Intersectionality and Crime: An Exploratory Look at How Gender and Race Influence Responses to Injustice Associated with Strain

ABSTRACT

Gender and race condition perceptions of and responses to injustice associated with strain. Yet, it is unclear how various types of injustice (distributive, procedural, and interactional) affect criminal coping by gender and race – especially among Asians and whites. A vignette of an academic group project that depicted a distributive injustice and manipulated procedural and interactional injustice was randomly assigned to a sample of undergraduates. Analyses reveal that injustice is associated with Asian and white males engaging in different types of deviance. Implications for the relationship that gender and race have in affecting perceptions of and responses to injustice are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Injustice
• general strain theory
• gender
• race
• context

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Shelley Keith for her valuable feedback on a previous version of this manuscript

Notes

¹ Although women and minorities are disadvantaged in comparison to men and whites, members of these groups may also minimize the injustice they personally experience in order to justify their inaction in redressing their injustice or to cognitively cope (Crosby 1984; Olson and Hafer 2001). Nevertheless, when discrimination or unfairness is certain, members of these groups should not minimize their discrimination and thus perceive injustice (Ruggiero and Taylor 1995).

² Intersectionality is how gender, race, and class are oppressive systems that reinforce each other via ideas and practices that habitually privilege certain groups over others (Collins 1998:63).

³ Yet, distributive justice rule preference may depend more on the situational context rather than culture (see Leung 2005 for a detailed discussion).

⁴ Race was not controlled. Respondents may have envisioned interacting with same-race peers (Joyner and Kao 2000), or attributed positive and negative stereotypes to others based on assigned racial categories (Fiske et al. 2002). Whether race of the perpetrator of injustice influences the injustice-crime relationship is a question for future research.

⁵ The injustice manipulations each affected their respective subjective perceptions of injustice. The interactional injustice manipulation, however, influenced procedural and interactional injustice perceptions. Although distinct (Bies 2005), these forms of injustice may be perceived similarly (Tyler and Lind 1992).

⁶ Having drinking and drug use reflect deviance among undergraduates may be problematic due to normative expectations surrounding these actions on college campuses. Yet, the behavior examined in this study of “getting wasted,” implies an excessive use of alcohol and/or drugs, in which college students do not uniformly engage and misperceive as more pervasive than what actually occurs (Baer 2002; Perkins et al. 1999).

⁷ Control variables were measured after respondents received the vignette. With the exception of those receiving the interactional injustice manipulation reporting higher levels of constraint (p ≤ .05), family attachment (p ≤ .01), and commitment (p ≤ .05), group mean-comparison tests (two-tailed) reveal that vignette conditions did not affect measurement of the control variables.

⁸ Separation occurs when the outcome variable has “low (or high) prevalence, or when there are several interacted categorical predictors, it can happen that for some combination of the predictors, all the observations have the same event status” (Kleinman 2010). Here, being white and female predicted failure perfectly when examining violent behavior.

⁹ Although the use of Wald tests and confidence intervals are not likely to be accurate when separation is present (Coveney 2015), these statistics are not very different from profile confidence intervals when the predictors are significant and the logistic model is well fit (Hilbe 2015:27–28).

¹⁰ When examining interaction effects, some degree of collinearity is expected, but can be safely ignored (Allison 2012b). The highest VIF of 7.70 occurred when examining the three-way interaction between gender, race, and procedural injustice (O’Brien 2007). Correlations are available upon request.

¹¹ The patterns of results reported in this study were also found when conducting traditional logistic regressions and comparing each group, i.e., Asian males, Asian females, and white females to white males.

¹² Control variables that achieved significance conformed to expectations. Injustice, negative emotionality, peer criminal beliefs, peer support of criminal coping, and engagement in prior crime are positively associated with criminal coping, while criminal coping is less likely among those who are high in constraint.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heather L. Scheuerman

HEATHER L. SCHEUERMAN is an assistant professor in the Department of Justice Studies at James Madison University. She researches how social psychological concepts and processes structure behavior, including crime. Her recent work has been published in Social Psychology Quarterly, Restorative Justice: an International Journal, and Criminal Justice Policy Review.