“No CAP”: Reflections on the Intersectionality, Positionality and the Experiences of Navigating Race as a Black Male Criminologist

• Published date: 01 July 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/21533687211011211
• Author: Joseph Richardson
• Date: 01 July 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

“No CAP”: Reflections on the

Intersectionality, Positionality

and the Experiences of

Navigating Race as a Black

Male Criminologist

Joseph Richardson

1

Abstract

The arrest of respected Black professor and scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., by the

Cambridge Police Department in 2009 for allegedly breaking into his own home

proverbially “set the table” for this discussion. Following his arrest, Gates noted:

“There are one million black men in jail in this country and last Thursday I was one of

them. This is outrageous and this is how poor black men across the country are

treated every day in the criminal justice system. It’s one thing to write about it, but

altogether another to experience it.” Regardless of social class or occupational

prestige, Black professors at predominately White institutions are subjected to hyper-

surveillance and racially bias policing in public spaces on campus. Using inter-

sectionality and positionality as conceptual frameworks, this paper describes the lived

experiences of a Black professor and criminologist at a predominately White insti-

tution and his encounters with the university’s police department and the carceral

state. Using Armour’s (2020) N*gga Theory, which is framed by Critical Race Theory,

I analyze the relationship between race, class, unequal justice, and the politics of

respectability. I use Armour’s N*gga Theory (2020) to show solidarity between those

vilified as a “crime prone” Black underclass, and the less “crime prone” Black bour-

geoisie. Although, the Black bourgeoisie in the academy may embrace the politics of

respectability, according to N*gga Theory there is no moral or political distinction

between the those considered good Negroes and those considered bad.

Keywords

Black Americans, intersectionality, positionality, policing, higher education

1

University of Maryland, Maryland, MD, USA

Corresponding Author:

Joseph Richardson, University of Maryland, 1137 Taliaferro Hall, College Park, Maryland, MD 20742, USA.

Email: jrichar5@umd.edu

Race and Justice

2021, Vol. 11(3) 260–275

ªThe Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/21533687211011211

journals.sagepub.com/home/raj

The expression no cap is slang meaning “no lie” or “for real,” often used to emphasize

someone is not exaggerating about something hard to believe.

Urban Dictionary

The Irony of a Lack of Diversity Among Those Who Study

Crime

Trained as a criminologist, I have navigated the racial barriers of the academy since

I was a doctoral student in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University in the

late 1990s and early 2000s. As the only Black male student during my doctoral

candidacy, and the third Black man to receive a doctorate from the criminology and

criminal justice program (in May of 2003), 3 decades after the program first opened

its doors in 1972, I am intimately aware of the challenges Black criminologists face

in predominately White institutions. The doctoral experience of navigating race is

even more pronounced in the discipline of criminology where every course, dis-

cussion, theory, and question regarding criminality and criminal justice policy is

directly or indirectly tied to the intersection of race, gender, age and class. To be a

young Black man in one of the nation’s premier criminology programs in the 90s a nd

early 2000s at the height of the war on drugs, which was essentially a w ar on Black

America (especially in Newark, NJ, a predominately poor Black and Brown city that

never recovered from the racial justice uprisings of the ‘60s and ‘70s), was partic-

ularly challenging.

Because race and crime in criminology and criminal justice programs is so

thematic, there should be diverse representation in the faculty and student body.

However, during my doctoral candidacy there were no tenure track or tenured Black

professors in my program. Yet, less than a mile from our campus, poor Black and

Brown people were being rounded up every day in distressed neighborhoods in

Newark. They were victims of structural and state sanctioned violence placed in the

oppressive grinding machinery of the carceral apparatus.

I know the Black experience in Newark quite intimately because one of my close

college friends lived in the Hawthorne public housing projects in Newark. I spent

many weekends with him in those projects, a 15-min drive from my campus but a

world away. The perverse irony is my courses stereotyped people who lived in places

like Hawthorne, blaming them for their condition, describing their proclivity to

criminality using theories such as strain and social control. During my time in

Hawthorne those theories never seemed to apply to the people I knew. My friend

graduated with a degree in Architecture from the University of Virginia and worked at

a construction firm. He remained in the projects so he could take care of his aging

mother who still resided in his childhood home. Despite the concentrated poverty in

Hawthorne, he was not a criminal. Neither was his brother who was a nuclear engi-

neer. Nor did most of his friends who still lived there fit the narratives of theories I had

learned. Where were the criminological theories that described their lives?

Richardson 261