Color Of Crime

In her book, The Color of Crime, author Katheryn Russell-Brown analyzes the roles that race, gender, and ethnicity play on crime in the United States, particularly how African Americans are viewed and effected by the views held by law and policymakers, law enforcement officers, and judges. The second edition of Russell-Brown’s book is a revision of her first edition, originally published in 1998, which was updated to address modernity issues, topics, and cases. Throughout, Russell-Brown focused on the balancing of heavy in-depth statistical information with specific cases to exemplify her views.

The first chapter addressed the historical and current inaccurate portrayal of race in the mass media, while the second chapter discussed the conversation

Although at times the statistical information seemed heavy, it also seemed necessary to the overall plight of the book. That being said, it was the statistical information throughout that I also found to be pivotal to the book’s persuasive power—particularly that of the Maryland State Troopers’ legalized racial profiling of African Americans on I-95. I found it interesting because these cases were local and hit close to home for me. Also interesting was the historical crimes by race and punishment chart for Virginia which reflected that most serious crimes sentenced African Americans to death while their white counterparts received little to no punishment. One of the most important parts of the book was the discussion of the OJ Simpson trial and its effect on American society; the media’s portray divided the races, and yet, in actuality, they were actually more often either united, or less of a disparity than that published. Most interesting to me was the fact that by sheer numbers, more whites than blacks thought that Simpson was not guilty. I remember being nine that summer and watching the trial daily from my grandparent’s living room in middle Georgia—the local news interviews and even Oprah reflected the races divided—because of that, the misinformation seemed to make sense, but having now read the statistical data, I am absolutely appalled and incensed by the media’s portrayal of society’s opinions which further drew a race line in the sand, rather than striving to unite the