Race and Crime Final

The Sociological Imagination

the ability to connect individual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to broader social forces

Sociological Intervention

using or changing social structures and systems to address social problems

Critical Legal Scholarship (CLS)

academic movement started in the 1970s-80s started by legal scholars, questions why racial inequality persists after civil rights movement

Critical Social Theory

builds upon CLS, how individuals and social structures interact to produce inequality

4 key Concepts in Critical Legal Theory

racial is a social construct

racial attitudes interact with the legal system

“liberal legalist thought” in western legal system

racial attitudes embedded in liberalism

Political criminalization

social construction of identities, organizations, and institutions shape who or what is deemed criminal

Demystification

clarifying legal jargon shows how the legal system serves interests of the powerful

Critique of legal rights

rights framed as individual liberties undermine collective action and systematic change

Reification

social constructed ideologies are “made real” and treated as natural via insitutionalization

Racialized Reification in Organizations

organizations place certain people in certain positions, provide unequal access to resources and structured in ways that benefit certain people

Racial Superstructure

racial Ideology (justification of racial inequality)

Racial structure

rules and resources (formal/informal) (material/social)

Racial substructure

schemas (binaries, emotions, implicit)

3 Key Elements of Critical Race Theory

1. Hegemonic Liberalism

2. Colorblind law

3. Prioritization of the individual

Hegemonic liberalism

political philosophy promoting individual/civil rights, political equality, and private enterprise (universalism, neutrality, objectivity)

Universalism

all formal rules and consequences apply to everyone equally

Neutrality

creation of laws based on consent of the governed

Objectivity

enforcement is based solely on legal factors

John Locke

social contract, property, natural rights, separation of powers

Thomas Hobbes

state of nature, belief in centralized authority, social contract

Social contract

people must surrender some degree of freedom to a sovereign to establish social order

The Racial Contract

limited universality (racial exclusion), colonial dispossession, legalization of “just war” and slavery, property rights and race

Color-Blind Law

belief that equal treatment under the law eliminates racial discrimination, ignorance of race and other social structures, justifies unequal outcomes

Color-Blind Racism

ideology that claims race should not matter while ignoring ongoing structural and systematic inequalities that shape peoples’ lives, views racism as the past and attributes outcomes to personal choice

Liberalism and MLK

advocated for true liberalism that integrates ones community in the deep South

Derrick Bell

argued Brown v. Board of Ed was not a civil rights turning point but coincided with hegemonic middle/upper class white interests

Racism without Racists

social conditions produce racialized attitudes, colorblindness account for invisibility of biased racial attitudes, race is embedded into laws, policies, and practices

Race Consciousness

CLS argues recognizing that race exists and has significant consequences, intersectionality accounts for subjectivities that are impermeable

Prioritization of the Individual

liberalism/political equality encourages difference to be attributed to individual characteristics, crime measured by individual actions

Racial Distinctiveness

race accounts for unique experiences that generate unique subjectivities by race and racialization

Integrative Model of Critical Race Consciousness

racial reflexivity, racial analysis, antiracism actions

Diversity and Inter-Subjectivity Objectivity

rejects prioritization of certain identities, asserts an unbiased social structure requires equal representation of all identities

Meritocracy

people should be valued and selected based on ability

Affirmative action

recognition that race/identity informs perceptions of merit and treated as a merit in itself

Blind Auditions

orchestra tryouts behind a screen increases hiring of minority musicians → identity informs perceptions of merit and white subjectivities

Prioritization of the Individual in CJ

liberal justice achieved by punishing the criminal and providing restitution to victim, fails to address social conditions