Unveiling White logic in criminological research: an intertextual analysis

Abstract

Critical race scholars have called into question the objective neutrality upon which much positivist social science rests, arguing that it discursively masks how whiteness underpins the normative purview of research design and findings. As the scholarly securing of whiteness takes shape through explicit and discursive mechanisms, this article examines how it is manifest in criminological research through an intertextual analysis of contemporary peer-reviewed scholarship. Examining 558 articles in five recognized journals, this paper documents how blind spots towards race and racial stratification surface in criminological research, arguing that most of the articles analyzed do not simply ignore White privilege; they actively uphold it. Findings suggest that they do so through two means: first by whitewashing race, that is, disregarding how race and racism can differentially affect acts and trends of crime and deviance, and secondly, by narrowly representing race as merely explanatory variable without querying the broader power relations it marks. After discussing how these patterns reveal and uphold whiteness as a normative value, we conclude with a discussion of preliminary steps aimed at exposing and unpacking how White logic informs the field.

The whiteness of white-collar crime in the United States: Examining the role of race in a culture of elite white-collar offending

“…While some may say that this theory is premature given the lack of data available to test it, we argue it is the lack of data that has obscured the relationship between race and white-collar crime. Just as Muhammad (2010) documents how data collection choices were integral in constructing ideas of Black and White criminality, and Henne and Shah (2015) find that criminological research upholds “White logic”, data collection choices which disproportionately focus on street crime have generally resulted in criminological theories that explain only street crime (for excellent reviews of data limitations as well as theoretical shortcomings in this field, see Braithwaite, 1985; Simpson, 2010, 2013; Simpson and Yeager, 2015). Without a clean, testable, theoretical framework on the relationship between race and white-collar offending, data collection efforts will continue to neglect race, or treat it only as something to be “controlled for”, further perpetuating the invisibility of whiteness.…”

Latino Criminology: Unfucking Colonial Frameworks in “Latinos and Crime” Scholarship

“…As critical criminologists, many of us have acted on the realization that there is so much more to our day jobs than some of the drudgery found in our conventional research outlets, some portions of which remain racist and frozen in time (see Henne and Shah 2013). I am not alone in perceiving some of our major conferences to be the equivalent of rearranging chairs on the Titanic.…”

“…Criminal justice data are often dichotomized along either Black/White or White/ non-White binaries (Covington 1995;Price 2010;Urbina 2007), leaving Latino subjectivities to the continuously evolving racialization projects to which such concepts have always pertained (Hooker 2014). As identified by Henne and Shah (2013) in their examination of White logics in criminological research, there are major segments of our research enterprise that continue to treat nominal categories, like "Hispanic" and "Latino," through the more intellectually sterile framework of "Add-Variable-and-Stir." That said, even the scholarship that remains at the "banal [level] of mere demographics" could benefit from better data on Latinos in the criminal justice system (De Genova 2019: 25; see also Lantigua-Williams 2016).…”

Dear British criminology: Where has all the race and racism gone?

“…This has unhelpfully reinforced the notion that racism operates only in singular or binary form, marked by an identifiable presence or absence that can only be determined definitively when it can be pinned down using sophisticated statistical techniques. This positivist neutralization obscures the privileging foundations of whiteness and the historically embedded materiality of systemic racism and its legacy in contemporary realities (see also Henne and Shah, 2013).…”