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CRIMINALIZED SUBJECTIVITY

Du Boisian Sociology and Visions for Legal Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2021

Matthew Clair
Matthew Clair*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Stanford University
*
Corresponding author: Matthew Clair, Department of Sociology, Stanford University, 450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 120, Stanford, CA94305. E-mail: mclair@stanford.edu
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Abstract

Over the period of mass criminalization, social scientists have developed rigorous theories concerning the perspectives and struggles of people and communities subject to criminal legal control. While this scholarship has long noted differences across racial groups, it has yet to fully examine how racism and criminalization interrelate in the making of criminalized people’s perspectives and their visions for transforming the legal system. This article engages with Du Boisian sociology to advance a theory of subjectivity that is attuned to the way criminalization reproduces the subjective racial order and that aims to uncover subaltern strategies and visions for transforming the structure of the law and broader society. Through a critical review of interpretive scholarship across the social sciences and an original analysis of interviews with a diverse sample of criminal defendants conducted in the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement, I illustrate how a Du Boisian approach coheres existing theories of criminalized subjectivities, clarifies the place of White supremacy and racism, and provides a theory of legal change rooted in ordinary people’s experiences and needs. I introduce the concept of legal envisioning, defined as a social process whereby criminalized people and communities imagine and build alternative futures within and beyond the current legal system. Du Boisian sociology, I conclude, provides the methodological and theoretical tools necessary to systematically assess legal envisioning’s content and to explain its contradictions, solidarities, and possibilities in overlooked yet potentially emancipatory ways.

Keywords

Du BoisSubjectivityCriminalizationMass IncarcerationCriminal JusticeRaceDouble ConsciousnessBlack Lives Matter
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Fall 2021 , pp. 289 - 319
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hutchins Center for African and African American Research

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