by Mike Males

About the author: Mike Males, a social ecology graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of The Scapegoat Generation: America’s War on Adolescents.

In previous decades, American politicians and social scientists predicted waves of violence stemming from “impulsive” blacks, volatile Eastern European immigrants, “hot-blooded” Latin Americans, and other groups “scientifically” judged to harbor innately aggressive traits. In each case, the news media joined in vilifying whatever temporarily unpopular minority politicians and pseudo-scientists had flocked to blame.

And in each case, the branding of disfavored population groups as inherently violent has been disproven. (See Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man for examples.) In each case, violence has been found to be a straightforward function of poverty and...