Blog #18 - Steinman, Crenshaw

Supremacy crimes are violent acts committed by individuals who believe they are superior to their victims. Gloria Steinman discusses in her article Supremacy Crimes, that individuals who commit these types of crimes believe that they are entitled to a certain amount of control and dominance over their victims. Supremacy crimes are done by mainly white, middle-class and heterosexual males. Steinman argues that men feel a need to exhibit their superiority over other individuals because our patriarchal society requires men to demonstrate a certain level of masculinity and dominance. Males are taught to be aggressive, violent and in control of their surroundings. In her article, Gloria Steinman draws parallels between supremacy crimes and acts of mass murdering and serial killing. Studies show that the overwhelming majority of serial murders are committed by white males. The statistics given by Steinman support her argument that serial murders can generally be classified as supremacy crimes in which the assailant is demonstrating his dominance over individuals of a different gender, class or race. What disturbs Steinman is that because our society views white and male as the norm, people tend to disregard the idea that the gender and racial identity of serial killers could contribute to their violent actions. The fact that most serial killers are white males proves that there is a problem with the way that society requires white men to act. They commit these crimes because they need to establish their masculinity by harming “inferior” individuals. Steinman states that people are ignoring the information in her article because it would force people to admit there is a problem with our society and force people to redefine masculinity in a way that downplays violence, dominance and control. This would lead to a deterioration of our patriarchal hierarchy in which white males would no longer be in control.

The article Mapping the Margins, by Kimberle Crenshaw, discusses the ways in which race and culture contribute to domestic violence. Crenshaw begins her article with an idea similar to that of the matrix of domination. The matrix of domination is a paradigm that outlines social oppression based on different factors including race, gender and socioeconomic class. Crenshaw discusses how all of these factors converge to amplify the oppression and disadvantage of abused women of different races and cultures. What I found most interesting in Crenshaw’s article was her analysis of the ways in which domestic abuse affects black communities. She states that many acts of domestic violence are not reported in black communities because the victims do not want to contribute and to fuel racial stereotypes. Crenshaw states that, “People of color often must weigh their interests in avoiding issues that might reinforce distorted public perceptions against the need to acknowledge and address intra-community problems.” Many black women endanger themselves in order to protect their community from negative stereotypes.

Many people have stated that domestic abuse is not a problem isolated to women of a certain race, but that abuse is a problem for all women. These statements are made in an attempt to protect women from domestic abuse, but instead what they reveal is the disregard that many people had for battered women when they believed that domestic abuse was only isolated to communities of color. In response to Senator Boren’s statements about the ubiquitous nature of domestic violence, Crenshaw writes, “Rather than focusing on and illuminating how violence is disregarded when the home is “othered”, the strategy implicit in Senator Boren’s remarks functions instead to politicize the problem only in the dominant community. This strategy permits white women victims to come into focus, but does little to disrupt the patterns of neglect that permitted the problem to continue as long as it was imagined to be a minority problem.” Despite the language used by policy-makers, the abuse of black women is still being ignored, while the abuse of white women is being addressed.