Apartheid. USA 1988

January 19, 1987:

Mayor Edward I Koch of New York City published in the Times some thoughts on race, crime, prejudice and fear in the aftermath of Howard Beach. ‘We cannot avoid the fact that crime in New York City is disproportionately committed by young men who are black,’ wrote the Mayor. ‘One recent estimate suggests that a young black man is 10 times more likely than his white counterpart to commit a robbery. Indeed, any given day approximately 57 percent of the inmates detained by the New York City Department of Correction are black.’ Then the Mayor asked why this was so. ‘One explanation reminds us that violent criminals are more likely to be poor and that blacks in contemporary America are disproportionately poor... A second explanation suggests that the disproportionately high crime rate among blacks in America must be understood as a cruel legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. No group has had such a painful experience in America. Centuries of oppression, the destruction of the American black family unit and forced economic dependency have, in this view, resulted in a pattern of anti-social behavior. Still another explanation suggests that black criminality is, to some extent at least, an artifact of a racist criminal justice system. Those who hold this view cite statistics showing that a black man is more likely to be stopped by the police and arrested for behavior that, had he been white, might have been overlooked. According to other statistics, once a black man is arrested, he is more likely to be convicted and sentenced to prison. Each of these explanations contains more than a kernel of truth. We should come to grips with the fact that for many whites, crime has a black face and, because in their minds

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race and crime have become inextricably intertwined, their fear of crime fuels a larger set of racial stereotypes and prejudices.’ The Mayor then posed the question: ‘How do we acknowledge understandable and appropriate fear of crime while condemning inexcusable and intolerable racial stereotyping?... To distinguish fear from racism, we should understand the role of racial stereotyping. Racism is defined by Webster's as the belief that one race is superior to another. Like its close cousins, religious and ethnic prejudice, racism consists of a set of attitudes, a bundle of beliefs, that provide a rationale and justification for overt acts of discrimination. The racist world view is expressed, in large measure, through racial stereotyping. Often these stereotypes have some basis in truth. The evil of stereotyping, however, is that characteristics of some members of a race or ethnic group are applied indiscriminately to the entire group. It may be true, for example, that the Mafia is made up of Italians. That does not mean that all Italians are involved in organized crime. Nor does the high incidence of criminality among black youths justify stereotyping black youths as criminals. The truth of the narrow proposition does not justify the broad stereotype.’^27.

27. The New York Times, Op-Ed page