Fighting for Theories of Race and Gender: Pacific Islander Teens Confront Violent Legacies

• In Event: Theorizing Race, Crime and Justice

Abstract

For more than 20 years, researchers have been keen to explain the structural causes of youth violence, and, more often than not, scholars have argued that economic inequalities and neo-liberal politics are central forces giving rise to youth violence in America. As a result, the political-economy framework has become a dominant one in criminology, while deep investigations of race and gender inequalities have been pushed to the sidelines of our youth violence theories. When conducting an ethnographic study with 100 adolescents living in Hawai‘i (most of whom were of Pacific Islander ancestry), the historic role of racialization and racial domination in the U.S. came to the fore teen’s narratives about violence. Structures of and beliefs about male domination also reigned as central organizing forces in adolescents’ lives. In this paper, I broaden current perspectives of youth violence by combining insights about racial formation in the U.S. circulating within colonial perspectives with theories of patriarchy from feminist criminology. In this way, I outline how violence can be seen as a response to a long history of racial inequality and deeply embedded systems of male domination in the U.S. nation state.

Author

• Katherine Irwin, University of Hawaii at Manoa