Building a Black Criminology, Volume 24

Race, Theory, and Crime

James D. Unnever, Shaun L. Gabbidon, Cecilia Chouhy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367504915
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429757440
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In light of the Black Lives Matter movement and protests in many cities, race plays an ever more salient role in crime and justice. Within theoretical criminology, however, race has oddly remained on the periphery. It is often introduced as a control variable in tests of theories and is rarely incorporated as a central construct in mainstream paradigms (e.g., control, social learning, and strain theories). When race is discussed, the standard approach is to embrace the racial invariance thesis, which argues that any racial differences in crime are due to African Americans being exposed to the same criminogenic risk factors as are Whites, just more of them. An alternative perspective has emerged that seeks to identify the unique, racially specific conditions that only Blacks experience. Within the United States, these conditions are rooted in the historical racial oppression experienced by African Americans, whose contemporary legacy includes concentrated disadvantage in segregated communities, racial socialization by parents, experiences with and perceptions of racial discrimination, and disproportionate involvement in and unjust treatment by the criminal justice system.

Importantly, racial invariance and race specificity are not mutually exclusive perspectives. Evidence exists that Blacks and Whites commit crimes for both the same reasons (invariance) and for different reasons (race-specific). A full understanding of race and crime thus must involve demarcating both the general and specific causes of crime, the latter embedded in what it means to be "Black" in the United States. This volume seeks to explore these theoretical issues in a depth and breadth that is not common under one cover. Again, given the salience of race and crime, this volume should be of interest to a wide range of criminologists and have the potential to be used in graduate seminars and upper-level undergraduate courses.

Part I
Foundations

1
A Black Criminology Matters^*

James D. Unnever and Akwasi Owusu-Bempah

One key issue dominates the theoretical discussion of the relationship between race and crime. This issue is whether African Americans offend for the same reasons as Whites—the racial invariance thesis. This thesis is the foundational assumption of the existing general theories of crime. Thus, the existing general theories recognize that race needs to be included in their models that explain criminality because of the elevated levels of offending among African Americans. However, general theorists relegate race to the status of a control variable along with other variables such as age and gender because they assume that African Americans and Whites offend for the same reasons. Once controlled, general theorists then posit that the only reason why some but not other African Americans offend is that they, for example, are more likely to live in disorganized neighborhoods, have weaker social bonds, affiliate more often with delinquent peers, are labeled more often, have greater episodic strains, or exhibit less self-control. Thus, Hirschi’s (1969) long ago declaration that there is no need to study the “Negro boy”—that is, the hegemony of White essentialism—remains a vibrant component of the general theories of crime (Cullen, 2011). Notably this assumption requires that had Hirschi (1969) and the other general theorists only studied African Americans, their theories of crime would have delineated the exact same causes and explanations of crime as they do now.

We recognize that race and racism have affected the development of the general theories of crime. For example, scholars note that the etiology of social disorganization theory was in part a progressive refutation of racist beliefs that suggested that biological or cultural inferiority caused African Americans to commit crimes (Gabbidon & Greene, 2012; Shaw & McKay, 1949). Social disorganization theorists refuted these racist beliefs by arguing that place causes crime. However, we contend that criminologists have “thrown the baby out with the bathwater” in their attempts to refute racist theories of crime. In essence, scholars have focused more on what White and African Americans have in common rather than their dissimilarities, including the fact that African Americans have a long history of racial oppression. As a result, the general theories of crime have ignored how the interactions that African Americans have with racist formations increase their likelihood of committing (Omi & Winant, 2004).¹

The Formal Development of a Black Criminology

Scholars have challenged relegating the “Negro boy” to the periphery in understanding why some African Americans offend. In fact, nearly a quarter of a century ago, Russell (1992, p. 681) published an article in Justice Quarterly that called for criminology to develop a Black Criminology; “a call for criminologists to expand their theorizing and testing of the causes of crime committed by blacks.”

Scholars have responded to her clarion call for the development of theories that detail the causes of crime exclusively among African Americans. Tatum (2000) developed a neocolonial theoretical model of offending among African Americans, and Unnever and Gabbidon (2011) have put forth a comprehensive theory that explains why some African Americans but not others commit crime. In addition, ethnographers have generated groundbreaking analyses that solely examine offending among some African Americans. For example, Potter (2008) presents a Black Feminist criminological understanding of intimate partner violence among African Americans, and Jones (2010) investigates the causes of violence among teenaged African American girls in an inner city. In addition, Goffman (2014) analyzes how unprecedented levels of policing, imprisonment, and supervision have affected the lives of young African American men and women living in a poor segregated community. However, despite these pioneering efforts, Russell’s (1992) clarion call for the formal development of a Black Criminology has not been accepted by the discipline of criminology (Unnever, Cullen, Mathers, McClure, & Allison, 2009).

