Why Don’t More Black Americans Offend? Testing a Theory of African American Offending’s Ethnic-Racial Socialization Hypothesis

• Published date: 01 October 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/2153368716688740
• Author: Elaine Eggleston Doherty,Shytierra Gaston
• Date: 01 October 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article
Race and Justice
2018, Vol. 8(4) 366-395
Why Don’t More Black
ª The Author(s) 2017
Article reuse guidelines:
Americans Offend?
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/2153368716688740
Testing a Theory of
journals.sagepub.com/home/raj
African American
Offending’s Ethnic-Racial
Socialization Hypothesis
Shytierra Gaston1 and Elaine Eggleston Doherty2
Abstract
Criminology is replete with research on the correlates of African American offending,
yet theorizing efforts have lagged. Unnever and Gabbidon recently proposed a Theory
of African American Offending, an integrated explanation of African Americans’ risks for
and resilience to offending. Many of the theory’s hypotheses remain untested, espe-
cially its major claim that positive ethnic-racial socialization is the main reason more
Black Americans do not offend. The theory argues that positive ethnic-racial sociali-
zation inhibits African American offending by attenuating the criminogenic effect of
weak social bonds. Using data from a prospective, longitudinal cohort of African
Americans from the Woodlawn Project, we test whether these postulations hold for
adolescent delinquency and adult offending and find general support: Positive ethnic-
racial socialization buffers the effect of weak school bonds on adolescent substance
use and adult offending for males, but not females, across most crime types. Advancing
criminological discourse on race, offending, and resilience, this study has implications
for broader criminological theorizing and crime-reduction efforts.
Keywords
ethnic-racial socialization, social bonds, African American offending, criminological
theory, violence
1 Department of Criminal Justice, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA
2 Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri–St. Louis, Saint Louis, MO, USA
Corresponding Author:
Shytierra Gaston, Department of Criminal Justice, Indiana University, Sycamore Hall 302, 1033 East Third
Street, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
Email: scgaston@indiana.edu

---

Gaston and Doherty
367
Arrest, victimization, and self-report data show that African Americans1 have been
disproportionately involved in violent offending for decades, although self-report data
show they are no more involved in nonviolent offenses (e.g., drug or property
offending)—the majority of the nation’s crimes—than other racial/ethnic groups
(Elliott & Ageton, 1980; Huizinga, Loeber, & Thornberry, 1994; Lauritsen, 2010;
Mitchell & Caudy, 2013). Empirical studies have pointed to potential explanations of
racial disparities in violent crimes, often citing that such disparities reflect Black
Americans’ disproportionate exposure to criminogenic risk factors. For example,
Black Americans uniquely experience racial discrimination—a robust correlate of
offending—that White Americans generally do not experience (Burt, Simons, &
Gibbons, 2012; Caldwell, Kohn-Wood, Schmeelk-Cone, Chavous, & Zimmerman,
2004; Simons, Chen, Stewart, & Brody, 2003; Unnever, Cullen, Mathers, McClure, &
Allison, 2009). Furthermore, Black Americans are more likely to face factors con-
ducive to crime such as experiencing poor economic conditions and living in neigh-
borhoods characterized by concentrated disadvantage.
Criminology is replete with empirical research on the correlates of race and
offending; however, theorizing efforts have lagged in comparison to empirical
endeavors. While many criminologists favor a general theory of crime that explains all
types of offending among all individuals, some scholars argue that traditional, race-
neutral theories of crime are inadequate to explain Black offending because they fail
to capture the unique conditions Black Americans face, and they ignore the historical,
economic, political, and social context in which Black Americans are embedded
(Phillips & Bowling, 2003; Russell, 1992). By default, traditional, race-neutral the-
ories of crime overlook important differences that shape Black offending. Just as
feminist criminology appreciates women’s unique position in the social order and
makes their experiences central to explaining offending, some argue that theories that
attempt to explain Black offending must be grounded in the context of race relations
and must make the experiences of Black Americans central (Daly & Chesney-Lind,
1988; LaFree & Russell, 1993; Phillips & Bowling, 2003). Race relations order social
life and American institutions (e.g., schools, workforce, etc.) in fundamental ways and
thus race should not be treated as peripheral or an accessory. Moreover, some
empirical analyses have refuted the “racial invariance” assumption that undergirds
race-neutral theories of crime (see Ousey, 1999; Unnever, Barnes, & Cullen, 2016),
pointing to the need for race-specific explanations of offending.
For more than 100 years, scholars have advocated for the development of a “Black
criminology,” “minority perspective,” or a subfield devoted to theorizing and
researching Black offending (DuBois, 1898; LaFree & Russell, 1993; Phillips &
Bowling, 2003; Russell, 1992), but scholars have been slow to respond to this theore-
tical call, with most race and crime theories emerging within the last 25 years. Most
notably, Sampson and Wilson (1995) put forth a Theory of race, crime, and urban
inequality, a place-based, structural–cultural explanation of race differences in violence
that has received mixed empirical support (McNulty, 2001; Ousey, 1999; Peterson &
Krivo, 2005). It contends that Black neighborhoods are more likely to be plagued with
structural conditions conducive to crime, such as segregation, deindustrialization, and

