By Nicholas D. E. Mark,  Abigail Weitzman and Julia Behrman

Heightened partisan rhetoric surrounding immigration, combined with increasingly punitive immigration policies, has the potential to affect how children interact with their social environment, with implications for racially and spatially variegated developmental processes. In this data visualization, the authors use data from the 2009 to 2017 waves of the National Crime Victimization Survey’s School Crime Supplement to show that Hispanic students in Texas reported a significant increase in fear of harm in 2017, a change that was not observed among among non-Hispanic white students in Texas, or among either group in California. Despite increased fear, Hispanic students in Texas did not report corresponding increases in bullying, indicating that their rising fear was attributable to something beyond peer interaction. Together, these findings highlight emergent changes in Hispanic youth’s perceived hostility alongside changes in the surrounding political and legal landscape.

By Katheryn Russell-Brow

This article is based on Katheryn Russell-Brown's 2025 presidential address at the 85th annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, held in Washington, D.C. The article begins with an overview of the Author's approach to research and the highlights of her scholarly contributions. Following this, the article presents a research question—whether contemporary race and crime scholars and their scholarship have been stigmatized by the creation of a moral panic designed to marginalize and criminalize their work. This moral panic specifically targets Black history and other race-related scholarship. A criminological and sociological lens is used to analyze the breadth of the panic. Using moral panic as a base for the discussion, the next section examines the broad contours of stigma, and stigmatization and how race-related stigmas operate. Following this is a look at how negative stigmas assigned to race scholars and race scholarship harms the discipline of criminology. For instance, studies indicate that fewer scholars will embrace race and crime scholarship if its value is diminished. Migration studies and imagined futures are included in the assessment of how racial stigmas impact race scholarship. Academic disciplines benefit from rigorous engagement regarding their core principles and perspectives. The absence or diminishment of critical research creates a void in the criminology literature. This raises questions about the representativeness, integrity, and comprehensiveness of criminological scholarship. The article concludes with a charge to the discipline to ensure that race and crime scholarship remain a robust part of the criminological canon.