Racial moral panics produce self-confirming cycles of incarceration and white fear.

Evidence

Racial moral panics resulted in exaggerated outrage that increased policing of certain black communities, dulled even further capacities for empathy and compassion, and confirmed and deepened white fears. And we now have nearly one million African Americans incarcerated, which for many people, consciously or not, affirms the perceptions that started the cycle in the first place. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 215

Categorization

• XREF: A self-fulfilling feedback loop linking fear to policing to more fear; echoes how moral panics become self-confirming in the reader’s other material on crime panic. — connects to: Moral panics about racialized criminals resolve economic crises via law-and-order solutions — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 93; Racialized images of criminality reconstitute and escalate through moral panics
• DEFINE: Concrete illustration of what a racial moral panic is and how it functions as a feedback loop rather than a one-shot reaction.