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First published online August 1, 2008

Marginalized white ethnicity, race and crime

Colin WebsterView all authors and affiliations
Volume 12, Issue 3
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480608093308

Abstract

White ethnicity is generally invisible and unexamined in racism, crime and justice debates. Serving mostly as a default comparator to describe visible minority experiences of crime and criminal justice processes, white ethnicity is seen as unproblematic as an ethnicity except as a potential source of racism. This article draws on aspects of `whiteness studies' in the USA and UK—focusing on marginalized white ethnicities—to explore racialized `white' ethnicity, both historically and today. Designations such as white `underclass', `new' migrants, `white trash' are offered to show that some whites are seen as `less white' than others within a hierarchy of `whiteness'. The article concludes that racism and classism towards marginalized white working-class ethnicities have criminalized these groups in ways not too dissimilar from the criminalization of visible working-class minorities.
1.
1. Presumably, if comparisons of offending and victimization by current ethnic categories were controlled for social class, area of residence or other proxies for SES—something that most surveys omit or is only implicit— then differences between `whites' and others would disappear or whites show higher rates of offending and/or victimization when similar age and SES were compared.
2.
2. An important caveat to the proceeding discussion is that as Steve Garner argues, `racialized identities are dynamically produced and are reproduced by particular practices, in particular places, at particular times' (2007c: 117). This is also true of classed identities, and the balance, importance and relationships between racialized and classed identities are contingent on given situations and local conditions. It would be quite wrong to read this article as privileging white ethnicity over class or vice versa, or as making white ethnicity equivalent to `visible' ethnicity as one ethnicity among many. Similarly, `marginalized white ethnicity' is not simply a coda for `lower-class whites' who may or may not be racialized or assigned an ethnicity (Webster, 2007).
3.
3. It is not coincidental that the term `paddywagon' refers both to a police vehicle used to transport large numbers of Irish people who have been arrested and a police car because Irishmen made up a large proportion of the officers of early police forces in American cities—a metaphor perfectly reflecting the making of the Irish into whites.
4.
4. Many readers will insist that although of historic interest these eugenics discourses are today discredited and anachronistic. And yet, in the course of writing this article, I and colleagues received a presentation from a senior police officer that mapped the genealogy of a local white lower-class prolific criminal family, posing the question `how can the police and other agencies interdict to prevent the intergenerational transmission of criminality within these extended families?' Of course the racial genealogy was mentioned in passing as Irish Traveller origin!
5.
5. Recent studies have pointed to a de facto residential segregation that has occurred in many areas against a wider cultural and social context of violence, social exclusion and marginalization. As white working-class communities displace `resentment at economic decline and social decay onto apparent representatives of a “cosmopolitan” culture' (Ray and Smith, 2004: 695), encouraged in this by local media representations and far-right political parties, these wider crises of deindustrialization and neighbourhood destabilization become displaced onto the biographies and structures of feelings of individuals, including racist offenders. These processes involve the transformation of offender's unacknowledged shame rooted in multiple disadvantages and perceptions that Asians are illegitimately given preferential treatment and are more successful than them. Shame turns to fury and rage directed against Asians within a cultural context in which violence and racism are taken for granted (Ray et al., 2003, 2004; Webster, 2007).
6.
6. The literal meaning of the term is a self-referencing, self-enclosed, `anthropological' time, place and space.
7.
7. `White ethnicity' in this context may be understood as a proxy for social class, having `foreign' or (new) `immigrant' status and so on, but this article is also concerned with how certain sorts of `whiteness' become visible through signifiers of dress, deportment, place, conspicuous consumption patterns, worklessness and proximity to poverty.

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Published In

Volume 12, Issue 3
Pages: 293 - 312
Article first published online: August 1, 2008
Issue published: August 2008

Keywords

  1. class
  2. ethnicity
  3. social exclusion
  4. social marginality
  5. whiteness

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Colin Webster
Leeds Metropolitan University, UK
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