Dear British criminology: Where has all the race and racism gone?
| Published date | 01 August 2020 |
| Date | 01 August 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619880345 |
| Subject Matter | Part I: Conscious Criminology |
880345TCR0010.1177/1362480619880345Theoretical CriminologyPhillips et al.
research-article2019
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2020, Vol. 24(3) 427 –446
Dear British criminology:
© The Author(s) 2019
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Where has all the race
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619880345
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and racism gone?
Coretta Phillips
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Rod Earle
The Open University, UK
Alpa Parmar
University of Oxford, UK
Daniel Smith
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Abstract
In this article we use Emirbayer and Desmond’s institutional reflexivity framework to
critically examine the production of racial knowledge in British criminology. Identifying
weakness, neglect and marginalization in theorizing race and racism, we focus principally
on the disciplinary unconscious element of their three-tier framework, identifying and
interrogating aspects of criminology’s ‘obligatory problematics’, ‘habits of thought’ and
‘position-taking’ as well as its institutional structure and social relations that combine
to render the discipline ‘institutionally white’. We also consider, briefly, aspects of
criminology’s relationship to race, racism and whiteness in the USA. The final part
of the article makes the case for British criminology to engage in telling and narrating
racisms, urging it to understand the complexities of race in our subject matter, avoid its
reduction to class and inequality, and to pay particular attention to reflexivity, history,
sociology and language, turning to face race with postcolonial tools and resolve.
Corresponding author:
Coretta Phillips, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: coretta.phillips@lse.ac.uk
428
Theoretical Criminology 24(3)
Keywords
Decolonization, epistemology, race, racism, reflexivity, whiteness
Introduction: Content and discontent
At the start of this century, Garland and Sparks (2000) called for a reconfiguring of
criminology to facilitate the vibrant transformation of modes of theorizing, empirical
research and political engagement (see also Carrabine, 2016; Loader and Sparks, 2011).
Their exhortation was fuelled by the recognition that crime and punishment are deeply
enmeshed in the routines, emotions and cultural imaginations of our everyday lives and
centrally implicated in political decision making. In turn, Carbado and Roithmayr (2014),
as critical race scholars, insist there is a powerful and longstanding dialectical relation-
ship between race and crime. This operates so that when we think of crime we have black
people in mind, and when we think of black people we have crime in mind. Other varia-
tions work but the prevailing paradigm is one of Otherness (or ‘non-whiteness’) being
synonymous with crime or its threatening presence (see also Cuneen, 2011). Rather than
engaging with this enmeshment of race, crime and the public and political imaginary,
criminology has tended to focus on the numerical incidence of race and disproportional-
ity in criminal justice outcomes, defaulting to a positivist lens of quantification, rather
than theorizing race’s complex material and symbolic manifestations in the intersection
with crime, control and social order (Bosworth et al., 2008; Parmar, 2016). Our concern
is that the relative stasis of the ‘recited truths’ of the social construction of race are
deployed in criminology through its research and teaching agendas without substantive
engagement with race’s constitutive dynamism. This is in stark contrast to the vigour and
vitality that currently propels the sociology of race (Lentin and Titley, 2011).
By way of comparison, reconfigurations of criminology with regard to gender have
been more transformative. The scholarly inroads made by feminist criminology are
widely regarded as distinctively and irreversibly reshaping the discipline (Burman and
Gelsthorpe, 2017; Downes and Rock, 2003). This began with bringing girls/women into
criminological focus from a position of neglect and challenging the unthinking generali-
zation of androcentric criminological theories to girls’/women’s experiences (see Daly
and Chesney-Lind, 1988; Heidensohn, 1968). Subsequent work has acknowledged sub-
jectivities intersected by class, race and sexualities, unpacking variation in lifeworlds
and exploring their impact on victimization, offending and treatment within the criminal
justice system (Daly, 2010). Epistemological and methodological questions emanating
from feminist theory have brought further refinement in articulating whose knowledge
counts in the academy (Heidensohn, 2006, 2012). The feminist struggle in criminology
is far from concluded and neither is gender totally analogous to race. However, our fear
is that while most British criminologists would routinely introduce students to theorists
of gender and class (such as Butler, Connell, Marx, Weber and the like), we suspect they
might struggle to identify theoretical equivalents for race or recognize their salience to
the study of crime.
