CRM 187R Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Medicalization
27 Apr 2020
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Document Summary
Whiteness," criminality, and the double standards of deviance/ social control. White criminality is increasingly defined and controlled via the medical model. This is made possible by the white racial frame, which constructs whiteness"as normative and white deviance as an individual aberration or mental illness. Conversely, the white racial frame constructs blackness as synonymous with criminality. Media depictions of crime and criminals play a central role in furthering this framing, which provides the underlying legitimation for disparities in social control. The result is double standards of definition and control which medicalize whiteness and criminalize blackness. This differential framing of whiteness and blackness provides the foundation for the expansion of both the medical and prison industrial complexes, which are characterized by real racial differ- ences despite comparable patterns of deviance across racial lines. In the post-civil rights era, color-blindness is also a key feature of the white racial frame.
