Shining a Light on Racial Privilege: An Empirical Examination of the Role of Whiteness in Willingness to Commit Elite White-Collar Crime

Abstract

A significant amount of criminological research has focused on explaining the overrepresentation of Black individuals in crime, attributing them with disproportionate criminal involvement. However, evidence suggests that the most severe crimes, particularly elite white-collar crime, can be disproportionately attributed to White individuals. This study tests the Theory of Racial Privilege and Offending, which argues that racial dynamics in the United States shape cultural adaptations contributing to white-collar and corporate crime. These adaptations involve cognitive frameworks related to empathy, entitlement, and competition. The findings support the influence of race on financial conditions and racial isolation, mixed support for isolation’s impact on cognitive frameworks linked to criminality, and strong support for the direct impact of cognitive frameworks and crime-specific justifications on offending likelihood. The study concludes with implications for research and policy.

Keywords:

• Concentrated advantage
• culture
• race
• white-collar crime
• whiteness

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the participants in the 2020 European Society of Criminology Conference and previous reviewers for their helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This project was determined to be exempt by both universities’ Institutional Review Boards (Old Dominion IRB# 1440491-1, University of Nevada, Las Vegas IRB#1099958-1). Consent was passive in nature, given the anonymity of completing the survey online. After receiving information about the survey’s purpose, time expectations, and anonymity, participants were told “By moving onto the next page, you are voluntarily agreeing to participate in this survey and acknowledge that you have received sufficient information about the research to make the decision to participate.” The contact information of the principal investigators was also provided.

2 The 2020 American Community Survey reports that White, non-Hispanic individuals make up 60.1% of the U.S. population, Black or African American citizens make up 12.2% of the population, and biracial White and Black citizens make up 0.1% of the U.S. population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020). Thus, our sample slightly overrepresents White, non-Hispanic respondents as well as Black or African American respondents.

3 McDonough et al., 2005, for example, found that 81% of adults exhibited SES stability between 1967–1982.

4 Despite the name, the items in this subscale do not specify that the questions are meant for White respondents only – the language is broader, including things like “I am angry that racism exists” or “Racism is dehumanizing to people of all races, including Whites.”

5 We also examined models (available from the authors) in which standard errors were clustered by individuals (935 clusters) as well as by scenario type (3 clusters). The results were substantively the same across all specifications, with relatively little variation in statistical significance. Given that scenarios were assigned to individuals and that we are not claiming that our sample is representative, we report the results from the models using robust but not-clustered standard errors (see Abadie et al., 2017).

6 We also ran the SEM on our White respondents only (after dropping the initial relationship between one’s race to structural variables) as a sensitivity analyses. Results did not differ meaningfully when examining only Whites.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research came from the College of Arts and Letters, Old Dominion University.