The test set for criminology in Garland and Sparks’ (2000) challenge was to move
beyond extant ‘habits of thought’, to embrace intellectually reflexivity, so as to better
Phillips et al.
429
reflect the stark realities of late modernity. Two decades on, we are in the midst of politi-
cally tumultuous times. A seismic shift to the right and the forceful march of nationalistic
populism means that a criminology for our times in which race is not central and funda-
mental is surely untenable.
Coalescing at the same time has been a resurgence of pressure ‘from below’, from
students, prompting a new wave of epistemological and pedagogical attempts to deco-
lonize the university (Arday and Mirza, 2018). Such efforts have a foundation in decol-
onizing movements’ political struggles in countries of the ‘Global South’ that exposed
how knowledge production in elite institutions of the imperial metropole were impli-
cated in sustaining global racialized hierarchies (Bhambra et al., 2018; see also Ladner,
1973). Today, we have seen student-led political campaigns such as UCL’s ‘Why is my
curriculum white?’ (Peters, 2018), ‘Why isn’t my professor black?’ (following a panel
organized by Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman) and ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ at Oxford
(Gebrial, 2018), challenging the narrowness of curricula and academic representation.
Such developments have profound implications for criminology just as much as any
other discipline.
Yet there are worrying signs, we argue in this article, of criminology turning away
from race (Back and Tate, 2014), or as Garner (2015) puts it, criminology’s disciplinary
norms continuing to contend with race only at the margins. This is particularly evident in
criminology’s tendency to elide race with class, a point we return to later in the article.
In noting criminology’s suppressions, contradictions and lacunae when it comes to race
and racism our intention is to highlight criminology’s carelessness rather than claim
proactive discrimination (see also Unnever and Owusu-Bempah, 2019). To develop this
claim further, we employ Emirbayer and Desmond’s (2012, 2015) typology of discipli-
nary reflexivity to consider where some of the weaknesses in the development of racial
knowledge within criminology lie, additionally using an illustrative mapping of the cov-
erage of race in a premier criminological journal, Punishment & Society.
Disciplinary reflexivity, according to Emirbayer and Desmond (2012, 2015), is key to
scientific progress. It requires us to turn our analytic gaze back upon ourselves to inquire
critically into the hidden presuppositions that shape our thought. This is emphatically not
about ‘introspective confessionalism’ at the individual level but rather moving collec-
tively towards ‘analyses of the institutional settings in which [race] scholars are formed,
the structures and processes whereby their hidden assumptions about the world are
forged’ (Emirbayer and Desmond, 2012: 592). As they note, such self-critical reflection
has become increasingly commonplace in diverse disciplines including sociology,
anthropology, history, philosophy and literary criticism. Specifically in the UK, the
Royal Historical Society has noted the intellectual, legal, demographic and ethical ration-
ales for challenging racial and ethnic equalities in the practice of History (Atkinson et al.,
2018), and the Social Policy Association has begun its own interrogation of teaching and
learning practices (Craig et al., 2019). And so we may ask, why not criminology?
Drawing from Bourdieu’s insistence on the epistemological value of reflexivity,
Emirbayer and Desmond (2012, 2015) propose a three-tier model of systematically scru-
tinizing the social unconscious, scholastic unconscious and disciplinary unconscious to
appraise the content and conduct of a discipline. Notwithstanding some theoretical cave-
ats (Venkatesh, 2012; Winant, 2012), Emirbayer and Desmond’s call for vigilance
430
Theoretical Criminology 24(3)
towards the disciplinary frames that reproduce a hegemonic whiteness in sociology is
also significant for criminology. And while the need for intersectional rather than a sin-
gular race-based analysis is irrefutable—we maintain that a necessary first step is to
invest explicitly in theorizing race and racism (Parmar, 2017).
Criminology’s social unconscious:...
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