Subcultural Theory and Race - Criminal Justice

Subcultural theory and race examines how classical subcultural criminology has addressed, and in significant respects failed to adequately address, the role of race and ethnicity in shaping delinquent and criminal subcultural formation, and how later scholarship, particularly Elijah Anderson’s code of the street framework and the broader structural-cultural synthesis it represents, developed a more explicit account of how racial inequality and residential segregation produce racially patterned subcultural adaptations. This article traces the treatment of race across the subcultural tradition from its classical formulations through contemporary structural-cultural theory within Subcultural Theory.

Introduction

Classical subcultural theorists, including Cohen, Cloward and Ohlin, and Miller, developed their theories primarily from research populations that were racially mixed but that these theorists analyzed principally through the lens of social class rather than race, treating lower-class position as the operative structural variable generating subcultural adaptation while giving comparatively little explicit theoretical attention to how racial discrimination and segregation might independently shape opportunity structures, status systems, and cultural transmission beyond their correlation with class disadvantage.

This class-centered framing drew increasing criticism from scholars who argued that treating race merely as a proxy or correlate of class obscured distinct mechanisms, including residential segregation, discriminatory policing, and racially exclusionary labor markets, that shaped the specific opportunity structures and cultural adaptations of Black and other minority communities in ways not fully reducible to class position alone. This critique gained particular force as urban sociology increasingly documented the specific, historically produced conditions of concentrated racial disadvantage in post-industrial American cities.

This article surveys the limitations of race-blind and class-centered classical subcultural theory, examines the structural-cultural synthesis developed by William Julius Wilson and Elijah Anderson that placed racial segregation and economic restructuring at the center of subcultural analysis, and reviews contemporary debates over culture, structure, and race within subcultural criminology.

The Limits of Class-Centered Classical Theory

Cloward and Ohlin’s differential opportunity framework, though attentive to neighborhood variation in both legitimate and illegitimate opportunity structures, did not theorize race as an independent variable shaping which neighborhoods possessed which types of opportunity structure, leaving the theory comparatively silent on how specifically racial mechanisms, including redlining, employment discrimination, and racially targeted urban renewal and highway construction, actively produced the concentrated disadvantage that then shaped local illegitimate opportunity structures (Cloward & Ohlin, 1960; Massey & Denton, 1993).

Walter Miller’s lower-class culture theory drew particular criticism on this front, since Miller’s ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in a predominantly White lower-class Boston neighborhood, yet his six focal concerns were subsequently generalized in much secondary literature as characteristic of lower-class culture broadly, a generalization critics argued risked obscuring meaningful racial and ethnic variation in cultural content while implicitly, if unintentionally, associating focal concerns such as toughness and trouble with racial minority populations disproportionately represented in official delinquency statistics (Miller, 1958; Sampson & Wilson, 1995).

The Moynihan Report controversy of the mid-1960s crystallized broader anxieties about class-centered and family-structure explanations of Black poverty and delinquency, since critics argued that emphasizing family structure and cultural adaptation risked shifting analytical and political attention away from the specific structural mechanisms of racial discrimination and segregation that produced concentrated Black urban poverty in the first place, a controversy that shaped how subsequent generations of criminologists approached the relationship between race, culture, and crime with considerably greater caution (Moynihan, 1965; Wilson, 1987).

Orlando Patterson’s later intervention in debates over Black poverty and culture argued that the controversy surrounding the Moynihan Report had produced an overcorrection, in which legitimate cultural questions became difficult for researchers to raise without inviting accusations of blaming victims for their own disadvantage, a dynamic Patterson argued had left an analytical gap that more recent, methodologically careful cultural sociology has only gradually begun to fill (Patterson, 2006).

Wilson’s Structural Synthesis and the Underclass Debate

William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged reoriented the relationship between race, class, and subcultural adaptation by documenting how the combined effects of deindustrialization, the suburbanization of employment, and the outmigration of stable working- and middle-class Black families from historically Black urban neighborhoods produced a newly concentrated form of urban poverty distinct from earlier-twentieth-century Black poverty, which had typically occurred within economically and socially more integrated neighborhoods (Wilson, 1987).

Wilson argued that this concentrated poverty, rather than race as such, drove the emergence of what he termed “social isolation,” a condition in which residents of severely disadvantaged neighborhoods had substantially reduced everyday contact with employed, conventionally successful role models and mainstream social networks, a structural condition that plausibly generated distinct subcultural adaptations not because of any inherent cultural deficiency but because of the specific, historically produced absence of conventional opportunity and modeling within these neighborhoods (Wilson, 1987; Sampson & Wilson, 1995).

Wilson’s work proved influential precisely because it offered a structural rather than purely cultural explanation for subcultural adaptation while still taking seriously that genuine cultural adaptation, including altered orientations toward work, family formation, and violence, did occur within socially isolated neighborhoods, effectively bridging the earlier divide between structural strain-opportunity theories and cultural-transmission theories by treating culture as an intervening, structurally produced variable rather than as either an autonomous cause or an epiphenomenon to be explained away entirely (Wilson, 1987).

Anderson’s Code of the Street as Racialized Subcultural Theory

Elijah Anderson’s ethnographic research directly extended Wilson’s structural framework into a fully developed subcultural theory explicitly centered on the intersection of race and concentrated disadvantage, documenting how the specific historical experience of residential segregation, employment discrimination, and diminished confidence in police protection among Black residents of disadvantaged Philadelphia neighborhoods produced the honor-based street code Anderson described, distinguishing his account from earlier subcultural theories by grounding the racial concentration of the phenomenon explicitly in documented mechanisms of racial exclusion rather than treating race as an unexplained demographic correlate (Anderson, 1999).

