The History of Criminology is a History of White Supremacy

• In Event: Abolish Criminology: Book Panel and Discussion

Abstract

A critical ethnography of criminology and criminal justice classrooms and narratives highlighting the unreservedly white-supremacist/heteropatriarchal roots and manifestations of criminology’s thought. Contextualized within a larger reading of the history of criminology’s thought patterns the chapter maps the rise of Classical Criminology as a function of Europe's systems of colonialism and chattel slavery as well as hundreds of years of witch Inquisitions. The rise of Biological Positivism emerges central to the reforms that transported chattel slavery’s power into the criminal legal system, with a subsequent shift into Sociological Positivism that abstracted and extended the reach of eugenics and racial violence beyond individual bodies and into entire social bodies being interrogated by sociologists.

Offered are two teaching tools for conceptualizing theories of crime. The first is deconstruction of criminology’s opposites as aligned (i.e. positivism is not the opposite of classical theory, and biological positivism is not the opposite of sociological positivism). The second is comprehensive mappings of criminology’s dominant theories and schools of thought within the times they were written. This allows instructors to trace and define well established relationships existing between the history of criminology’s thought and the overt/documented trajectories of white supremacist violence and policy debates across place and time.

Author

• Viviane Saleh-Hanna, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth