The Invisible Woman. Joanne Belknap
ineffective in combating de facto discrimination (Bell, 1973, p. 2). Instead they emphasized that recognizing and accounting for white privilege and power are core to understanding racism in the systemic discrimination and civil rights violations of people of Color (see Bell, 1973; Crenshaw, 2002; Seiler, 2003). CRT identifies three beliefs accepted by mainstream society as myths: (1) Ignoring race eliminates racism; (2) racism is caused by individuals, not systems; and (3) racism can be fought alone, without recognizing sexism, classism, homophobia, and so on (Valdes, Culp, & Harris, 2002). Central to CRT is the assumption/problem that race is completely embedded in U.S. laws and policies. It is worth noting that student activism around increasing diversity in higher education in the 1960s through 1990s has been credited with the development of CRT (Cho & Westley, 1999), and CRT continues to develop (Valdes et al., 2002).
Although there are limited applications of CRT to studies of crime, a recent one addresses the idea of schools representing relatively safe havens for youths until the 1990s. Watts and Erevelles (2004) point out that violence in urban schools in areas with social exploitation and high unemployment was ignored until violence hit the suburban and rural white schools in high-profile shootings (e.g., Marjorie Douglas High School in Florida and Columbine High School in Colorado). Today, according to the authors, many public schools serve simply as institutions of social control, and school violence is not a result of a few “violent” students but rather institutions that base norms on Whiteness and disability status. They conclude that whether the violent students are inner-city African Americans and Latinx or middle- and upper-class white boys, “their failure to measure up (to the rigid social norms including those of masculinity) ensured their isolation and provoked them to commit horrifying acts” (Watts & Erevelles, 2004, p. 293). Thus, the answer to school violence is not to get rid of the “rotten kids” but to provide institutions that are not oppressing the students.
Critical Race Feminist Theory (CRFT)
Chapter 1 addressed how many people associate “feminism” with white women and how much of the earlier work written by white feminists (and sadly, sometimes still) assumed a monolithic experience of “womanhood” without recognizing the diversity of women’s experiences based on their race/ethnicity, class, sexual identification, nationality, religion, immigrant status, and so on (see hooks, 2000). Similar to the centuries of documentation of white women’s struggles and activism to fight sexism (as well as other forms of oppression), women of Color have a long history of advocating against sexism, as well as other forms of oppression, particularly racism. Records of African American women’s resistance to slavery authenticate the many ways they resisted other forms of racism, sexism, and numerous types of abuse and oppression beginning in the 1600s (see Crafts & Gates, 2002; A. Y. Davis, 1981; Guy-Sheftall, 1995; D. K. King, 1988; Shaw, 1997).
Feminist jurisprudence was developed by white feminist legal scholars in the 1970s to address ways that law-making and enforcement work to the detriment of women and girls. CRT emerged as a response to the view by some left-wing academic women and scholars of Color that CritLS was limited by its framing by largely elite, white, male left-wing academics. In turn, the emergence of critical race feminism (CRF) was a response, largely by U.S. women of Color law professors in the early 1990s and since then, indicating concern that feminist jurisprudence was dominated by white female law professors and CRT was dominated by African American male scholars. Just as the designers of CRT accused the CritLS theorists of limitations using the (white) lens through which they see the world, CRF scholars suggest that CRT and feminist jurisprudence are not appropriately equipped to address women of Color’s double and multiple marginality when racism and sexism are combined with each other and/or additional forms of oppression (e.g., classism, homophobia, etc.). Table 3.1 provides the tenets of CRF as described by Evans-Winter and Esposito (2010, p. 20) and Delgado and Stefancic’s (2017, p. 96) examples of CRF aims in assessing and changing laws and society. Significantly, numerous scholars have used a CRFT lens to study African American girls’ school discipline as part of the school-to-prison pipeline, and all of these studies confirmed the theory (e.g., Annamma et al., 2019; Evans-Winters & Esposito, 2010; Evans-Winters, Hines, Moore, & Jones, 2018).
Table 3.1
Sources: “Tenets” adapted from Evans-Winters, V., & Esposito, J. (2010). Other people’s daughters: Critical race feminism and Black girls’ education. Journal of Educational Foundations, 24(1/2), 11–24. “Topics Examined” adapted from Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical race theory: An introduction (3rd ed.). New York: New York University Press.
Potter’s (2008) application of CRF to explain the intimate partner abuse of African American women confirmed the utility of relying on CRF as a framework for understanding these victims and the important ways that racism and sexism intersect with each other, as well as with classism and sexuality, within the context of intimate partner abuse. Evans-Winter and her colleagues applied CRF in their analysis of the hypercriminalization and policing that Black girls experience even following President Obama’s 2015 enactment of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). They criticize ESSA for failing to address the intersections of marginalizations and how “race does not operate as a silo—race, gender, social class, and other parts of our identity are layered and form a mosaic” (Evans-Winters et al., 2018, p. 1). In her powerful book Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, M. W. Morris (2015) documents how Black girls are pushed out of school (as opposed to dropping out) in addition to being criminalized. J. Flores (2016) documents similar findings about Latina high school girls in the book Caught up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wraparound Incarceration. Although Uggen and Thompson’s (2013) study of the impact of Bill Clinton’s 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)—a federal “bundle” welfare reform act—does not mention CRF, it strongly supports this theory. More specifically, in addition to other highly negative impacts, PRWORA’s restriction on public assistance or people with felony drug convictions resulted in a steep increase in women’s property and violent arrests, particularly the latter (Uggen & Thompson, 2013).
Labeling Theory (LT)
Tannenbaum is credited by some with the origins of labeling theory (LT) in his 1938 delinquency book, Crime and the Community, in which he argued that assigning criminal labels to people increases the chances that they will become their labels (see McGrath, 2014; Willis, 2018). LT is concerned with the process by which deviant labels are both applied and received. Specifically, LT speculates about how people are “marked” (or labeled) as deviant, delinquent, or criminal and what the effect of the label is on their future behavior. Thus, LT has two tenets: (1) Some people are more likely to be labeled criminal because of their race, sex, class, and/or other factors; and (2) once people are labeled delinquent or criminal, they may accept or resign themselves to this label and continue in crime because of the labeling. In addition to the irony that labeling people “juvenile delinquents” or “offenders” may make offending worse, there is also the problem of whether there is gender, race, class, and other types of discrimination involved in who is labeled. The fairly recent #BlackLivesMatter movement has certainly stressed which citizens the police are most likely to use excessive force with, including lethal force (see Boyd & Dumpson, 2019). But given that labeling can result in an “offender” identity and continued offending, the ramifications of labeling become even more dire. Stated alternatively, official intervention (e.g., by the police) is disproportionately practiced among disadvantaged youths, thus more negatively impacting their education, employment, and criminal behavior (Bernburg & Krohn, 2003).
Although many scholars advanced the concepts behind LT (see Erikson, 1962; Kitsuse, 1962; Lemert, 1951), the most famous advancement is by Howard Becker (1963) in his research on jazz musicians, in the book Outsiders. Becker’s work is admirable in many ways, particularly his efforts “to find out how it worked by seeing it from the vantage point of those who lived there, from the viewpoint of those labeled deviant” (Naffine, 1996, p. 40). He collected his data through participant observation, playing the piano professionally with his subjects.