Katheryn Russell-Brown

Katheryn Russell-Brown is an American social scientist and legal scholar, emerita professor of law, who directed the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. Her scholarship centers on the intersections of race, crime and the legal system, including how racial stereotypes shape public perceptions of criminal offending. In her 1998 book The Color of Crime, Russell-Brown examined and named the phenomenon of the criminalblackman, the persistent racialized stereotype linking Black male identity with criminality in American media, law enforcement practice and public opinion, and traced its effects through the criminal justice system from policing to sentencing. Her work helped establish race and crime as a distinct area of empirical criminological research rather than a topic addressed only incidentally within broader studies of the justice system.