anxieties and emotions and arrive at the factual answer to
this question. Most go quickly to FBI arrest or incarceration
statistics, to see who has been convicted and sentenced for
various offenses, broken down by race. But this data doesn’t
include every state or even consistent reporting from one
police department to the next. Nevertheless, this FBI data
shows that African Americans, who comprise 13 percent of
our population, represent 38 percent of inmates in state and
federal prisons. That is, blacks are locked up at nearly three
times their rate in population, a shockingly high number.
This statistic is often used in support of the black-as-criminal
conclusion.
But these numbers are almost entirely useless, because they
are both over- and under-inclusive. They include a small
number of people who may be innocent as well as a very
large number of inmates incarcerated for nonviolent
offenses, especially marijuana possession, which does not
strike fear in the hearts of most people. Worse, these
numbers are flawed because they do not reflect who’s
committing the crime, merely who has been apprehended
and locked up. They leave out all the burglars and rapists
and killers who are still on the loose.
And the statistics don’t take into account unequal policing.
Many people are unaware of the huge disparity of law
enforcement resources applied to majority black urban
neighborhoods in comparison to the relatively lax policing
of white suburbs. Police departments send legions of
officers to patrol inner city neighborhoods, with high
concentrations of blacks, stopping, questioning, and frisking
African Americans (and Hispanics), and where law
enforcement has more eyes on a community, it finds more
offenses. Once in the “sticky” criminal justice system, young
men of color are likely to find themselves under correctional
control, monitored, watched for many years, even after
release from incarceration. To make room for the
skyrocketing number of Americans (disproportionately men
of color) incarcerated in the last few decades, we’ve slashed
and generally eliminated prison counseling, drug treatment
programs, education and vocational programs. Once
released, ex-cons are legally discriminated against by
employers, denied food stamps, access to public housing,
school loans, professional licenses, and access to many
other basic services. As a result, the United States has a high
recidivism rate, as drug dealing and other criminal
enterprises are the rare occupations that offer jobs to
released former inmates. In inner city neighborhoods, it’s
easy to fall under correctional control, and once in, it’s tough
to get out.
The chief problem with arrest and incarceration statistics,
compiled so diligently by law enforcement annually and
relied upon heavily by most legal analysts, is that they are
only as good as the humans making decisions as to where to
focus police, what crimes to charge, what plea bargains to
offer, what sentences to impose. As we’ve seen, nearly
everyone harbors implicit racial fears and assumptions, and
the humans staffing our criminal justice system are no
better nor worse than the rest of us. We know that at every
turn, similarly situated African Americans are treated more
punitively than whites in the criminal justice system.
Thus the decisions made at the entry point to the criminal
justice system – community policing decisions as to who gets
watched, who gets stopped, who gets questioned, who gets
patted down for contraband – powerfully determine not who
is a criminal, but who gets labelled as criminal. All things
being equal, inmate numbers would easily tell us who has
broken the law. But again, almost nothing is equal in our
justice system.
For example, arrests. We know that overall blacks and
whites use marijuana at about the same rate (whites are
more likely to sell). Among young people aged eighteen to
twenty-five, the most common age to be caught up in the
criminal justice system, whites are more likely to have
smoked marijuana. This is contrary to the widely held
association of drug use with African Americans. When we
include other narcotics, whites constitute the vast majority
of drug users. Yet in one survey, when subjects were asked,
“Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug
user, and describe that person to me?” Ninety-five percent
of respondents pictured a black drug user.
Nationwide, four times as many African Americans as whites
are arrested for marijuana possession. In Iowa and the
District of Columbia, the number jumps to eight times as
many. How does this happen? Because police departments,
partly driven by a desire to increase their drug arrest
statistics, concentrate on minority or poorer
neighborhoods. Focusing on low-level offenses is easier
and cheaper than investigating serious crimes, and drives
those arrest numbers high, triggering increased funding.
And so hundreds of thousands of inner city residents are
arrested, convicted, and incarcerated for having a joint, a
cookie, or a baggie of marijuana in their pocket, even
though the majority of Americans favor legalization.
When was the last time you saw a drug sweep in the
suburbs?
If one reasoned only from arrest records, one would
conclude that blacks are four times as likely as whites to
smoke marijuana. And we know that would be wrong.
Reasoning backward from arrest or imprisonment statistics
to conclude that minority groups are violent criminals is
equally flawed.
We know that police disproportionately target
neighborhoods of color, so that’s where the vast majority of
arrests occur. That does not necessarily mean that’s where
most of the criminals are. To drill down on this, let’s take a
look at a timely case study of focused policing, where due to
a federal judge’s intervention, massive data was compiled
by police themselves as they patrolled, stopped, questioned,
and frisked millions of citizens over many years in America’s
largest city. 1 Like |
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