ABSTRACT
Surely one of the central elements of the image of white collar crime is this: it is not the crime of the lower class. For that matter, it is not the crime of racial minorities and women. The white collar offender, in any meaningful conception of the term, is more likely to be a wealthy white male than a poor black female. The traditional preoccupation of students of crime with lower class crime was in fact an important source of inspiration for the promotion and development of the concept of white collar crime by E. H. Sutherland (1940). But beyond this historical association the white collar crime literature—which has expanded exponentially since the 1970s—has paid rather little attention to class in relation to this type of crime, and even less to race and gender. What has been said about the interconnections has not infrequently been somewhat confusing and contradictory. The objective of the present chapter is to sort through some of the issues which arise in the intersection of white collar crime with class, race and gender. A basic premise of this chapter is that the correct posing of questions on these issues is more important than adopting the pretense that we can provide meaningful, definitive answers.
