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Notes
In this essay, we use the term “criminal justice” to refer to related academic disciplines and courses of study (e.g., majors and minors), given that it is still standard in the field. However, we choose to utilize the phrase “criminal (in)justice” to refer to the United States legal system, since it systematically and inequitably oppresses those racialized as nonwhite (for more on this topic, see Harris 2020.).
We view these objectives as even more necessary once we consider the demographic profiles of students taking courses in ethnic studies and criminal justice. A review of the most popular college majors by the racial and/or ethnic identities of students reveals that Black and Latina/o/x students were more likely to major in sociology, criminal justice, and ethnic studies relative to their white peers (Hinrichs 2015). For both Black and Latina/o/x students, criminal justice was, respectively, the fourth and sixth most popular major, while it did not fall in the top ten most popular majors for white students. These trends track closely with our own institutional experiences and those of our disciplinary colleagues, who have observed that “working-class Black and Latino students … view the criminal justice system as a viable path to middle class security” (León 2021, p. 19).
Given the long history of Latinx racialization and dehumanization through immigration policy in the US, Latinx studies as an academic field has justifiably focused more deeply on questions of (trans)national, border, and (im)migration surveillance and detention, rather than questions of contemporary policing within the United States.
More rarely do contributions consider how the racism that built our domestic justice system affects Latina/o/x/s, who complicate a US racial ideology rooted in hypodescent (León 2021), the notion that “one drop of black blood makes you black” (Morales 2018, p. 7). The logic of hypodescent substantiates an overly simplistic, dichotomous division between Black and white (i.e., the Black-white binary). Consequently, it also relegates Latina/o/x/s to an ambiguous ethnoracial category marginalized within criminal justice discourses. On the other hand, the enduring influence of slavery in shaping US law enforcement (Haddon 2001), has led criminal justice as a discipline, and critical criminology as a subfield, to focus heavily on anti-Black racism in the criminal justice system (see for example, Hattery and Smith 2018). Beyond the legacy of slavery in the US, the problematic and narrow social construction of nonwhiteness as Blackness has created a decades-long data vacuum, whereby Latina/o/x individuals have been inconsistently categorized or even excluded in official crime metrics and related research on nonwhite experiences in the domestic justice system (ACLU 2013). For greater detail on entrenched racial binaries in criminal justice research, see León 2021. As he notes, “Criminal justice data are often dichotomized along either Black/white or white/non-white binaries..., leaving Latino subjectivities to the continuously evolving racialization projects to which such concepts have always pertained.... There are major segments of the criminological research enterprise that treat nominal categories like ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino’ through the more intellectually sterile framework of Add-Variable-and Stir, but even the scholarship that remains at the ‘banal [level] of mere demographics’ could benefit from better data on Latinos in the criminal justice system.”
Morales writes, “This notion of ‘collective black,’ developed by sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva to highlight the common racial and social class interests of African Americans and other racialized groups, is reminiscent of the ‘black’ label devised in England to unify Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities, expressing that even though they were not culturally, ethnically, or physically the same, they were seen and treated similarly by the dominant culture. That’s why…I argue for the importance of Latinx and African Americans forming alliances, rather than competing through contesting testimonies of marginalization” (2018, p. 10).
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Trocchio, S., Martínez, C. From parallels to partnership: Bridging pedagogy and collective action for transformative justice in Black and Latinx communities. Lat Stud (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-023-00444-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-023-00444-0