Rather, higher black crime rates reflect the specific conditions that stem from a number of socioeconomic realities that disproportionately face the black community. Now sure, some of those conditions stem from a history of discrimination in housing and elsewhere, such that blacks have been concentrated in highly populated urban areas, with less job opportunity, etc (See, Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, Harvard Press, 1994; or Oliver and Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. Routledge, 1995). But it is also due to fairly impersonal economic developments, such as the collapse of manufacturing in the cities, and the resulting job crisis. In neither case am I blaming racism per se, in the sense we traditionally think of the term. Not at all.
Anyway, as I was saying, according to several studies, socioeconomic variables explain the difference between white and black violence rates, and where economic conditions are comparable between whites and blacks, there are no significant racial crime differences (Krivo, L.J. and R.D. Peterson, 1996. “Extremely Disadvantaged Neighborhoods and Urban Crime,” Social Forces. 75, 2. December: 619-48.; Chasin, Barbara, 1997. Inequality and Violence in the United States: Casualties of Capitalism. NJ: Humanities Press International: 49). In fact, the correlation between economic variables and crime are remarkably consistent from one society to the next. Evidence gathered from more than thirty countries has found that race and ethnicity have far less to do with crime than these environmental factors (Mukherjee, Satyanshu. 1999. “Ethnicity and Crime,” Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice. Australian Institute of Criminology: Canberra. May: 1).
Although whites also suffer poverty, black poverty is more severe and more likely to correlate with crime. Seven out of ten poor whites live in stable, mostly non-poor neighborhoods, while eighty-five percent of the black poor live in mostly poor areas (Johnson, Calvin and Chanchalat Chanhatasilpa, 2003. “The Race/Ethnicity and Poverty Nexus of Violent Crime: Reconciling Differences in Chicago’s Community Area Homicide Rates,” in Violent Crime: Assessing Race and Ethnic Differences. Darnell Hawkins, ed., Cambridge University Press: 98.; also, Smith, Robert C. 1995. Racism in the Post Civil Rights Era: Now You See it, Now You Don’t. SUNY Press: 128).
Blacks are three times more likely to live in extreme poverty than whites (less than half the poverty line) (Sklar, Holly, 1998. “Let Them Eat Cake,” Z Magazine, November: 31), and six times more likely to live in concentrated poverty neighborhoods (Wachtel, Paul L. 1999. Race in the Mind of America: Breaking the Vicious Circle Between Blacks and Whites. NY: Routledge, 294, fn 15). Indeed, three-quarters of persons living in concentrated poverty neighborhoods are people of color (powell, john, 2001. “Socioeconomic School Integration,” Poverty and Race Research Action Council Bulletin, 10: 6, November/December: 6).
Looking specifically at homicide rates, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that crowded housing was the key to higher murder rates among blacks in the U.S. When census tracts with similar incomes, population density and housing conditions are compared, racial murder rate differences evaporate, (Pope, John, 1995, “Murder linked to dense poverty,” New Orleans Times-Picayune. June 14). because the poorest neighborhoods have similar homicide rates, no matter racial composition (Johnson, Calvin and Chanchalat Chanhatasilpa, 2003. “The Race/Ethnicity and Poverty Nexus of Violent Crime: Reconciling Differences in Chicago’s Community Area Homicide Rates,” in Violent Crime: Assessing Race and Ethnic Differences. Darnell Hawkins, ed., Cambridge University Press: 106).
A 1990 meta-analysis of twenty-one different studies on homicide, covering thirty years of research found much the same thing: among all the factors positively correlated with higher homicide rates, two of the most significant were unemployment rates and community resource deprivation (Land, K., P.L. McCall and L.E. Cohen, 1990. “Structural Covariates of Homicide Rates: Are There Any Invariances Across Time and Social Space?” American Journal of Sociology, 95: 922-63).
Indeed, racial crime gaps in the U.S. are largely a reflection of geography. Since blacks are more concentrated in cities, which have higher crime rates no matter their racial makeup, the crime rate among blacks is skewed upwards; but this has nothing to do with any genetic or cultural predisposition to crime. In large measure, because cities are more crowded, and because crowded areas tend to increase levels of anonymity amongst residents, and chip away at the levels of organization in a neighborhood, they will be the site of elevated levels of crime (Johnson and Chanhatasilpa, 2003: 97). Adjusting violent crime rates for levels of urbanization alone cuts the racial disproportion in half, with economic conditions explaining the remainder (Zimring, Franklin and Gordon Hawkins, 1997. Crime is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America. NY: Oxford University Press: 82-3; 234-236).
In fact, absent a litany of socioeconomic factors, there is no substantial independent relationship between a community’s racial composition and its homicide rates (Johnson and Chanhatasilpa, 2003: 92). Although the homicide rate among “middle class” blacks is higher than that for middle class whites, the reasons for this have nothing to do with race: middle class blacks tend to live in much closer proximity to poor communities, tend to be substantially less well off than middle class whites, and are thus exposed to more negative social influences than whites of their same general class group (Ibid, 107).
The role of social and economic environment and community conditions in determining crime rates is particularly evident among juveniles. A comprehensive analysis of homicide and robbery data, which looked at the importance of such things as race, poverty, family disruption and unemployment in determining crime rates in these categories, found that black male joblessness explained black family disruption, which in turn was highly related to black murder and robbery rates, particularly for youth (Hawkins, Darnell, John H. Laub, Janet L. Lauritsen, and Lynn Cothern, 2000. “Race, Ethnicity and Serious and Violent Juvenile Offending,” Juvenile Justice Bulletin. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, June.)
Further research has demonstrated that racial differences in delinquent behavior can be explained entirely by the highly unequal community conditions faced by white youth and those of color (Ibid). One study of white and black youth in the Pittsburgh area, for example, found that Black youth residing in neighborhoods more similar to their non-poor white counterparts, were no more likely to engage in acts of delinquency than their white peers (Peoples, F. and R. Loeber, 1994. “Do Individual Factors and Neighborhood Context Explain Ethnic Differences in Juvenile Delinquency?” Journal of Quantitative Criminology. 10, 2. June: 141-57).
Examination of longitudinal data indicates that once an assortment of economic and social variables are controlled for by the common social science technique of regression analysis, blacks are no more likely than whites to commit crimes, are less likely to commit property crimes than whites, and Latinos are also less likely to commit crimes than non-Hispanics (Crutchfield, Robert D. 1995. “Ethnicity, Labor Markets and Crime,” in Ethnicity, Race, and Crime: Perspectives Across Time and Place, Darnell F. Hawkins, ed., State University of New York Press: 200-201).
