Whiteness and critical white studies in crime and justice

As a discipline, criminology has long attempted to come to terms with the ways in which race is implicated in crime causation, everyday criminal justice practice, policy formation, and punishment. While the attempt is honest and ongoing, much criminological writing ignores crucial historical and structural textures, flattens the complexity of race as a social phenomenon to a single dimension of identity, and treats it as something to be ‘controlled for’. Thus, for much of the mainstream study of crime, to speak of race is to invoke a relation of binaries, in which ‘race’ really means non-white, black, or Hispanic. This sort of binary ontology or ‘dummy variable’ approach, positions whiteness as a ‘reference category’ and helps it to escape careful scrutiny or disappear altogether. It is this dearth of historical, structural, and political depth that instigated a series of roundtable conversations at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology in 2011 and 2012 on the topic of critical whiteness studies. Out of these productive discussions emerged the idea for this special issue and, of course, many of the papers included here.

To be clear, the papers in this collection do not simply argue for greater attention to be paid to whiteness in order reify it as a discrete category in its own right or necessarily push it to the forefront of criminological analysis – far from it. Rather, our aim here is to understand race as a dialectically constructed social phenomenon in order to apprehend the ways in which whiteness and white identity help to perpetuate disparate social relations. So for instance, sociologist Bonilla-Silva (2012) has encouraged his readers to think about the ways in which racial domination is accomplished through a quotidian, yet insidious racial grammar. For Bonilla-Silva, grammar is not only language composition, but also pertains to the deep structure, logic, and rules of social interaction, which are negotiated and reproduced through and as practice. It is this racial grammar which structures how race is seen, understood, felt and lived, in everyday life. As an example, Bonilla-Silva points to the term ‘Historically Black College and University’ (HBCU). At first glance, HBCU is a rather innocuous way of linguistically designating institutions that have traditionally focused upon the needs of black students and the black community. Yet as he rightly points out, the character and difference of Historically Black Colleges and Universities is always already encoded in their very name, thereby obscuring the question: where are the Historically White Colleges and Universities? The answer is of course, everywhere. It is the normalized, ‘invisible weight’ of whiteness that provides meaning for the difference and crafted inferiority of the other. At work all around us, this sort of racial grammar is particularly evident in criminological scholarship that treats race as a flat, fixed, immutable trait.

At our initial meetings, it was noted that an overwhelming majority of our group identified as white. We understand the inherent contradictions here, in that a group of mostly white academics taking up the subject of whiteness, is embedded in and runs the risk of perpetuating the same sorts of privileges we aim to critique. We marked this contradiction and hope it is recognized as the critical analysis of whiteness in the field progresses. Likewise, as Kate Henne and Rita Shah thoughtfully argue in their article, the North Atlantic and United States centrism tends to dominate criminology and dramatically influences Western understandings of the race/crime/justice nexus.

Beyond research, we hope the collection will be pedagogically useful as well. Effectively and thoroughly addressing racism and inequality in the criminal justice system – and the social construction of deviance more generally – in the classroom is an ongoing task. Often, students meet these inequities with responses ranging from ambivalence and outrage, to resistance to the idea that they continue and should be addressed. Again, reflecting the binary conception of race, in many of these instances, it is our experience that racial inequality and discrimination in policing, court decision-making, or prisons is viewed as a problem of the racially marginalized. That is, the focus typically falls on the disadvantage of blacks, Native Americans, or Latinos. Undoubtedly, this side of the problem cannot go unrecognized or attended to. But meanwhile, we are less equipped to explicitly address the causes and consequences of white privilege and how they are wrapped up in criminal justice processes and the social construction of crime.

The papers gathered here are from scholars of varying backgrounds, and touch upon many contours of white identity and whiteness, bearing witness to many of the subtle processes that currently work the boundaries of those characteristics and allow or disallow access into hierarchical racialized categories. Matthew Hughey’s exploration of racial identity formation and race–crime perceptions provides a penetrating look into white masculinity and how race/crime discourses uphold and reproduce racial ordering. In elegant fashion, Hughey complicates evidence that racial attitudes and racial inequalities are lightening, and marks how white masculinities remain bound by dominant social expectations to recreate persistent hierarchies. Kate Henne and Rita Shah uncover the reproduction and maintenance of the ‘white as normative’ frame in criminological research, arguing that,

[e]ven though most criminological research no longer explicitly evokes biological determinism as an explanation for crime and deviance, a similar logic operates to fix racial difference as a static, explanatory attribute. In doing so, an assumed notion of White behavior is tacitly accepted as a normative standard to which other races are compared. (Henne & Shah, 2015)

Their critical analysis dares criminology to examine and recognize its role in the adherence to white supremacist logics and highlights the ‘unmentioning’ of whiteness within criminology. Similarly, Jason Eastman highlights how the shield of ‘white innocence’ frames the construction of deviance between biker groups, and contributes to critical race criminology by analyzing Coyle’s (2010) conception of ‘race as languaged’. Stephanie Whitehead’s ethnographic work reveals the ‘specter of racism’ within policing, and in line with others in this issue, contests the flat and static conception of race advanced by much criminological writing. Whitehead’s critical engagement with race and policing works to illustrate the distinct connections between white identity, racial anxieties, and the understanding and everyday practices of racial profiling.

Danielle Dirks, Caroline Heldman, and Emma Zack engage the visual in order to illustrate how white skin privilege is at work within the practices of penal spectatorship. Dirks and her colleagues show how bodies appearing in mug shot photographs elicit the logics of ‘white protectionism’, thereby guiding effects of penal spectators and the position of the arrested as either victim or offender. Spencer Wood, Joe Jakubek, and Kristin Kelly present a critical analysis of recent racialized and violent political discourse, showing how the far right’s understanding of whiteness and white identity is linked to the social imaginary of rural spaces as havens of individualism, which is starkly opposed to the multiculturalism of the city. In doing so, Wood and his colleagues’ analysis reveals the discursive foundations of an armed militia mobilized for race control. Nancy Heitzig confronts the seemingly perpetual series of mass shootings committed by young white men, to illustrate how the ‘medicalization’ of this sort of violence is linked to the criminalization of young black men. It is this double standard, Heitzig argues, which helps to frame the violence of young white men as exceptional and normalize the criminalization of blackness. Bringing critical race theory to the field of Green Criminology, Avi Brisman argues that while the looming effects of climate change are perceived by some to be relatively ‘color blind’, the ability of people and nations to adapt to the changing climate will no doubt be unevenly distributed. Brisman pleads for an understanding of the consequences of climate sensitive to the needs of poor and developing countries.

The bulk of these perspectives rest on many past critical insights around whiteness and white identity (e.g. Bush, 2011; Delgado & Stefanic, 1997; Frankenberg, 1993; Hartigan, 1999; Twine & Gallagher, 2008; Wise, 2008; Wray, 2006), and we wish to fuse these interdisciplinary perspectives into criminology’s work on race, crime, and justice. Criminology as a discipline has increasingly disconnected from its interdisciplinary roots – largely sociological ones – and in turn fails to critically analyze one of its primary tasks, namely understanding how race is interconnected to the administration of justice and crime causation. As we attempt to understand victimization, mass incarceration, and police use of force and their threats to dignity and human rights, we hope these writings will help readers interrogate whiteness as embedded in problems of injustice.

Justin Smith
Department of Sociology, Anthropology & Social Work, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI 48859, USA

Travis Linnemann
School of Justice Studies, Eastern Kentucky University, Stratton 467 A, Richmond, KY 40503, USA