This article examines the relationship between community structural conditions and racially motivated crimes against blacks and whites. Drawing on six years of police reports, census data, and survey data of Chicago communities, the study evaluates alternative hypotheses about the social organization of racial hate crime derived from social disorganization, resource competition, and defended communities perspectives. Multivariate analyses controlling for spatial autocorrelation reveal that antiblack hate crimes, in contrast to general forms of crime, are more likely in relatively organized communities with high levels of informal social control. Conversely, antiwhite incidents appear more numerous in traditionally disorganized communities, especially those characterized by residential instability. Acts of violence and discrimination motivated by racial animus are "interwoven with the fabric of our culture" (Newton and Newton 1991, p. ix). In the United States alone, history abounds with examples of racial and ethnic violence, from the well-known extremes of slavery and lynching of African-Americans, to the genocide of Native Americans, to more mundane yet pervasive forms of discrimination and harassment. Given the indelible marks of interracial violence on our history, and on our current conceptions of racial and ethnic identity, social scientists have sought for centuries to understand the nature of intergroup conflict. Interest in the study of intergroup criminal victimization has grown 1 A dissertation fellowship from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation supported this research. I thank Ross L. Matsueda, Becky Pettit, Stew Tolnay, Bob Crutchfield, and the AJS reviewers for helpful suggestions. I also thank the Chicago Police Department, the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, and the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods for sharing data.

Using a multilevel comparative framework, we propose that politically receptive city contexts facilitate the viability of marginalized neighborhoods. To illustrate this proposition, we examine the relationship between immigrant concentration and neighborhood violence. Drawing on political process and minority incorporation theories, we argue that favorable immigrant political opportunities will strengthen the often-found inverse relationship between immigration and crime at the neighborhood level. Unique data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study (Peterson and Krivo 2010a) provide demographic and violence information for Census tracts in a representative sample of 87 large cities. We append this dataset with city-level measures of immigrant political opportunities, such as the extent of minority political incorporation into elected offices and pro-immigrant legislation. Multilevel instrumental variable analyses reveal that the inverse relationship between immigrant concentration and neighborhood violent crime is generally enhanced in cities with favorable immigrant political opportunities. We speculate that this occurs because favorable political contexts bolster social organization by enhancing trust and public social control within immigrant neighborhoods. Our findings demonstrate that the fate of neighborhoods marginalized across ethnicity and nativity are shaped by the responsiveness of political actors and structures to their concerns.

Despite the continued importance of discrimination for racial labor market inequality, little research explores the process by which workers name potentially negative experiences as race discrimination. Drawing on the legal consciousness literature and organizational approaches to employment discrimination, we assess the effect of social status, job characteristics, and workplace context on the likelihood that workers perceive race discrimination at work. Analyzing data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, we find that ascriptive status is associated with perceptions of discrimination, with African Americans, Hispanics, and women more likely to perceive racial discrimination, net of job and organizational controls. Results also suggest that workers with a greater sense of entitlement (as indicated by job authority, promotion experience, and union membership) and knowledge of legal entitlements (as indicated by education level and age) are more likely to perceive workplace racial discrimination. Other workplace conditions can signal fairness and decrease perceptions of racial bias, such as formalized screening practices and having nonwhite supervisors, whereas working among predominantly nonwhite coworkers increases the likelihood of perceiving discrimination. These findings suggest that personal attributions of discrimination vary across social groups and their environments, and demonstrate the importance of workplace context for understanding how individuals apply legal concepts, such as discrimination, to their experiences.

Previous clearance research provides an incomplete test of theories emphasizing the role of both victim and offender status in police discretion. Using National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) data, we investigate the impact of both victim's and offender's race, and, in particular, victim— offender racial dyads on homicide clearance by arrest, using event history (survival) analysis, so that time to clearance and censoring are considered. We also compare models for homicide clearance with those for aggravated assault. For homicides, results indicate that incidents with non-white offenders are more likely to be cleared by arrest than those with white offenders, regardless of victim's race. In contrast, for aggravated assault, dyads are important: incidents involving white victims and offenders are most likely to be cleared, with incidents involving non-white parties least likely to be cleared. Furthermore, the impact of victim—offender racial dyads on clearance is smaller for homicide than for aggravated assault.

When applied to homicide clearance by arrest, the victim-devaluing perspective posits that police favor higher—social status victims by allocating greater investigative effort to their cases. Previous studies have measured social status via a dichotomous race variable (White vs. Black, White vs. non-White, or non-Hispanic White vs. racial/ ethnic minority). As the Hispanic population grows in the United States, it is increasingly important to extend homicide clearance research beyond the traditional questions of dichotomous racial/ethnic differences. Using 2000-2007 homicide data from agencies that report victim’s ethnicity to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), the current study examines the impact of victim’s race/ethnicity on homicide clearance by arrest via a trichomotous measure (non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, or Hispanic). Event history analysis found that, controlling for other incident characteristics, homicides with Hispanic victims had a lower risk of clearance by arrest than those with non-Hispanic White or non-Hispanic Black v ictims.