Anderson’s distinction between “decent” and “street” orientations, and his emphasis that most residents, including most street-oriented young men, held mixed or code-switching orientations depending on situational demands, also directly addressed earlier criticisms that subcultural theory risked essentializing racial minority populations as uniformly holding deviant values, instead presenting street-code behavior as a situationally adaptive performance available to and deployed strategically by individuals who might hold quite different values in other contexts (Anderson, 1999).

Robert Sampson and Wilson’s related theoretical statement on race, crime, and urban inequality argued explicitly that apparent racial differences in violence and crime rates should be understood as a function of racial differences in exposure to concentrated structural disadvantage, rather than as evidence of independent racial or cultural differences in values, a formulation that has become a standard reference point for contemporary criminologists seeking to explain racially patterned subcultural adaptation without attributing it to race itself as an independent causal variable (Sampson & Wilson, 1995).

Contemporary Debates Over Culture, Structure, and Race

Contemporary criminology continues to debate how far cultural explanations of racially patterned violence can be advanced without risking a return to the essentializing tendencies critics identified in earlier subcultural theory, with some researchers, including Mario Small and colleagues, arguing for renewed but methodologically cautious attention to culture as a mediating mechanism between structural disadvantage and behavior, provided culture is treated as heterogeneous, contested, and situationally deployed rather than as a fixed, group-wide value system (Small, Harding, & Lamont, 2010).

Quantitative research applying multilevel and neighborhood-effects methods has generally supported the structural-cultural synthesis associated with Wilson, Sampson, and Anderson, finding that neighborhood-level structural disadvantage substantially explains racial disparities in exposure to violence and predicts individual endorsement of street-code attitudes independent of race, evidence consistent with the claim that apparent racial patterns in subcultural adaptation reflect racial disparities in exposure to concentrated disadvantage rather than any independent racial or cultural difference in underlying values (Kirk & Papachristos, 2011; Matsueda, Drakulich, & Kubrin, 2006).

The mass incarceration literature has further extended these debates by documenting how racially disproportionate incarceration itself reshapes the structural conditions, including family stability, employment access, and neighborhood social organization, that earlier structural-cultural theories treated as producing racially patterned subcultural adaptation, suggesting a feedback relationship in which criminal justice policy responses to subcultural crime may themselves deepen the structural conditions that generate it (Pettit & Western, 2004).

Conclusion

Classical subcultural theory addressed race primarily indirectly, through its focus on lower-class position as the operative structural variable, an approach that drew sustained criticism for obscuring specifically racial mechanisms of exclusion, including residential segregation and employment discrimination, that shaped opportunity structures and cultural adaptation independently of class alone. William Julius Wilson’s structural analysis of concentrated urban poverty and social isolation provided the theoretical bridge that allowed subsequent scholarship to take racial concentration seriously without treating it as an independent, unexplained cultural variable.

Elijah Anderson’s code of the street and Robert Sampson and William Julius Wilson’s structural formulation of race, crime, and urban inequality together established the contemporary standard for analyzing race within subcultural criminology, treating racially patterned subcultural adaptation as the product of documented, historically specific structural mechanisms of racial exclusion rather than as an inherent or autonomous cultural characteristic of any racial or ethnic group.

References and Further Reading

Anderson, E. (1990). Streetwise: Race, class, and change in an urban community. University of Chicago Press.
Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. W. W. Norton.
Bourgois, P. (1995). In search of respect: Selling crack in El Barrio. Cambridge University Press.
Bruce, M. A. (2003). Contextual complexity and violent delinquency among Black and White males. Journal of Black Studies, 33(4), 494-513.
Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs. Free Press.
Cohen, A. K. (1955). Delinquent boys: The culture of the gang. Free Press.
Duneier, M. (1999). Sidewalk. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kirk, D. S., & Papachristos, A. V. (2011). Cultural mechanisms and the persistence of neighborhood violence. American Journal of Sociology, 116(4), 1190-1233.
Massey, D. S., & Denton, N. A. (1993). American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. Harvard University Press.
Matsueda, R. L., Drakulich, K., & Kubrin, C. E. (2006). Race and neighborhood codes of violence. In R. D. Peterson, L. J. Krivo, & J. Hagan (Eds.), The many colors of crime (pp. 334-356). New York University Press.
Miller, W. B. (1958). Lower class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency. Journal of Social Issues, 14(3), 5-19.
Moynihan, D. P. (1965). The Negro family: The case for national action. U.S. Department of Labor.
Patterson, O. (2006). A poverty of the mind. The New York Times.
Peterson, R. D., & Krivo, L. J. (2010). Divergent social worlds: Neighborhood crime and the racial-spatial divide. Russell Sage Foundation.
Pettit, B., & Western, B. (2004). Mass imprisonment and the life course: Race and class inequality in U.S. incarceration. American Sociological Review, 69(2), 151-169.
Sampson, R. J., & Wilson, W. J. (1995). Toward a theory of race, crime, and urban inequality. In J. Hagan & R. D. Peterson (Eds.), Crime and inequality (pp. 37-54). Stanford University Press.
Small, M. L., Harding, D. J., & Lamont, M. (2010). Reconsidering culture and poverty. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 629(1), 6-27.
Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. University of Chicago Press.
Wilson, W. J. (1996). When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. Alfred A. Knopf.
Young, A. A. (2004). The minds of marginalized Black men: Making sense of mobility, opportunity, and future life chances. Princeton University Press.