Racial Threat and Social Control: A Review and Conceptual Framework for Advancing Racial Threat Theory

Abstract

In the 50 years since its inception, racial threat theory has gained substantial traction across the social sciences and been widely embraced by scholars studying race, power structures, crime, and justice. Using racial composition as a proxy for racial threat (e.g., percentage Black), criminologists have produced nearly 100 empirical studies that suggest that large and growing minority populations lead to harsher social controls for minority groups. However, racial threat theory and our understanding of the precise interworking of population composition, threat, and social control is far from settled. The empirical evidence on racial threat theory is mixed. In addition, there remains considerable ambiguity about how, when, where, and to whom racial threat is applied, which has clouded our understanding of racial threat and created a “theoretical fog” surrounding this literature. Our goal in this chapter is twofold. First, we provide an overview of the state of racial threat theory and literature as it relates to criminology and criminal justice research. Second, we identify key gaps in research and offer a blueprint for systematically advancing the next era of racial threat research in ways that can begin to lift the ambiguities and fog surrounding this theory.