In this chapter, we renew Russell’s (1992) clarion call for criminology to develop a Black Criminology. We argue that criminology has escaped from its “theoretical time warp” and now can explore, without reservations, the relationship between systemic racism and crime (Russell, 1992, p. 675).² However, we concur with Russell (1992, p. 675) that criminology’s continuing failure to acknowledge and accept a Black Criminology calls “into question the integrity of the discipline’s policy recommendations related to race and crime.” And that its “failure to develop and cultivate a Black Criminology will not cause the problems associated with race and crime to go away. Rather, it will limit the discipline’s ability to help explain this relationship and to guide policy accordingly” (Russell, 1992, p. 675).

We also agree with Russell (1992) that a Black Criminology is as warranted as a feminist criminology, especially given that women disproportionately underoffend, whereas according to the official statistics, African Americans disproportionately overoffend (Gabbidon & Greene, 2012; Like-Haislip, 2014). Therefore, we consider the unique lived racialized experiences of being an African American in a racist society as worthy of study as the inimitable lived experiences of being a woman in a sexist society.³ As there are gendered pathways to crime, we argue there are racialized pathways to offending (Jones, 2010; Kruttschnitt, 2016; Miller & Mullins, 2006; Nuytiens & Christiaens, 2016; Potter, 2008; Yun, Kim, & Morris, 2013; Unnever, Barnes, & Cullen, 2016a; Unnever, Cullen, & Barnes, 2016).

Note that our conceptualization of a Black Criminology encourages the development of multiple perspectives using diverse methodologies within its larger theoretical framework (Simpson, 1989). These perspectives can incorporate the intersectionality of offending among African Americans (racialized class, race, and gender effects) with the intent of delineating the causes for the different rates of offending between African Americans and Whites (and others)—group differences—and why some African Americans but not others offend (Goffman, 2014; Jones, 2010; Potter, 2008; Tatum, 2000; Unnever & Gabbidon, 2011). Together, these efforts should reveal the multitude of ways that systemic racial oppression produces offending among some African Americans. In what follows, we propose some guiding assumptions for the development of a Black Criminology.

Guiding Assumptions of a Black Criminology

It is beyond the scope of this essay to outline the tortuous history of Black America. However, it must be recognized that African Americans are the only group who were forcefully brought to the U.S., enslaved, suffered the atrocities of Jim Crow laws, were forced to live in segregated areas (e.g., urban ghettos), and currently are massively policed, incarcerated, and supervised (Alexander, 2010; Bolton & Feagin, 2004; Goffman, 2014). Consequently, the legal and social constraints that limit African Americans are pervasive and run deep—they are systemic (Smångs, 2016). Indeed, the resiliency of Black America is found in their enduring struggle to dismantle the legal, social, and cultural apparatus of their racial oppression (Feagin, 2013; Gines, 2014).

Therefore, we suggest that scholars can build a Black Criminology upon three assumptions.

1. A Black Criminology assumes that Whites purposefully constructed a racially stratified society that oppresses African Americans.
2. A Black Criminology assumes that because the United States has been and is a racialized society, the history of African Americans is incomparable to the histories shared by Whites (and other minorities).
3. A Black Criminology assumes that a minority of African Americans commit crimes because of their inimitable past and current racial subordination.

In sum, we suggest that the overarching assumption or starting point of a Black Criminology is that the creation and maintenance of the United States’ system of racial stratification has caused African Americans to have historical and contemporary racialized experiences that are incomparable to those of others (Bonilla-Silva, 2015; Feagin & Elias, 2013; Gines, 2014). The all-embracing hypothesis of a Black Criminology is that their past and current racial subjugation causes a minority of African Americans to commit crimes.

The Racial Invariance Thesis

Obviously, the assumptions of a Black Criminology are incompatible with the prevailing general theories’ postulation that Black and White people commit crime for identical reasons. A Black Criminology assumes that most African Americans have unique racialized experiences that are born out of their past and current racial subjugation and that these experiences uniquely produce their offending. This does not rule out the reality that Black and White people experience similar risk factors such as poverty. However, a Black Criminology argues that African Americans and Whites may not perceive, interpret, and react to these risk factors in exactly the same way. Thus, it is the purpose of a Black Criminology to discover when, why, and how there are differences in offending between African Americans and Whites. In short, the formal development of a Black Criminology (as does a feminist criminology) rests upon the rejection of the racial invariance thesis.

