DETAILED OVERVIEW OF TOPICS IN CHAPTER SIX OF GREGG’S 5TH EDITION BOOK: CLASS, RACE, GENDER, CRIME
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Chapter 6 of class, race, gender crime book by Gregg Barak emphasizes privilege, no master status, and data modeling. Privilege makes inequalities seem natural therefore blinding people to many social dynamics. Middle-class white maleness (Potter 2015:7) tends to be the unspoken default that makes that position seem universal. On the other hand, criminology denotes that a man’s identity affects his reactions in the social world. (Potter 2015: 145).
The problem that discrimination occurs due to some people in the social order benefiting from the middle-class white male. The whites and men tend to avoid racism and sexism labels while simultaneously benefiting from their privileged position concerning those “isms” the labels refer to.
Gender consistency can be described as ‘master status.’ Law tends to have a patriarchal bias since men tend to make the law and are the majority of judges and prosecutors. Marxists point out that history is defined by the struggle of the rich and the poor in which the rich have the master status since they are involved in making the law used in warfare.
Reports made by the Bureau of the census, department of labor, and department of justice in America seldom present breakdowns by race and gender simultaneously that would enable readers to compare, for instance, the offenses committed by white men and those committed by white women. Future research hopes to put traditional categories together although they have been separated.
The increasing use of computers and statistical software has also attempted to isolate the effects of gender, class, and race at the expense of understanding how those structuring factors interact with one another to yield.
Using interactive terms and additional variables and incorporating nonlinear or reciprocal dynamics has assisted quantitative analysis, but the fundamental problem is conceptual, not statistical.