Jonathan Chait has a characteristically glib response for liberals who associate "fear of crime" with white racial anxieties:
From the 1960s through the 1990s, crime weighed heavily on the public mood, but liberals tended to dismiss it as mere code words for racism. One measure of the liberal mood is political movies like "The Candidate" and "The American President," where virtuous liberal politicians candidly declare that crime is not a real issue at all.
In reality, there really was a huge explosion in the crime rate. In 1960, there were 161 violent crimes per 100,000 Americans. By 1980 that rate had risen to 597 violent crimes per 100,000, and it peaked in 1991 at 758 violent crimes per 100,000 Americans. (It has since fallen back into the 400s.) [...]
In any case, the salience of crime as a political issue has collapsed. Doesn't that suggest that the fear of crime was not merely racial backlash but an actual response to, you know, rising crime?
Chait would do well to contextualize those numbers before trying to use them as a bludgeon against liberals. A few things. First, the largest influx of whites from urban centers and to the suburbs -- including Detroit -- predated the crime explosion of the 1970s and 1980s by at least a decade. In St. Louis, Missouri, for example, close to 60 percent of whites had fled the city between 1950 and 1970, a period that coincided with black migration to the area. Indeed, it's funny that Chait is responding to Thomas Sugrue, who points out that this was also true of white outmigration from Detroit:
As Detroit’s black population skyrocketed during the Great Migration from the South, the city’s whites fought what they called the “Negro invasion” with every tool at their disposal. From 1945 to 1965 whites attacked at least 250 black families — usually the first or second to move into all-white neighborhoods — breaking windows, burning crosses and vandalizing homes.
When white Detroiters could not win by fighting, they fled to the suburbs. Indeed, for a half-century beginning in the 1950s, Detroit lost nearly half of its population, almost all whites. [Emphasis mine]
Of course, Chait would still have a point if the crime explosion was a geographically uniform phenomena, affecting rural areas, suburbs and urban centers alike. But that wasn't actually the case; the crime explosion of the 1970s and '80s was centered in urban areas, and more important, crime-victimization rates (particularly violent crime) were highest for African Americans:
Given the crime epidemic and its relationship to the drug trade (particularly the explosion of crack/cocaine), this makes perfect sense.
Yes, Chait is right to say that crime rose sharply, and whites were afraid of it. But their migration from the cities occurred well before the crime explosion, and even then, suburban whites were least affected by growing crime rates. As such, I think it's perfectly fair to say that for a non-trivial number of whites, "fear of crime" was actually code for "black people."
