Strategies Promoting Race-Neutrality in Prosecution

• In Event: Poster Session

Abstract

Though some claim that colorblindness promotes racial equality, scholars have demonstrated that colorblindness allows racial inequality to persist by ignoring race and structural inequities. In the criminal justice system specifically, colorblindness attributes existing racial disparities to individual faults and legitimizes the disproportionate arrest, incarceration, and prosecution of minoritized racial groups. Prosecutors’ office in particular employ an ideology of colorblindness to supposedly combat racial disparities, but little is known about how race-neutral practices in prosecution may actually perpetuate racial inequalities. Given the purported neutrality of law, the perceived objectivity of the legal system, and the discretion afforded to legal practitioners, this paper explores the way prosecutors perceive racial disparities and portray race-neutrality in practice. Using a combination of interviews and content analysis, I identify three strategies prosecutors use to communicate race neutrality: 1) the use of secondary identifiers associated with race (i.e. social class, neighborhood), 2) a portrayal of lawyer responsibility that isolates prosecutors from the criminal justice system, and 3) and emphasis on the law as central in obtaining a just legal outcome. Drawing on literature that examines the formation of race and white normativity, I explore the implications of these findings, including sustained rights deprivation and constructed vulnerability.

Author

• Quincy Marie Pfeffer, Northern Arizona University