The racial invariance thesis is the foundational assumption of the general theories of crime. It assumes that (1) there are no risk factors related to crime that only African Americans experience and (2) the size of the effects of crime-causing variables are the same for African Americans and Whites; that is, the effects of crime-causing factors do not significantly vary across Black and White people. We suggest that there are risk factors related to crime that only African Americans experience and that the effects of crime-causing variables are not always equal across Black and White people. We concur with Peterson (2012, p. 319) that “When a society is organized along race/ethnic lines, we cannot assume that the sources and responses to crime, or the application of criminal justice, are race neutral in their effects and consequences.” In short, we contend that the evidence indicates that “race” may be a scope condition that “is a core organizing construct that operates to generate the patterns, sources, and consequences of crime” (Peterson, 2012, p. 309).

There are three reasons why the assumptions of a Black Criminology are incompatible with the racial invariance thesis. First, a Black Criminology argues that African Americans have unparalleled racialized experiences (and experiences similar to Whites) that can only be understood in the context of their past and existing systemic racial oppression (Bonilla-Silva, 2015; Feagin, 2013). By definition, Whites—the superordinate group—do not systematically oppress other Whites because of their skin color. Of course, some Whites may episodically perceive that they are being oppressed—discriminated against—because of their skin color. Nevertheless, a Black Criminology argues that a White person who episodically experiences oppression because s/he is White is incomparable to African Americans as a group experiencing chronic systematic oppression (Feagin, 2013). For example, only African American men continually confront the racist microaggression stereotype threat that they are “super-predators” or the “criminalblackman” (Dilulio, 1995; Russell-Brown, 2009; Steele, 1997).⁴

Gates and Steele (2009) add that African Americans cannot escape from the noxious consequences of stereotype threats such as the criminalblackman because they are as omnipresent as if they were “in the air.” In addition, because of their history and current experiences, most African Americans racially socialize their children in order to prepare them for their racial oppression, which includes giving their children—especially their boys—“the talk” (“the talk” prepares them for their possible racist encounters with the police) (Coates, 2015; Owusu-Bempah, 2014). Thus, African Americans have racialized experiences not shared by Whites that may both propel them toward crime—the pejorative stereotype of the “criminalblackman”—and prevent them from offending— positive racial socialization experiences (Burt & Simons, 2015; Unnever, 2014).

Shaw and McKay (1949) illuminate another crime-related experience that only African Americans encounter—their unique exposure to racialized areas of compounded deprivation (Hagan, 2010; Perkins & Sampson, 2015). Shaw and McKay (1949, p. 617) report that the rates of delinquencies for African American boys were higher than for White boys in comparable areas, but “it is impossible to reproduce in white communities the circumstances under which Negro children live. Even if it were possible to parallel the low economic status and the inadequacy of institutions in the white community, it would not be possible to reproduce the effects of segregation and the barriers to upward mobility.”

More contemporarily, Peterson (2012, p. 310) highlights the incomparable living circumstances of African Americans as she states that “one direct product of the racial organization of society is noncomparability in local social circumstances across areas of different colors” (see also Griffiths, 2013). Sharkey’s (2008, p. 962) analyses also reaffirm the rejection of the racial invariance thesis, as he found that “the most common experience for black families since the 1970s has been to be surrounded by poverty over consecutive generations. This type of persistent contextual disadvantage is nonexistent for whites.” Thus, areas of compounded deprivation that racist Whites purposefully constructed to subjugate African Americans encapsulate, define, and concentrate the systemic racial oppression of only African Americans (Massey, 1990; Perkins & Sampson, 2015). In short, a Black Criminology considers areas of compounded deprivation as racialized areas of compounded deprivation—that is, they are racial formations (Omi & Winant, 2004).⁵

A Black Criminology further recognizes that the efficacy of prevention and treatment programs may not be invariant across races—that is, there is a need for culturally and ethnically sensitive approaches to prevention and treatment (Halgunseth, Jensen, Sakuma, & McHale, 2016; Liddle, Jackson-Gilfort, & Marvel, 2006; Moore, 2001; Stams, 2015; Stepteau-Watson, Watson, & Lawrence, 2014; Watson, Washington, & Stepteau-Watson, 2015). Anderson, McKenny, Mitchell, Koku, and Stevenson (2017) examined a race-based prevention and treatment program— Engaging, Managing, and Bonding through Race (EMBRace)—which was specifically designed to help African Americans families address racial stress and trauma in their lives while promoting familial bonds and positive coping strategies after racial encounters. The program promoted strategies that are more effective for African American caregivers and children to discuss racial encounters in their lives and to reduce racial stress and trauma as a family unit. These strategies included increasing cultural socialization messaging and behaviors (e.g., exploring their fami...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Half Title
• Series
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Part I. Foundations
• Part II. Explaining Crime
• Part III. Social Control
• Index