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A critical strong program: Cultural power and racialized civil exclusion

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Abstract

Cultural sociology’s strong program along with civil sphere theory has the potential to reveal new and insightful ways of understanding and explaining various social inequalities. We use this paper to offer one model of how such a project might look. Drawing on the intersections of media, crime, race, and the U.S. Criminal Justice System, we identify the mechanisms and processes of racialized civil exclusion in the post-Civil Rights era of mass incarceration. In so doing we seek to make two contributions to existing literature. First, we complement popular political process and multi-institutional approaches to social inequalities by providing a model of civil exclusion that is both parsimonious and expansive. Second, we illustrate how cultural sociology’s strong program and civil sphere theory may be used to engage the critical scholarship on race by identifying racialized civil exclusion as a distinct aspect of contemporary racism. We conclude with suggestions on how scholars and activists alike might use cultural sociology’s strong program to inform processes of racialized civil inclusion and investigate other entrenched inequalities.

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Notes

  1. Indeed Michele Lamont has been a leading cultural sociologist examining social boundaries as they relate to race, immigration and poverty (Lamont, 2000; Lamont and Molnar, 2002; Lamont et al, 2015). Our approach is similar in its focus on moralities, meanings and boundaries, and extends upon it by situating it in a broader, more systemic framework (i.e., civil sphere) for engaging questions on insider/outsider status.

  2. The civil sphere is dynamic, contradictory and in constant flux. Communicative and regulatory processes of inclusion and exclusion operate simultaneously. It is beyond the scope of this article to develop these nuances, but we wish to draw attention to them as they may help in recognizing how particular discourses and practices of exclusion and inclusion coexist.

  3. We realize race and ethnicity are complex social phenomena with distinct histories and varied meanings. We focus strictly on African Americans/Blacks as the most significant and historically excluded racial category in the U.S. We encourage others to investigate the nuances and unique qualities that contribute to the civil exclusion of other ethnic and minority groups.

  4. Clearly, the post-Civil Rights era of mass incarceration was not the beginning of racial control in the U.S. We focus our attention here however, for both simplification and because it reflects an important shift in racial control from one of de jure racism to one of de facto, color-blind racism.

  5. While we do not have the space to elaborate here, we wish to acknowledge that our analysis and discussion must be situated within a larger historical context of Black/White relations in the U.S. Doing so would likely illuminate further dynamics to processes of racialized civil exclusion, revealing their resonance with various forms of slavery throughout human history (Patterson, 1982), and in neo-slave systems in the U.S. (Blackmon, 2008).

  6. For example, consider the debates between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington (Massey and Denton, 1998).

  7. To be clear, some Blacks may and do act in similar ways, contributing to the exclusion of other Blacks (Fortner, 2015; Patterson, 2015), and some Whites may seek to counteract these trends—even if remaining color-blind (Burke, 2016). This is a dynamic we wish to develop in future scholarship.

  8. It is true that during President Obama’s term federal mandatory-minimum sentencing regulation for crack cocaine was reduced from a 100:1 to 18:1 ratio (when compared to powder cocaine). While this is a change in policy, with real implications for possession charges, it nonetheless still institutionalizes racial disparities in sentencing and the application of felon labels.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Jeffrey Alexander, Orlando Patterson, and the anonymous reviewers who all offered detailed and encouraging remarks on previous versions of this paper. We also wish to thank Michele Adams (Tulane University) and William Armaline (San Jose State University) for their willingness to read earlier drafts and offer thought-provoking feedback. Please send all correspondence to Stephen F. Ostertag at sosterta@tulane.edu.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Tulane University, 220 Newcomb Hall, New Orleans, LA, 70118, USA

    Stephen F. Ostertag & Lucas Dìaz

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Ostertag, S.F., Dìaz, L. A critical strong program: Cultural power and racialized civil exclusion. Am J Cult Sociol 5, 34–67 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-016-0005-7

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