The whiteness of white-collar crime in the United States: Examining the role of race in a culture of elite white-collar offending
| Author | Melissa Rorie,Tracy Sohoni |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480619864312 |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
864312TCR0010.1177/1362480619864312Theoretical CriminologySohoni and Rorie
research-article2019
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2021, Vol. 25(1) 66 –87
The whiteness of white-collar
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480619864312
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Examining the role of race in
a culture of elite white-collar
offending
Tracy Sohoni
Old Dominion University, USA
Melissa Rorie
University of Nevada, USA
Abstract
While the role of race has been heavily scrutinized in terms of minority involvement in
crime, it has remained largely invisible for Whites despite indications that Whites are
overrepresented as offenders in elite white-collar crimes. We propose a theoretical
model detailing how “whiteness” encourages cultural adaptations conducive to elite
white-collar crime in contemporary US society. Many middle- and upper-class US
Whites live in environments of relative social isolation, both geographically (in terms of
schools and neighborhoods) and culturally (as mainstream media largely reflect the lived
realities of middle- and upper-class Whites). When this social isolation is combined with
financial advantage, it serves to block the development of empathy toward outgroups
and increases feelings of individual entitlement, which leads to the formation of crime-
specific cultural frames that include neutralizations and justifications for elite white-collar
crime. We argue that whiteness plays a role that is independent from (but exacerbated
by) socioeconomic status, and is an important contributor to the generative worlds
from which many white-collar criminals emanate.
Keywords
Concentrated advantage, culture, race, theory, white-collar crime, whiteness
Corresponding author:
Tracy Sohoni, Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, Old Dominion University, 6000 Batten Arts
and Letters, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA.
Email: tsohoni@odu.edu
Sohoni and Rorie
67
Introduction
The overrepresentation of Blacks1 in serious forms of street crime (particularly crimes
of violence) has been thoroughly researched, with different explanations offered as to
the cause of this overrepresentation (Anderson, 1999; Burt et al., 2012; Martin et al.,
2011; Sampson and Lauritsen, 1997; Unnever and Gabbidon, 2011). Significant energy
has also been devoted to exploring factors related to white-collar crime, including cul-
tural explanations. However, very little research explores the implications of race gen-
erally for white-collar crime, despite the fact that Whites have long been overrepresented
in elite forms of white-collar crime such as corporate crime, investment fraud, and
securities fraud (Friedrichs, 1996; Hagan et al., 1980; Harris and Shaw, 2000; Weisburd
and Waring, 2001).2 In other words, researchers have neglected the psychological
impact of receiving racial privileges upon cultures conducive to criminal involve-
ment—particularly elite white-collar offending. We explore the role of “whiteness” in
the development of cultural norms that might allow offending to occur. By “whiteness”
we refer to the experience of having white skin in a society which regularly favors or
privileges those perceived as Whites—as Hartigan (1997: 496) states, “Studies of
whiteness are demonstrating that whites benefit from a host of apparently neutral social
arrangements and institutional operations, all of which seem—to whites at least—to
have no racial basis.”
In our “Theory of Racial Privilege and Offending”, we develop testable propositions
explaining how experiencing racial privilege predicts the creation of cultural frames con-
ducive to white-collar crime.3 We argue that many middle- and upper-class US Whites
live in environments of relative social isolation, both physically and culturally. Such
racialized isolation, when combined with financial privilege, motivates individual-
centered perspectives over concerns for group welfare, and manifests in broad cognitive
frameworks characterized by a lack of empathy for faceless/anonymous others and feel-
ings of entitlement and competition. These cognitive frameworks, in turn, allow for
potential offenders to neutralize or justify their actions without inducing guilt.
