The chapter focuses predominantly on racial rather than ethnic comparisons (primarily black/white comparisons) because of a lack of consistency in the crime data that contrasts Hispanics and non-Hispanics and because of similar problems in crime data for racial groups such as Asians and Native Americans. Data were gathered from the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and self-report and victimization surveys. The chapter describes the racial distribution of serious violent offending among juvenile offenders in the United States; provides information on short-term national and local trends related to offending patterns by race and ethnicity; and summarizes research findings on race and ethnic differences in chronic or persistent offending. The chapter also describes various data sources and highlights some of their major strengths and weaknesses as instruments for the study of ethnic and racial differences in rates of serious juvenile offending. Table, figures, notes