"I Never Thought It Would Happen Here": White Privilege and Assumptions of Safety
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Date
2014-05-03
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Abstract
Criminology and media scholars over the last two decades convincingly argue
that crime is one of the major social problems of this era. Racialized constructions of
safety and space, however, continue to be the dominant paradigm through which crime is
viewed and the hypervigilance of people of color legitimized. I argue that depictions of
white communities as pure, homogenous, and calm spaces permit and facilitate whites’
tendency to link danger and violence to people of color, which not only reinforces
existing stereotypes that associate people of color with the dangerous side of the safety
continuum, but also harks back to a history when white space was violently protected
and its isolation legally sanctioned. Using 155 newspaper articles taken from four
Chicago area newspapers from January 2008 to January 2013 (The Chicago Tribune,
The Chicago Defender, La Raza Chicago, and The Daily Herald), I conduct a
structurally contextualized critical discourse analysis and engage several different
categories of frames, particularly in three areas: 1) neighborhood contextualization; 2)
safety concern of the article; and 3) how the incident being reported on is described and
understood in terms of locality. My analysis highlights the white supremacist logic found
and upheld in newspaper discourse; a discourse that focuses on white normative
standards of safety while also structuring the way in which people and communities of
color experience safety. As such, my analysis indicates demonstrates discourse
surrounding safety and crime indicate an often unnoticed privilege—the privilege of
being able to presume safety—that is denied to people and communities of color and
almost guaranteed to whites and white communities.
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Safety, Crime, Criminology, Race