Criminal Communities: "Racial Dualism" puts White Supremacy in the Media Crime Frame
By
Mikal Muharrar
"It is a crisis of staggering proportions." So says ABC News' Ted Koppel at the beginning of a
Nightline segment (8/27/97) on the most recent of a series of reports on the alarmingly high—and
rising—numbersof African-Americans under the control of the criminal justice system. (See The
Sentencing Project's "Young Black Americans and the Criminal Justice System"—1990, 1995—and
"Intended and Unintended Consequences: State Racial Disparities in Imprisonment"—1997.)
The segment opens with George Washington University professor Paul Butler stating that "one out of
three young African-American men is under criminal justice supervision." In voice-over, Koppel asks
if the statistics "reflect reality," while an unidentified male states, "the reality is that, unfortunately, a
disproportionate number of black men are involved in crime." Then Koppel counters, "Or is there
something wrong with the system?" And putting the question to his viewers: "Tonight, America in
black and white—what seems fair to you?"
This was not the first time Koppel used this rhetorical device. In an earlier show (Nightline, 9/2/92),
he asked his viewers to "listen to the finding of a major new study, and then consider your own
reaction as a sort of social Rorschach test." After Jerome Miller of the National Center on
Institutions and Alternatives pointed out that in Baltimore, for instance, "56 percent of 18- to
35-year-old African-American males were either in prison, jail, on probation, parole or being sought
on warrants on any given day," Koppel then asks if this suggested that "(a) black men are more
inclined to criminal behavior than whites" or that "(b) the criminal justice system is unfairly biased
against blacks?" "What," he asks his viewers, "do you think?"
This "A or B" framing of crime stories can be called "racial dualism"—the juxtaposition of the
possibility of bias against African-Americans with the possibility that blacks are inherently criminal. It
is not a bias particular to Koppel, for it is prevalent throughout the mainstream media.
It puts forward in earnest a tongue-in-cheek comment made by Moham-adu Jones, a staff attorney
with the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project: "When you go through these
prisons, and I've been through prisons in 10 states, you are forced to come to one of two
conclusions: either that young black men are naturally criminals or that there is something seriously
wrong with the system." (Emerge, 10/1997). But while Jones' statement was a transparent attempt to
contrast what he considered to be the obvious (systemic injustice) with the absurd (the notion of
congenital black criminality), the media crime frame of racial dualism airs the absurd and racist notion
of congenital black criminality as a legitimate point of view.
Criminal labeling
The labeling of African-American and Latino communities as in some way "criminal" is
commonplace. It happens, though, in a variety of ways. Study after study has documented how the
mainstream media disproportionately portray the face of crime in America as young and black. (See
"Crime in Black and White: The Violent, Scary World of Local News," Harvard International
Journal of Press/Politics, Vol. 1, No. 3.)
Sometimes mainstream media resort to outright labeling, as in the case of a New York Times article
(12/23/92) on the high incidence of street crime arrests in several largely African-American and
Latino neighborhoods in New York City. An ominous sub-head within the story read
"Predispo-sition to Crime." Accompanying the article was a map of New York City featuring the
black and Latino neighborhoods in question—under the label "The Criminal Communities."
But the media crime frame of racial dualism is a more subtle, though no less problematic, operation.
For example, in "A Shocking Look at Blacks and Crime" (10/16/95), U.S. News & World Report
introduced its account of the 1995 Sentencing Project study with the question, "Are a third of young
black men criminals?" Overlaying the "A or B" framing with a "white vs. black" significance, U.S.
News proclaimed that "many whites say the statistics merely reflect the fact that a disproportionate
number of criminals are young black men," while "many blacks say the numbers are the product of a
legal system that is tilted against them."
