review essay
Crime, Hate and Whiteness

Militarizing the American
Criminal Justice System
The Changing Roles of the
Armed Forces and the Police

Edited by Peter B. Kraska
Northeastern University Press, 2001

Inside Organized Racism
Women in the Hate Movement

by Kathleen M. Blee
University of California Press, 2002

The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness

Edited by Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica
and Matt Wray
Duke University Press, 2001

between the military industrial complex and the criminal justice system continue to blur, Peter B. Kraska, Professor of Criminal Justice at Eastern Kentucky University, brings readers his timely, tightly-edited book, Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System.

"We have witnessed in only the last fifteen years a significant departure from the strong tradition in the United States of eschewing the military as a model for civilian police," writes Kraska in his introduction. "[A] central feature of our government is fading: the clear delineation in form and function between internal security forces (civilian police) and external security forces (the military)."

And this shift, as Kraska points out, can easily be interpreted as an acceleration of the overall trend of militarization which has been creeping into civilian life for the last several decades.

In such an acceleration, the winners are both the military (which is able to stretch its mandate to a "host of internal social problems" and thereby guarantee the expansion of its already-inflated budget) and the criminal justice system (which is then able to tap into the surveillance, weapons and computer technology of the military complex).

The losers? The rest of us.

To take but one example, police paramilitary units now conduct some 40,000 drug raids annually, with hundreds of such incidents resulting in fatalities, injuries and wrongful arrests of innocent citizens.

In one of the most egregious examples cited by Kraska, 11-year-old Alberto Sepulveda was shot to death in his own home in the predawn hours of September 13, 2000. With a SWAT officer standing over him screaming at the boy to lie down on the floor with his arms outstretched, Alberto complied. Less than 30 seconds later, writes Kraska, "he was struck in the back and killed by a shotgun blast from a SWAT officer who stood over him—from all indications, an unintentional discharge."

No guns or drugs were ever found in the house. The elder Mr. Sepulveda did not have an arrest record. Yet 11-year-old Alberto had paid the price of the ill-informed raid with his life.

With contributions from an intriguing combination of academics, military writers and attorneys, Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System covers a broad scope of subtopics, including the military's involvement in drug and immigration enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border and the creeping role of high technology, science, information management, and surveillance in the coercive militarization of the U.S. "Military crime control," he concludes, "is unfolding not by grand design but by bureaucratic momentum, political maneuvering, corporate interests, and individual dynasty builders."

Professor Kathleen Blee's latest book, Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement, could be viewed as the compelling sequel to the 1991 release of Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. As the only existing body of work related to female white nationalists across the nation, Blee's Inside Organized Racism is an exhaustive, engrossing and often enraging collection of interviews with women of the far-right hate movement.

At considerable risk to her own life, Blee set about locating and negotiating with women in the Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity, and an array of neo-Nazi groups for their permission for indepth interviews.

The common threads that emerge from Blee's research are often surprising. It has long been assumed, for instance, that most women drawn to the hate movement are from relatively disadvantaged or at least working-class/lower middle class
families. What Blee finds, to the contrary, is that most racist "activist" women are educated, often from middle-class backgrounds, drawn to the movement out of their own personal concerns about the economy, crime rates, and, eventually, extreme manifestations of preexisting racist attitudes toward people of color and Jews.

Organized racism, as Blee points out, should be considered with all the seriousness of an organized movement, and not as a collection of crazy people. Despite their varied organizational affiliations, writes Blee, "it is a social movement, a "family" of overlapping groups organized to spread racist and anti-Semitic ideas and terrorist tactics."

In the end, Inside Organized Racism has the compelling effect of humanizing, and not demonizing, the women drawn to hateful, racist ideological stances. By making the women real, three-dimensional, and filled with their own contradictions and complications, the reader is invited into a world—and a worldview—she would otherwise be unlikely to grasp. And it is with this that Blee offers her readers the most important lesson:

"If we stand too far back from racist groups and fail to look carefully at the women and men in organized racism, we are likely to draw politically misleading conclusions. Superficial studies simply create caricature racist activists and make organized racism a foil against which we see ourselves as righteous and tolerant."

What is whiteness? Within academia—particularly in the disciplines of biology, anthropology and ethnic studies—it is well known, by now, that whiteness (and, by extension, the concept of "race) is a social construction and fabrication.

But it is a social construction, as the editors of Making and Unmaking of Whiteness point out, "with real effects."

Whiteness, depending on setting and context, can be the ticket to housing, employment, and physical safety. And in the last several years, anti-racist activists and academics alike have begun to devote more attention to what has been termed "critical whiteness studies," which seeks to uncover, dissect, deconstruct or even abolish the very concept of whiteness.

Born out of the 1997 University of California at Berkeley conference of the same name, the Making and Unmaking of Whiteness anthology is an invaluable addition to the critical analysis which has begun to sprout forth on the topics of white privilege, self-definition and identity.

In this anthology, the editors bring together an impressive variety of contributors to pick apart their own life experiences and pour their sociopolitical analysis into eight, thought-provoking essays.

Beginning with Dalton Conley's "Universal Freckle, Or How I Learned to be White," the author of Honky (eds.:see Kari Lydersen's review, in this issue) leads readers on a narrative personal tour of the meanings and consequences of becoming white and middle-class.

But it is longtime anti-racist activist Mab Segrest's review, "The Souls of White Folks," that offers the most by way of a provocation to the readers of this anthology: Racism, she asserts, has produced long-lasting, far-reaching psychic damage in the lives of Euro-Americans. Five centuries of European hegemony, she argues, has devastated whites both emotionally and spiritually. And while she is careful not to try to equate such damage with the impact of racism on communities of color, Segrest asks her readers to understand that "there is a pain, a psychic wound, to inhabiting and maintaining domination."

"What, then, is the cost to white people of racism?," she asks. "Racism costs us intimacy ... Racism costs us authenticity. Racism costs us our sense of connection to other humans and the natural world. Racism costs us our spiritual selves."

Other authors, including UC Berkeley sociologist Troy Duster take on the "Morphing Properties of Whiteness," note the fluidity of whiteness, and the kinds of quandaries that such impermanence creates for researchers. Later, Allan Bérubé takes on the question of "How Gay Stays White and What Kind of White It Stays," fusing his academic analysis with personal account of a gay disco bar in San Francisco that would employ tactics to keep gay men of color from entering the establishment and thereby "turning" a white gay bar into one "taken over" by men of color.

Where does it all lead us? Whiteness is made and unmade, invented and reinvented, according to the needs of the state, the ruling powers-that-be, and, in time, even the pale-skinned downtrodden who see their way out as being contingent on vilifying the color of another man's skin.

As the editors seem to suggest, where all of this leads us is down a critical road of reexamination about what whiteness means, and why it means what it does. Perhaps most importantly, it leads us toward an honest examination of who, ultimately, benefits from whiteness—one of the world's most enduring, baffling, and dangerous social constructions.

Reviewed by Silja J.A. Talvi
02.21.02