In putting forth this new theory, we emphasize that we are not stereotyping all
Whites or White culture,4 but rather are examining how one’s (socially constructed)
racial position impacts one’s attitude toward offending. Just as others before us have
argued that structural conditions experienced by African Americans cultivate atti-
tudes that allow adaptive (sometimes criminal) behaviors to occur among some indi-
viduals in the group (Anderson, 1999; Sampson and Wilson, 1995; Unnever and
Gabbidon, 2011), we argue that Whites often live in environments that cultivate atti-
tudes allowing certain (sometimes criminal) behaviors to occur among some indi-
viduals in this group. By detailing this process, we highlight how theories of race and
crime have unduly focused attention on young, African American males as the pri-
mary offenders of interest to criminologists and hope to begin a conversation about
whiteness and the problems of racial isolation for all individuals in all socioeconomic
classes (particularly considering the substantial impact of elite white-collar crimes).5
While the intersectionality of race with gender and class informs this theory (Potter,
2013), particularly given the disproportionate number of white-collar offenders that
are males from wealthy backgrounds, we focus on the role of racial privilege as it has
68
Theoretical Criminology 25(1)
been undertheorized in the literature (Smith, 2014). Furthermore, we argue that by
looking beyond street crimes, our understanding of the relationship between race and
crime becomes more complete by incorporating the effect of all racial positions,
rather than just minority racial positions.
Specifically, our focus is on the impact of racial privilege in promoting elite white-
collar crimes in the contemporary United States. We include crimes falling under
Helmkamp et al.’s (1996: 351) definition of white-collar crime as “illegal or unethical
acts that violate fiduciary responsibility or public trust, committed by an individual or
organization, usually during the course of legitimate occupational activity, by persons
of high or respectable social status for personal or organizational gain”. Since our
focus is on decision making by elite white-collar offenders, our theory can apply to
individually beneficial crimes (e.g. embezzlement) as well as corporate crimes (i.e.
crimes committed to benefit the corporation as a whole; Braithwaite, 1984) when top
management’s decision to offend becomes corporate-level behavior (see Cohen and
Simpson, 1997; Hambrick and Mason, 1984; Pinto et al., 2008). We believe that this
theory has the potential to engage in and impact a variety of additional issues, includ-
ing: the definitional ambiguity that hinders white-collar crime scholarship (see, for
example, Friedrichs, 2009; Rorie et al., 2018); the role of racial privilege on a wide
range of problematic behaviors beyond elite white-collar crime; the role of whiteness
in the construction of capitalism itself in the USA (and, therefore, the sorts of behav-
iors that are criminalized in such a system; see, for example, Childs, 2015; McLaren
and Torres, 1999; Monzó and McLaren, 2016); and comparative understandings of the
impact of positional privilege both internationally and across time periods (such as
apartheid in South Africa or the Wajin in Japan; see Levin, 2008). Although such issues
are incredibly important, it is beyond the scope of this article to engage in all of these
topics.
In order to best illuminate the role of race in white-collar offending decisions, as well
as to situate it within previous theories of (US-specific) race and crime, we present our
theory in the context of a parallel to cultural theories of race and street crime that explain
offending as a consequence of an offender’s physical and social environments—envi-
ronments that ultimately foster cognitive justifications for crime (see Figure 1). We start
by discussing the structural conditions that allow certain cultures to develop. We then
outline the broad cognitive frameworks that arise as a result of White social isolation,
before detailing how broad cognitive frameworks translate into crime-specific cogni-
tive frames. We also discuss how the unique characteristics of white-collar crime fail to
challenge these crime-specific neutralizations. We then conclude with implications of
the theory.
Race-based structural conditions and criminal offending
Disadvantage and social isolation
From the beginning, cultural theories of crime have emphasized how economic disad-
vantage gives rise to criminogenic cultural adaptations (Cullen et al., 2006). Cultural
theorists have paid particular attention to the experience of African Americans due to this
Sohoni and Rorie
69
Figure 1. The Theory of Racial Privilege and Offending, as contrasted with theories of African
American pathways to offending.
racial group being uniquely situated within contexts of concentrated disadvantage
(Sampson and Wilson, 1995) and the historical focus of criminologists in collecting data
based on the Black/White dichotomy (Muhammad, 2010). This research provides a use-
ful foil for understanding the role of race and culture in...
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