White Kids on the Block: On Race, Identity and Criminality Among Incarcerated White Youth

Abstract

This study contributes to efforts already underway to attend to the reproduction of white supremacy and the ways whiteness manifests across contexts. We examine whiteness and white racial identity development among incarcerated youth, both a group and place not often studied in relation to these two concepts. Using critical ethnographic methods, we explore how processes of white identity development unfold among incarcerated white youth and the ways in which whiteness is lived, negotiated, and challenged within the carceral context. Findings suggest that white youth used pre-existing racial scripts about race, whiteness, and criminality to make sense of and navigate life in the carceral context. Still, we found that these racial scripts were often seeped in anti-black racist logics about criminality in service of whiteness and the construction of superior white identities.

Keywords: Critical ethnographic methods; incarcerated youth; white racial identity development.