Similarly, coverage of the 1997 Sentencing Project report "Unintended Consequences" in the New
York Times (1/30/97) gave further credence to the notion that a lot of black males are just naturally
criminals. Times writer Fox Butterfield used the quotes of a professor to say that while "much of the
racial disparity in imprisonment" of black males "could be attributed to tougher sentences for crack
cocaine favored by black drug users, than for powdered cocaine, favored by whites," there is the
"unhappy truth" that blacks are "arrested disproportionately for violent crimes." This device was used
elsewhere by the Times (10/5/95, 10/8/95, 2/13/96) and conveys the distinct impression that, bias
aside, there is still the larger problem of criminal black folk.
The media crime frame of racial dualism sets up a false conflict between a model that explains the
high numbers of blacks in the criminal justice system as a result of discrimination and a model that
posits "disproportionate" criminality on the part of blacks as a root cause. But the Sentencing
Project's reports cited a variety of causal factors, the principled ones being (1) bias, (2) the
continuing overall growth of the criminal justice system, (3) the continuing disproportionate impact of
the "war on drugs" on minority populations, (4) the new wave of "get tough" sentencing policies and
(5) the continuing difficult circumstances of life for many young people living in low-income urban
areas—what the Sentencing Project called the "intersection of race and class effects." Those who
use the frame of racial dualism ignore or minimize these causal factors while mystifying
"disproportionality" into racial destiny.
The media frame of racial dualism also reinforces the prevailing "discrimination" model for explaining
racism in America: By presenting racism as a matter of individual attitudes and choices, the more
important role that structural economic and residential apartheid have played as pillars of white
supremacy in the U.S. is missed. Finally, the frame of racial dualism divides black and white into
hostile camps, associating whites with one view and blacks with the other—glossing over the fact
that many leading critics of black criminalization, including the author of the Sentencing Project
reports, are European-Americans.
Interrupted message
Airing the notion of congenital black criminality as a legitimate point of view is much like using the
flagrant white supremacy of The Bell Curve as a framework for discussing racial inequality. That the
frame of racial dualism suggests an implicit if not explicit endorsement of white supremacist views is
evident in Ted Koppel's response to civil rights scholar/activist Lani Guinier's comment on Nightline
(8/27/97) that the U.S. has "one group of kids who are getting an education and one group of kids
who are being tracked to prison."
Koppel's response was to say that this dichotomy reflects "the age old question about the cart and
the horse and which comes first." "In other words," he said, "are these people ending up in prison
because they don't have good schooling? I mean, why are things as they are. . . ."
Curiously, Koppel doesn't finish his statement as he interrupts his own message. We are left, then, to
speculate on the implications of his "logic." "Are these people ending up in prison because they don't
have good schooling"—or what? Because they're just criminals anyway? Or is it because their
parents are criminals? Or is it just because they are black? Maybe they don't have good schooling
because they're destined to go to prison anyway! Why are things the way they are, Mr. Koppel?
Unfortunately, mainstream media is the wrong place to go to get answers to such questions. Take the
host of Nightline's response on yet another facet of the "Black Crime Problem" discussion. The
National Center's Jerome Miller confronted Koppel (Nightline, 9/2/92) with statistics documenting
that in Baltimore a total of 86 black youths and 18 white youths were arrested for drug sales in
1980, whereas in 1990 only 13 white kids were arrested while 1,300 black youths were arrested for
sale of drugs. Now, according to a 1992 estimate of the U.S. Public Health Service's Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 76 percent of illicit drug users in the U.S. were
white, 14 percent were black, and 8 percent were Latino. But when Miller confronted Koppel with
the data, Koppel's response was a question of his own. "Let me ask you a very painful, but
necessary question," he said. "Is it that not many white people are selling drugs?"
A "painful" question? Why, one might ask, is this so "painful" for Koppel? Could it be that he is
pained at the unhappy task of revealing the "truth" about blacks, a "truth" that is hard to hear, and
even harder for him to say, but one that bravely, if gently, must be uttered: the "truth" of black
pathology, of black criminality. But Koppel's paternalistic truth is not true. And thus the response of
Miller, who, in a nice turn of the tables, answered, "No. I think a lot of it, incidentally, has to do with
the media."
