Murji, Karim
(1999).
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Abstract
This chapter is concerned with representations and constructions of "black criminality" and specifically "yardies" in Britain. It draws on ideas about racialization that begin with a view of "race" as a socially and culturally constructed category. From this perspective, racist discourses are seen as generating, and seeking to fix or essentialize, "race differences" as the principal marker of boundaries between groups of people. In recent years "cultural difference" has become one of these boundaries. A "new racism" based on cultural rather than biological differences emerged in the 1970s (Barker 1981). Conventional notions of genetic superiority and inferiority were supplanted by beliefs about the incompatibility of different cultures. Cultural differences became a code for race and depictions of the "culture" of ethnic or racial minorities became a means for simultaneoulsy denying, while implicitly reasserting, racial hierarchies through which racism is veiled or "smuggled" back in. A "differential" or "culturalized" racism emerged in the writings of conservative commentators and politicians, where accounts of "black crime", often linked to "cultural pathology", were employed to demarcate cultural difference as a hard and fast boundary that separates "us" from "them".
| Item Type: | Book Chapter |
|---|---|
| Copyright Holders: | 1999 Walter de Gruyter |
| ISBN: | 0-202-30618-6, 978-0-202-30618-6 |
| Academic Unit/Department: | Social Sciences > Sociology |
| Interdisciplinary Research Centre: | Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) International Centre for Comparative Criminological Research (ICCCR) |
| Item ID: | 30242 |
| Depositing User: | Karim Murji |
| Date Deposited: | 30 Nov 2011 11:55 |
| Last Modified: | 23 Oct 2012 14:26 |
| URI: | http://oro.open.ac.uk/id/eprint/30242 |
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