ABSTRACT
This chapter’s central thesis is that the founding theories of American criminology either completely ignored or downplayed the unique significance of race. The starting point for the Chicago school and for classic strain theory was immigrant slum communities that contained few African Americans at the time of their original statement. The project for Sykes and Matza, in their work on techniques of neutralization, subterranean values, and drift, was to normalize delinquents—to show that they were not enmeshed in a subculture or very different from nondelinquents. Hirschi’s control theories similarly rejected class-based theories and argued that the causes of crime across races are general. More recent developmental/life-course theories, often based on White samples, similarly relegate race to a peripheral theoretical place. Although these perspectives are valuable in identifying invariant sources of crime, their allegiance to past ways of thinking unwittingly leads to their ignoring the core realities of historical racial oppression and discrimination faced by African Americans. A need thus exists for scholars to move beyond White Criminology and to incorporate the race-specific experiences of Blacks at the front end of their causal models.
