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  • White Boy:Prison Life Writing and White Male Victimhood in T. J. Parsell's Fish and Jack Henry Abbott's In the Belly of the Beast
  • Simon Rolston (bio)

Most white Americans tend not to distinguish race as an important or even identifiable part of their identity. As Paula M.L. Moya and Hazel Rose Markus write in Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (2010), "Many whites are quite comfortable with the idea that race (especially) and ethnicity are things that Asians, Latina/os, and blacks have to contend with, but that white people do not. They regard themselves as a neutral or standard, without race or ethnicity, or as a member of the 'human race.'" "Moreover," Moya and Markus continue, "when experimental social psychologists ask people to describe themselves on open-ended questionnaires, white people tend not to mention the racial or ethnic aspects of their identity."1 White racial identity, or "whiteness," is not always so invisible to white people, however. Whites at the boundaries of white normativity—such as poor whites—are unable to fully lay claim to what David Roediger, after W.E.B Du Bois, calls the "wages" of whiteness, the tacit "status and privileges" of their racial identity.2 Consequently, their whiteness (or their inability to claim a normative whiteness) is underscored, made visible, as evidenced by the epithet "white trash." As whiteness studies theorists have suggested, much can be learned about white normativity by exploring how whites at the boundaries of whiteness negotiate their distance from entitlement, performing cultural work that seeks to claim or critique an otherwise taken-for-granted racial identification.3 [End Page 187]

Perhaps those persons most at the boundaries of white normativity in America are incarcerated whites. They are at the "boundaries" because they are physically excluded from society, of course, through walls and razor wire, but they are at the boundaries of white normativity and the American status quo because they have lost many of the tacit "privileges" of whiteness (including many presumed rights like voting, for example). White prisoners are what Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) calls "collateral damage" since they have been swept up in a criminal justice system geared toward the mass incarceration and (in Alexander's terms) segregation of African American men and Latinos.4 Thus segregated, white prisoners quickly become acutely aware of their whiteness—which is otherwise an opaque racial identity for most white Americans. Identifying how the space of the prison makes whiteness intensely visible for white prisoners raises important questions for studies of prison but also for analyses of race and crime in America: How does the post-1980s criminal justice system, or what Alexander calls the "New Jim Crow," reorganize white racial formations? What cultural scripts do these prisoners use to negotiate the racially marked space of the prison where whiteness does not constitute an unspoken "common sense" that is beyond commentary or critique? And what does this imprisoned population reveal about hegemonic performances of race outside prison where emergent and residual forms of whiteness shift to account for social changes but continue to resist racial equality?5

Whiteness is frequently registered in prisoners' life writings. For example, prisoner and activist Sam Melville, who was shot to death during the infamous Attica uprising, writes in his 1972 posthumous memoir Letters from Attica, "One thing is for certain: when I emerge [from prison] . . . I won't be a honky anymore."6 Thirty years later, Jimmy Lerner describes in his prison memoir, You Got Nothing Coming: Notes from a Prison Fish (2002), how his fellow white prisoners are "white trash," neo-Nazis, and "woods" (which is short for "peckerwoods," a self-ascribed moniker for some white prisoners), like Kansas, his cellmate, who is a white supremacist prison gang member.7 Curiously, both Melville and Kansas share an interest in redefining their white racial identities. True, Melville's hoped-for postwhite identity is clearly quite different from Kansas' hyperbolic racism. But both men speak to a phenomenon behind bars: whether rejected (like Melville) or asserted (like Kansas), whiteness is highly visible but uncharacteristically elastic in prison; whiteness loses...

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