[1][2] This stereotype is associated with the fact that African Americans are proportionally over-represented in the numbers of those that are arrested and convicted for committing crimes.
[6] The criminalization of black males has a long history in the US, which includes both legal and informal social laws that can lead to death or incarceration.
Three sociohistorical threats to black male identities that speak to principles of race consciousness, primacy of racialization, and ordinariness of racism.
This involved arresting many of the recently freed men and women for minor violations and punishing them with hefty fines, long prison sentences, and working on former slave plantations.
[10] Their deaths, which occurred by being burned, shot, hanged, castrated, and/or tortured, were often part of public events and documented in scores of photos and postcards.
Some of these cases give legal authority for police to stop, question, pursue, and arrest individuals without probable cause or the presence of suspicious behaviors, even during minor traffic violations.
These cases demonstrate how policing behaviors across the USA are legally structured to produce institutional entrapment that often disproportionately target and affect black males.
[13] According to some scholars, the stereotype of African Americans males as criminals was first constructed as a tool to "discipline" and control slaves during the time of slavery in the United States.
For instance, Amii Barnard alleges that out of fear of the fugitive slaves staging a rebellion, slaveholders sought to spread the stereotype that African American males were dangerous criminals who would rape the "innocent" and "pure" white women if they had the opportunity to.
[16] Carter et al. argues that this criminal stereotype contributed to lynching in the United States that mostly targeted African American males in the south.
[32] Some argue that the ad Republicans used of an intimidating-looking mug shot of murderer Willie Horton created fear in white Americans minds.
[37] A number of studies have concluded that the news systematically portrays black Americans as criminals and whites as victims of the crime.
[41] By contrast, similar images of white people were often captioned without explicitly judgemental words, instead using phrases such as "finding food.
"[42][43] According to Sanders in Category inclusion and exclusion in perceptions of African Americans: Using the Stereotype Content Model to Examine Perceptions of groups and individuals, African Americans on television and in movies are most likely to play roles related to crime, sports, and entertainment stories rather than roles in which they make a valuable contribution to the nation.
It is very common for African Americans to be portrayed as threatening and violent gang members criminals and drug dealers.
Dixon states that heavy television viewing increases exposure to the overrepresentation of Blacks as criminals, when making race and crime judgements.
[40] A 2012 study found that white Americans overestimated the percent of burglaries, illegal drug sales, and juvenile crimes committed by blacks by between 6.6 and 9.5 percentage points.
[48] African Americans are also more likely than Whites to think that racial profiling is widespread[49] and to think they are treated unfairly by police, both in general and in actual criminal justice encounters.
[51][52] Many psychologists argue that the cultural stereotype of black criminality can have an unconscious but substantial influence on the way that "people perceive individuals, process information, and form judgments".
[53] For example, the criminal stereotype of African Americans could contribute to the reason behind why blacks are disproportionately more likely than Whites to be targeted by the police as suspects,[54] interrogated[55] and wrongfully convicted.
"[58] Another similar study examining 58,000 federal criminal cases concluded that African-Americans' jail time was almost 60% longer than white sentences while black men were on average more than twice as likely to face a mandatory minimum charge as white men were, even after taking into account arrest offense, age and location.
[61] Similarly, Giliam found that exposure to African American rather than White suspects led to increased support for capital punishment and the three-strikes legislation.
[62] Joseph Rand also suggests that when black witnesses are on trial with white jurors, they are more likely to feel stereotype threat and are more likely to appear less credible.
[63] Lincoln and Devah argue that the criminal stereotype of African American males can explain the growing racial segregation in the United States.
[65] Jelani Kerr, Peter Schafer, Armon Perry, Julia Orkin, Maxine Vance, and Patricia O'Campo in The Impact of Racial Discrimination on African American Fathers' Intimate Relationships, mentions that African American have a lower marriage rate and a lower relationship quality compared to whites.
According to Lubiano, the media portrays these African American women as "welfare queens" who are responsible for the crack trade.
[81] Rahier argues that Afro-Ecuadorians have been consistently stereotyped to be dangerous criminals in the popular and widely circulated magazine Vistazo, since the late 1950s.