Why is race and ethnicity of interest to criminologists?

SO305
Francesca Pin

SO305 Francesca Pin

To trace the origins of our modern way to intend race and ethnicity we should go back to the colonial slavery of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Africa and America. That historical context represents the point of departure of the creation and elaboration of racial categories and their consequent social divisions. Since Christopher Columbus discovered the new world, there have been a variety of theories to explain human differences and many of them may be seen as justifications of the colonial process. In order to explain criminological interest in race and ethnicity, the essay will delineate the historical and social process of constructing the meaning of race; the two concepts differentiation to one another and the historical, ideological and legal path of their development related to crime. The focal point in the relation of criminology-race-ethnicity is the overrepresentation of ethnic minorities involved in crime, hence a particular emphasis will be put on the British situation, (institutionalized) discrimination and legal changes, and on the construction of race/ethnic crime through labeling and moral panics.

The differentiation of people into categories started in ancient Greece, but we can trace its origins, with the connotations we attribute to it now, in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the colonial slavery (California Newsreel, 2003). Concerning the context in which it was formulated, the construction of different racial ranks served as a basis of justified discrimination. Western Imperialism was in fact supported by Racial Darwinism, and its struggle for survivor 2

SO305 Francesca Pin of the fittest, and by the formulation of the Aryan Master race in Arthur de Gobineaus book An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (Fredrickson, 2002, pp. 107-9). Both theories advocated the white supremacy. The idea of a justifying ideology has been resumed by other theories of domination that are mentioned below. In the nineteenth century emerged also the first criminological theory that connected criminal attitude to certain physical features to with Cesare Lombroso (Maguire, 2007, p. 422). The ever more marked distinction of races and its hierarchy reached the climax with the Nazis ideology and ended up in the aftermath of the Second World War, watershed which changed definitively the approach to the concept of race. In 1948 was in fact endorsed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the 1950s emerged in the United States a civil rights movement which achieved great legal changes in the African-Americans segregation. Although the terms race and ethnicity are often used indistinctly, they have two distinct meanings. We could summarize them saying that race is more a biological concept, while ethnicity refers to cultural aspects. When it comes to race it is true that certain groups of people share common ancestors and genetic features, but the concept of race does not find any scientific support (Hale, 2009, p. 407). The differences white men have always been concerned about related to our appearance refer to the phenotype, our physical characteristics resulted by the interaction of the genotype our genetic legacy with the environment (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2004). Notwithstanding the difference of meanings between race and ethnicity, there is an overlap between the two concepts. Race is often embedded in

SO305 Francesca Pin ethnicity, since markers like skin color [] have always been used [] to connote social and cultural differences (Hall, 2000, p. 223). In any case, since 1970s, Britain has called for an ethnic categorization for statistic purposes. According to crime figures, ethnic minorities are commonly overrepresented in the Western world. At the basis of the discourse there is a question about the contribution of institutionalized racism and the labeling of ethnic groups. Why are ethnic minorities overrepresented? is a central question to criminology and finding an answer result to be much controversial. Governments necessitate categorization to control progression and regression on the field, but, at the same time, categorization is also a source of reinforcement of bias and stereotypes as Angela Y. Davis puts it: The inevitable part played by the punishment industry in the reproduction of crime (2003, p. 285). It goes without saying that it is very improbable to reach a solution between the two approaches, but, on the other hand, it is possible up to a certain degree, to regulate and balance them through a detailed control of the practices involved in statistics elaboration, law enforcement practices and public representation of the phenomenon. But before it is worth looking at the beginning of the regulation of racial differences. In The Color of Crime, Katheryn K. Russel traces a legal progress from Slave Codes (1619-1865), to Black Codes (the first one in 1865), to the Jim Crow Segregation Statutes (early 1900s). The former codes established a cast system of rigid and fixed hierarchy to which corresponded different statuses and punishment accorded to the degree of blackness and the one-drope rule that treated every

SO305 Francesca Pin person with any black ancestor as black. They were subjected to inhuman sanctions such as castration, mutilation and murder. The second codes represented the recognition of new rights for blacks, which however were undermined by the emergence of new laws against them. The Black codes created thus a new system of involuntary servitude (1998, p. 14-22). The Jim Crow Segregation Statutes set up a segregation system, separating facilities as public toilets, buses, theaters, public parks and so on (Hatfield, 2009). In the twentieth century the battle for civil rights in the United States finally achieved remarkable results with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Russell, 1998) and the ban of the central symbol of a racist regime, intermarriage (Fredrickson, 2002, pp. 130-1). In spite of these steps forward, criminology and many other disciplines face an ongoing redefinition of race and the emergence of new related issues connected to the overrepresentation of ethnic minorities within crime statistics. The definition of crime is spatially and historically relative and we can see how race related issues have been modified throughout western civilization. Police operations have been discussed and have grown ever more significantly since the mid-twentieth century in Great Britain, and governments have controlled immigration since the beginning of the twentieth century (Hale, 2009, pp. 408-9). In the aftermath of the Second World War, with the dissolution of the colonial empire, the United Kingdom initially accepted the members of the former colonies without any kind of restriction. Afterwards, in the 1960s the British government limited the entrance of immigrants to spouses and children of previous immigrants (Hale, 2009, p. 409).