---

368
Race and Justice 8(4)
high unemployment rates, which give rise to cultural adaptations that undermine social
organization and foster crime. Another prominent race theory is E. Anderson’s (1999)
Code of the Street, which posits that some residents adapt to poor neighborhood con-
ditions by adopting a street code, or antisocial attitudes, that involves the willingness to
use violence or threats of violence in order to survive. Supporting the theory, empirical
research has shown that adopting a street code is related to violent offending (Brezina,
Agnew, Cullen, & Wright, 2004; Stewart & Simons, 2006). Deviating from popular
macro-level or structural–cultural explanations of violence, a recent addition to this
repertoire of race and crime theories is Unnever and Gabbidon’s (2011) Theory of
African American Offending (hereafter TAAO), an integrated, individual-level theory
that focuses less on structural–cultural forces and more on the criminogenic effects of
racism and Black Americans’ resilience to this racial subjugation.
A TAAO
TAAO is premised on the notion that African Americans have a unique lived expe-
rience not shared by Whites or other groups of color, and those experiences, such as
enduring institutionalized oppression, have shaped their worldview. TAAO contends
that virtually all Black Americans will experience some form of racial discrimination
throughout their lives, and experiencing racial discrimination places Black Americans
at risk for offending by eliciting negative emotions, such as anger, depression, and
anxiety, and by weakening attachments to White-dominated, prosocial institutions,
such as schools (Unnever & Gabbidon, 2011, pp. 26–29). These assertions are con-
sistent with research that links various dimensions of racial discrimination to a host of
deleterious consequences for African Americans. Scholars have found racial dis-
crimination to be associated with diminished mental health, higher levels of stress,
compromised cognitive processing and development, and cardiovascular problems
(Brody et al., 2006; Keith, Lincoln, Taylor, & Jackson, 2009; Sellers, Caldwell,
Schmeelk-Cone, & Zimmerman, 2003; Simons et al., 2002; Williams, Neighbors, &
Jackson, 2008). In addition to compromising the overall well-being of Black Amer-
icans, numerous studies have linked racial discrimination to offending (Brody et al.,
2006; Burt & Simons, 2013; Burt, Simons, and Gibbons, 2012; Caldwell et al., 2004;
McCord & Ensminger, 1997; Simons et al., 2003; Unnever et al., 2009), including
recent partial tests of TAAO (Isom, 2016; Jones & Greene, 2016; Unnever, 2014;
Unnever, Barnes, et al., 2016; Unnever, Cullen, & Barnes, 2016).
While many African Americans experience racial discrimination and in turn
experience negative emotions and weak bonds, not all who do will engage in
offending. TAAO explains this conundrum by drawing from the racial socialization
literature (Hughes & Chen, 1997; Hughes et al., 2006; Lesane-Brown, 2006) and
research of Burt, Simons, and Gibbons (2012), postulating that amid these crime-
inducing factors, positive ethnic-racial socialization—the process of Black parents
instilling their children with pride and coping skills needed to thrive in a racially
stratified society—will inhibit these criminogenic forces and is the factor that protects
most Black Americans from offending (Unnever & Gabbidon, 2011, p. 113, 145).

---

Gaston and Doherty
369
The potential protective role of ethnic-racial socialization is underemphasized in
criminological research but is well established in the developmental psychology lit-
erature as reviewed below. Its centrality in TAAO warrants an investigation in order to
test the validity of the theory and to inform criminological knowledge of the potential
of ethnic-racial socialization to reduce African American offending. Therefore, the
current study focuses on the ability of positive ethnic-racial socialization to provide
...