SO305 Francesca Pin Ethnic minorities has ever clashed with discriminating separation within society and the main concern in the country has been the ever more questioned behavior of law enforcement, culminated with the murder of Sthephen Lawrence, a black eighteen year old boy, in 1993. The murder was not a unique case, in fact, since 1991 the Institute of Race Relations has documented 24 racially-motivated murders in Britain (Barkham, 1999) but had been the first taken to the attention of the mass media because of the failure of charging any of the five suspects. The case, after a long path, ended up with the MacPherson inquiry, defining 70 recommendations to enhance the situations of ethnic minorities related to legal procedures and police officers behavior. For instance, the reform of the rule of double jeopardy which did not allow a second trial even in conditions of new evidence and the implementation of the law enforcement with ethnic minorities members. After the mid-nineteenth century, ethnic minorities had always been linked to crime and descendents of immigrants were considered different regardless if they were born in the United Kingdom and were legally British (Godfrey, 2008, p. 110). Apropos, various hypotheses had been formulated and the social construction of the phenomenon race-crime and its amplification could be explained through the labeling theory, the creation of moral panic to maintain the established/instituted system of hierarchy. Labeling people as criminals or deviants facilitates a great deal the internalization of the stigma, or label, attached to them by social entrepreneurs. According to the self-fulfilling prophecy, people who have been continuously judged as deviant have much more possibilities to become deviant and to recognize

SO305 Francesca Pin themselves as deviant. The phenomena is in specific related to youth-race-crime, and, as White puts it, when it comes to young people, they result to be even more subjected to the assimilation of the label attached to them and pushed to assimilate with each other generally in form of delinquent or criminal subcultures (White, 2000, p. 81). Deviance represents for the majority of youths a transitional passage and is called primary deviance while it is not yet labeled. It becomes secondary deviance after the deviant label is put on the deviant, and being pointed out, stigmatized and marginalized deviant becomes most of the time primary identity. The act of labeling might serve socio-political purposes and it could be a source of moral panic that ends up maintaining the present social stratification. Race distinctions, with gender differentiation and class stratification, is one of the main reproduced feature of a structure of domination and it could be embedded in a system of power relation and economic inequality. As Reiman puts it in his book The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, the criminal justice system is corrupt (White, 2000 p. 105). Moral panic often refers to race-crime and the emphasis of the media is a central feature in exaggerating the perceived social threat. An example can be the British social representation of Irish people, believed to be innately predisposed to crime, a phenomenon which did not affect just the press, but the criminal justice system itself. Another instance is the relation of people of color with mugging in the late twentieth century and also their stereotypical inclination towards the abuse of cannabis and in having parties (Godfrey, 2008, pp. 114-5). The emergence of moral panics is often related to profound social changes and they might

SO305 Francesca Pin function as means of social control and also as scapegoats moving the public attention from other problems to something that can be more easily controlled. Moral panic cases involve the process of deviance amplification and contribute to the social construction of deviance passing from the stage of exaggeration of the threat to the increase of measures to contain it, which in turn increases the initial deviance (Stanley Cohen on Folk and Devils and Moral Panics, 1999). To sum up, we can see how the relation of race and ethnicity to crime and their categorization has changed throughout history. Nowadays, we have scientific opposition to biological difference, which admits just differences of appearance. Legal changes have enhanced ethnic groups condition, but the core points remain discrimination and overrepresentation in crime data, which undermine racial/ethinc equality in criminal justice. In the United States and Great Britain there have been successful achievements during the twentieth century, but figures are still a marker of unequal treatment of these groups within the criminal justice systems and the association race-crime remain central in the discourse. A critical issue is represented by the necessity of categorization to control and regulate discrimination, and the related problem of reinforcing it through that same system of categories. Regarding the causes of the phenomenon some theories have been put forward, defining it as a social construction which underpins the stratified distribution of wealth and power within society. That construction of race-crime is widely conceived as created by the interaction of different agents and processes, among which labeling, moral panics and the self-fulfilling prophecy.

SO305 Francesca Pin

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barkham, P. (1999). Stephen Lawrence case Q to A. The Guardian. 23rd of February. [Online]. Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1999/feb/23/lawrence.ukcrime9 [Accessed 09 March 2010]. Bulmer, M. & Solomos, J. (2004). Researching Race and Racism. New York, Routledge. California Newsreel, (2003). Interview with Robin G. Kelley. [Online] Available from: http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-05.htm [Accessed 27 March 2010]. Davis, A. (2003). Race and Criminalization: Black Americans and the Punishment Industry. In McLaughlin, E, Muncie, J. & Hughes, G. (eds.), Criminological Perspectives Essential Readings (2nd Ed). London, SAGE Publications Ltd, pp. 28493. Fredrickson, G. (2002). Racism A Short History. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Godfrey, B. S., Lawrence, P. & Williams, C. A. (2008). Immigration, Ethnicity and Race. In History and Crime. London, SAGE Publications Ltd. pp. 104-125. Hale, C. et al. (2009). Criminology (2nd Ed). Oxford, Oxford University Press. Hall, S. (2000). Conclusion: The Multi-Cultural Question. In Hesse, B. (ed.), Un/settled Multiculturalism: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions. London, Zed Books, pp. 209-41. Hatfield, E. A. (2009). New Georgia Encyclopedia. [Online]. Available from: http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-3610 [Accessed 28 March 2010]. Maguire, M., Morgan, R. & Reiner, R. (2007). The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (4th Ed). Oxford, Oxford University Press.

SO305 Francesca Pin Russell, K. (1998). The Color of Crime. New York, New York University Press. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2004). The Genotye/Phenotype Dinstinction. [Online]. Available from: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/genotype-phenotype/ [Accessed 27 March 2010]. Stanley Cohen on Folk Devils and Moral Panics. (1999) [DVD] Twickenham, Halo Vine. White, R. & Haines, F. (2000). Crime and Criminology (2nd Ed). Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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